What are your children excited about doing all by themselves right now?  Tell me now!

I don’t want my daughter to be afraid of me or of the punishment I might hand down.  So I’ve chosen the most peaceful parenting I can possibly muster.  But if punitive discipline is out, does that mean I’m a total softie and my kids walk all over me?  Definitely not.

In fact, setting clear and consistent boundaries is one of the best ways to help your child feel secure.  In the Montessori schools in which I worked, we practiced a logical or natural consequences approach to setting boundaries with kids.  And it really worked!  Children understood why we did things a certain way and they were usually happy to cooperate.

Somehow setting boundaries was easier when it was my job to be completely respectful of the child.  Now that I think about it, it was much easier not to swear when I was a preschool teacher and my job was on the line.   But now that I’m a parent, I slip up sometimes.  It’s a much different challenge to be respectful of a child 24 hours a day than it is for six or eight hours a day five times a week.

Today I’d like to explore a different kind of discipline, the kind of discipline that allows us to complete a difficult task or to master a new skill.  Lately I’ve been thinking that by developing interests and practicing one or several disciplines myself as well as encouraging my child to do the same, the need for any other kind of discipline could simply melt away.  Maybe I’m crazy and my daughter just hasn’t hit her “difficult” period yet, but this sure seems to be working for us so far.

By encouraging her to develop her own interests and explore them independently, my relationship with my daughter becomes more about facilitating and supporting her desires, rather than circumventing them or redirecting her.  Oh, trust me, there are plenty of opportunities to redirect her.  But the more I’m able to just go with her flow and allow her to explore what she’s interested in, the more confident she becomes and the more she enjoys learning.

We’re setting up a positive loop.  She seeks out something interesting and explores it, she enjoys what she learns and then she seeks out something new and interesting again.  And we’re also building our connection because she understands that I deeply care about her and want her to explore her interests and fulfill her purpose in life.  So really, she’s developing self-discipline!

That way, in the times when I do need to set a firm boundary for safety or for some other reason, she knows that I’m not just trying to punish her.  I’m actually making choices based on what will give her the most freedom she can safely have.

So what do you think?  Can we reduce the need for “discipline” by supporting our children to develop their interests and practice self-discipline?  I would love to hear your take on my idea.  Please leave me a comment!

And have a fantastic week, Shelly

In the Montessori classroom we always had an open and close activity that the kids would gravitate toward, so I knew my daughter would enjoy learning to open and close things. But I had no idea just how MUCH she would enjoy it! We currently have an Open/Close activity in my office and every time my office door is open, my daughter makes a bee-line to it, takes the objects out of the box and begins to open and close them again and again and again.

Here’s a video I took last week…

My 13mo. old daughter doing her open/close activity from Shelly on Vimeo.

One of the great things about this activity is that it can grow with your child. Right now I have a couple of small metal tins, a small jar with a lid, and a plastic container with an attached lid in the activity for my 13 month old. But when she’s 3 years old, we’ll have a coin purse with a zipper, a box with a latch, and some other more challenging items.

Even if your child is 7 or 8 years old, you can find fun things to put in an open/close activity. Most 8 year olds I know LOVE figuring out how to lock and unlock padlocks or even the front door of their house. Of course you’ll have to decide what you’re comfortable with.  Learning to open and close plastic baggies and food containers can be a fun challenge too.  Remember diaries with locks?

So, the next time you get annoyed that your little one is emptying your purse out on the floor of the restaurant, remember, he’s just trying to learn about opening, closing, and containment. Oh, and he’s probably also looking for a toy or a treat too and I’m guessing he’ll find one!

Consider creating an open/close activity to keep at home, or a portable one for when you’re out and about. You can offer a lunch box filled with containers or an old purse you’re willing to give to your child. Begin collecting small items that have unique and interesting closures.

Once you have a few items compiled, arrange them in a basket or box and display the activity in an accessible location. When your child shows interest in the new “work,” sit down together and demonstrate opening and closing each item before allowing her to explore the activity on her own.

For added interest for your older child, include a small car, animal, doll, or action figure inside each container. For your reader, label the containers and invite your child to put the appropriate item back into the container when he’s finished playing.

We are having so much fun at our house with our open and close activity. I would love to hear about your experience with this fun work! Please share a comment below. And have a great week! Warmly, Shelly

The first time I heard about elimination communication it sounded completely insane to me. I heard wild stories of families who NEVER used diapers and I pictured an entire house covered in plastic drop cloths with some pretty gross repercussions. Sure, if we were living outside and could just hold our babies away from our bodies like I read about in “The Continuum Concept,” I could imagine not using diapers. But I live in a house, and it really bothers me when my dogs or cats fail to go in their designated locations, so why would I allow my child to just pee and poop all over the place? At that moment I decided that EC was not for me.

But after my daughter was born, I read a really great article in Mothering magazine (Oh how I wish they were still publishing!) about elimination communication. In the article the author described lots of different ways that families could go about practicing EC to various degrees. Some families used diapers some of the time, and other used them most of the time but also watched for signals from their child that it was time to go. Through the article I was introduced to the idea of “catching” my child’s pee and poop and that’s when it happened. I became an EC mom.

A good friend of mine had given me TONS of great baby gear hand me downs, so I dug out the small Baby Bjorn potty you see in the photo. When my daughter was about a month old I took off her cloth diaper and sat her up on the potty. She didn’t seem to like the feeling of the cold plastic on her toosh, so I grabbed a pre-fold, cut a hole in it and put it between her butt and the potty. That one sacrificed cloth diaper made all the difference! After that, my little one was happy to sit on the potty whenever I thought to try. But, she didn’t actually go in the potty yet. That was OK with me though, I just wanted her to get used to sitting on the potty and wasn’t attached to achieving any specific goals yet. Looking back at my baby calendar I see that she had her first poop on the potty at 8wks and her first pee at 10wks old!

After my little one had some better muscle control and was able to sit in her Bumbo (around 4 months old) I put the potty in front of the mirror in her room and sat with her for up to 10min. at a time. She loved her potty time! We would make faces, look at books, and talk about increasing our intrathecal pressure, complete with grunting. and bearing down together. At that point she would occasionally go during potty time. We were making progress!

I still wasn’t able to see any signs from her or predict when she would need to go, but we just tried a little potty time here and there when the mood struck me. And then we introduced solid foods at 6mo. Whoa! Suddenly my daughter’s poops became solid and then I noticed that she seemed to go at around the same time, during the morning between wake up and her first nap. After some experimentation I narrowed it down and caught a poop! I was so happy not to have to scrub that cloth diaper that I became determined to catch more.

At some point during her sixth month, I realized that I always pee when I wake up in the morning, so she might need to as well. I tried putting her on the potty first thing after we woke up in the morning and magic happened. She peed AND pooped that first morning and has almost every morning since. I was elated! I had suddenly gone from soaking, scrubbing, sunning, washing and drying poopy diapers to simply dumping the poop in the toilet and getting on with our day!

Now we put her on the potty after she wakes from sleep and a couple more times throughout the day and she almost always pees. She clearly knows what the potty is for (and has since around that six month mark) and although she will hang out for up to thirty minutes if needed, she more often goes within five to ten minutes and then waits for me to wipe and re-diaper her. Yesterday, for the very first time, she finished her business and then stood up.

I know that a lot of EC parents talk about the importance of noticing the cues and the deep connection they feel with their child about these important bodily functions, but for us, EC is more about practicality and ease.

I also like the notion that I’ll never have to “potty train” my child. Sitting on the potty is just something we do every day already. And just for the record, I don’t think our version of EC is something we could only do because I’m a work from home mom. We’ve taken our potty to Grammy’s house and even on vacation with us! All of my daugher’s grandparents and babysitters have used the potty with her seamlessly.

The next step in our journey will be to teach my little one how to signal when she needs to go. So, I’ve begun signing “toilet” every time I say the word potty. No luck yet, but given our success so far, I’m not too worried. I’m pretty sure that she’ll put two and two together in no time.

So, how many of you have gone on your own EC journey? I would love to hear how it went or is going. Please share your stories with us!

And have a wonderful week, Shelly

And, by the time you’re actually getting a good night’s sleep (except for the occasional accident or vomiting in the bed), they’re running around like crazy people and screaming, “Play with me! Play with me!” and wanting to go to the park and the pool and everywhere else they can think of.  Whew!  I feel tired just thinking about it.

I’ve heard some divorced parents admit that they’re actually relieved when they’re kids go to their co-parent’s house.  And now that I’m a parent myself, I can see why!  It really does take a village, doesn’t it?  I think we should all have statues erected in our honor if we survive parenthood long enough to see our adult children become exhausted parents.

As a kid, one of the things I never understood was why my parents didn’t have the energy to play with me all the time or take me wherever I wanted.  The idea that resting would be more fun than constant activity was a completely foreign concept.  I think the only time I was still was when I was mesmerized by the television or forced to sleep.

One of the things I loved about being a nanny for twins was that at least they always had each other to play with.  But the truth is, you can’t always just pawn off the littler kids with the bigger kids.  In fact, sometimes that creates more of a hassle than a help.

So, what do we do when we’re tuckered out and our kids are raring to go?  Well, I like to set them up with a self-directed activity and then sit nearby and read a book or rest while they are engaged in playing and learning at the same time.  Here’s a post I wrote a while back about some things kids can do mostly on their own.

There are tons of things that kids would love to do themselves, but often it feels like more work to let them.  Take cooking for instance.  Everyone I know loves to eat cookies.  And kids love to mix and bake them too.  Sure, they’re likely to make more of a mess than you would, but amazingly, they also often ENJOY cleaning up too!  I wrote a post about how to get kids to help with clean up too.

But, once you have them set up with an activity, the really challenging part begins.  We as parents must choose to take care of ourselves and actually REST, rather than jumping up to do another load of laundry or cleaning up after our kids while they’re still making a mess.  We need to learn to stop and take a break!

So, what can you do to maximize the 5-10min. window you have when the kids are happily engaged?  Here’s a list of some of my favorites:

1)     Close my eyes and take deep breaths (or meditate)

2)    Read a novel

3)    Take a bath

4)   Sit outside and watch the wind blowing through the trees

5)    Yoga

6)    Take a cat nap

7)    Smell the roses (literally)

What are the things that you could do to maximize the few minutes of restful time you can squeeze out of the day?  And how else do you deal with the exhaustion of parenting?  Please let me know, I could really use some help on this one!

Have a great week, Shelly

And then it hit me; maybe I didn’t actually have to install all those latches!  Of course, I realize that I might need to add a few as my daughter grows and gets into things more, but I came up with a solution that is working well and has caused the least work for everyone.  I gave my daughter her very own drawer.

As soon as she opened the bottom drawer in the kitchen for the very first time, I grabbed a bag, threw its original contents inside, and then tossed a few of her toys in the drawer.  I included some kitchen items like a metal spoon, a set of measuring spoons, and a plastic cup.  And voila!  She took to it like a bee to honey.

Now, whenever I’m cooking or we’re hanging out in the kitchen, she crawls right over, opens up her drawer and plays with her “kitchen toys.” She hardly even seems to notice that there are other cabinets and drawers nearby!

Office shelf

But I didn’t stop there, I gave her a drawer in the master bathroom and she occupies herself masterfully while my husband and I take our morning showers.

We have also designated the bottom two shelves of the living room bookcase to the little one, and in true Montessori form, I leave new and exciting toys on those shelves to encourage her exploration. She even has two shelves in my office that will have her “work” on them for years to come.

Sure, we also have a basket of toys in the kitchen, living room, and her bedroom too.  But she seems to enjoy her drawers even more, and I don’t have to look at the stuff inside when she’s finished, I just close the drawer!  Of course, the next step will be to teach her to close the drawers herself.  And after that, we’ll begin putting toys into the drawer and closing it when we’re about to leave the room.

Living room shelf

If you have an older child who doesn’t yet have any designated kid’s activity areas in the common rooms, I highly recommend you clear some space for your younger family members.  Then, stock their shelves and drawers with interesting activities that you’ll rotate when they lose their appeal.  And if you also provide a rug and/or a child sized desk or table that they can work at, you’ll be helping your child set up great work habits and helping yourself get some peace and quiet.  Because, when kids know where to look for an activity that they can explore on their own, they’ll go back to it again and again, and you’ll actually get some adult work done!

I would love to hear about your own solutions to support your child’s freedom and independence at home.  Please leave me a comment!

Have a fantastic week, Shelly

You might even already have a rug that will work well.  You want a rag rug, bathmat, or other rug that is about three feet by four feet in size and is easy to roll up.  To keep it out of the way when it’s not being  used, you can store your rug in a clean trash can, large vase, or other container when it’s rolled up.  And when your child is ready to get out her dinosaurs, remind her to get her rug first.

Children often enjoy taking care of their workspace and will take great pleasure in laying out their rug and then setting out their toys or other activities.  And, by keeping the space defined you will notice several benefits.

First, your child will feel his work and play are honored and important when you make it a point to walk around his rug and encourage other family members to respect his space.  Second, you’ll cut down of sibling conflict when each child has his own space and both practice respecting one another’s space.  In the Montessori classroom children are required to ask permission to touch anything on someone else’s rug.

Also, if you need to move your child’s activity, it’s fairly easy to pick up two ends of the rug and drag it over to another spot without disturbing what’s on the rug.  That means that even though she starts a puzzle on the living room floor, you can pull it over to the hallway, or even into her room, when the family needs the floor space again.

And, by keeping their work on a rug, it’s easy to see whether they’ve put away one thing before getting out something else.  “Oh, I see there’s still work on your rug.  Please clean that up first, and then we can bake some muffins.”

For older kids, especially those who like to play with leggos or other small pieces, I recommend you use a folded sheet BEFORE dumping the leggos out.  You can fold the sheet to a size that works for your child (about 5’x5’ works well).

Then, after she’s finished playing, she can set up her finished work on a desk or dresser for display and simply lift all four corners of the sheet to concentrate the small pieces in the center of the sheet.  Then she can either scoop them up into their bin or with your help, the two of you can pour the leggos into the bin!  It’s SO much easier than picking up individual pieces.  Trust me, this cuts leggo clean up time to a fraction of the time it used to take.

I’m curious, have you tried using a rug or sheet in this way?  Has it worked well for you?  I would love to hear about your experiences.  Please leave me a comment!  Warm hugs, Shelly

Children learn and develop differently and it’s not a competition, instead, each child is learning and growing at his own rate.  Part of our job as parents, caregivers, and educators is to identify where a specific child is capable and comfortable, where he is challenged, and what’s next.  You can do this with anyone, not just children, and it certainly applies to children who have special needs and different ways of learning.

In the Montessori schools I’ve worked at in the past we often had children who were diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, and learning disabilities.  Luckily, the Montessori classroom is specifically designed to meet the needs of a wide range of abilities and interests.   And, as a parent, you have a unique knowledge of who your child is and where her next challenge lies.   Just by helping your child identify the next steps and challenges in her development, you’re teaching her skills for how to work with her unique brain and body to grow and learn.  Every child has a desire to learn, grow, and contribute.

But if you’re a parent of a child who is on the autism spectrum you may feel confused about how to help your child and overwhelmed by conflicting information.  I’m no expert on autism.  But I do know that developing even more compassion for your child, having a greater understanding of your child’s autism and your particular situation, and reaching out for support from other people going through the same challenges will strengthen your bond with your child and help you weather any storm you may face.

If your child has physical challenges like blindness, deafness, challenges with movement, or medical issues there are often fun summer camps for kids in similar situations.  One summer during college I worked at a camp for legally blind children that was funded by the state of New Jersey.  Every child in New Jersey who’s legally blind is able to spend a week at the camp singing songs, doing art projects, swimming and boating and making friends (or at least that was the case in 1997).  It was so much fun to experience the kids, some of whom were the only blind kid in their area, and many of whom felt ostracized in their home communities for having albinism, connecting, playing and having fun together.  A summer camp is a great place to be reminded that there are other kids just like you.

I’m not sure I’ve been particularly helpful or insightful on this issue, but mostly I just want parents of kids with special needs to know that they are a valued part of our community.  I want to include you and help you as much as I am able.  So if you ever have a specific question about a situation you’d like some help with, please email me, schedule a complimentary introductory coaching session, or post your question as a comment at the end of this article.   Perhaps some of the other parents here would even have a tip, suggestion, or similar experience to share.

Your conscious parenting challenge this week is to reach out and share about a challenging situation you’re experiencing with your child.  Then, come up with a strategy to help your child develop new skills in that area.  I would LOVE to hear all about it so please share in the comment box below.

And have a kind, caring, and connected week.  Love, Shelly

But there was something in the article that I did agree with. The author said that overcoming a challenge provides a boost in confidence for young people.  I agree entirely.  She also wrote about the fact that Chinese mothers are willing to spend hours and hours tutoring, drilling, and helping their children with challenging lessons.  And I began to wonder, are we western mothers willing to do the same?  Would I sit down with my daughter for as long as it took her to learn her multiplication tables?  To be perfectly honest, I had to answer “maybe.”

As I considered the subject further I realized that I do know lots of parents who I think rely too heavily on computers and television to teach their children.   What if we were to take our American ingenuity and work ethic and apply it to the job of teaching our kids?

Your challenge this week is to get down in the trenches with your child and really support him in the skill or ability he’s most struggling with.  By being physically present as he struggles, you’ll let him know that you’re there to support him.  You can encourage, help, and model for him, and then sit back and watch him work.  Try not to be too chatty as your child tries to concentrate, just be present and available to help if he asks.

If you’re not sure what skill your child is struggling with, then start by asking other people who know your child.  Often teachers or childcare providers can give you fascinating new insights into your child.  Next, observe your child for a day or so and finally, come up with a few activities you think your child can do, but that will be somewhat challenging.

Now the real fun begins.  Pay attention to the ways you encourage your child.  Notice the urge to do it for her as soon as she gets frustrated.  And make a commitment to help and support your child in learning to do it herself.  Remember that learning is a process that can take time, so don’t expect your child to master tying his shoes the first day.  Instead, expect the new skill to develop over a period of days and even weeks.

Also, be aware that many young people will revert after learning a new skill, especially if they are extra tired or upset about something.  Practicing patience and being a yes to whatever is happening will help you weather the storm together.  “Wow, you were able to do that yesterday, but today it seems even harder!  I believe in you.  I know you can do it.  And I’m here to help if you need me.”

I can’t wait to hear how it goes!  Please share your experiences with us by leaving a comment.

Have a wonderful week!  Warmly, Shelly