Play Lays the Foundation for Thinking

“I don’t think. I just do it.” Commented one five-year-old boy.

We grown-ups have a hard time turning off our thinking. Our analytical intellect is always busy and acting as if it were the king of the mind. For the young child, thinking and intellect are in their infancy and total engagement with what is at hand is their primary interactive modality. Hence they are able to truly play. When a young child transforms themselves or various objects as a part of play, they fully live into that change without an ‘observer’ past of their mind commenting.

As adults, we want to see possibilities of an action before we do it. Young children are far more impulsive. They discover the possibilities only in the doing of the action without any intention, external purpose or consideration of possible results. For the young child, play is full engagement with the activity. Play is their way of being, it describes their consciousness. They have free creative forces that are available to transform self and world. For them, the relationship between perception (what is outside) and concept (what is inside) is mobile and flexible.

The young child ‘s central mode of learning is imitation. They are imitatively busy and their consciousness is spread out into their surroundings. They are at one with all - with their sensory experiences, with the world around them. One aspect of early childhood play is active and eager imitation of the creative forces of the world and of the people around. 

The three year old child begins to put her own uniqueness on the objects around her. The stimulus for her activity comes from outside, as also with the toddler. An object at hand reminds her of something she has already experienced, and that object is transformed into the object from her memory. The young child receives stimulus for play, stimulus for imitation, from the adult around them who is engaged in real life activities. This is how she learns about the world and develops real skills. I think it is important for adults to be playful with young children, and to make time to play with them. However, because of their imitative learning style the building of capacities and skills comes more from the child seeing the adult engaged in ‘real’ work than from the adult on the floor playing.

The play of the three-year-old is not really very social. They like to play near other children, but it is not yet really a playing with others. It is very much vertical play - up and down, and next to. This stage of play is the fantasy stage of ‘this can be that.’ For example:

The four-year-old - “Look. I found a guitar.” (A stick that to me only vaguely looks like a guitar)

The six-year-old - “I need a guitar for our band. This stick is a guitar.”

With six-year-olds, the play is more intricate, more filled with intentions, and more social. A group of six-year-olds might spend the whole morning making the rules and planning for their play. With six-year-olds the stimulus for play has become an inner one rather than being stimulated by objects in their surroundings. Before she plays, the six-year-old has an inner picture, an imagination. Her play is preceded by a mental image, an idea. The stimulus for play more and more arises from inner activity. Play has also become more social and rules are a big part of this developmental stage.

Six-year-old Sally - "I was supposed to be the mother and now Jill is a mother and there is supposed to be only one mother."

There is a recognition that this is play and not “reality,” even though the child can still enter in fully and lose themselves in their play. A typical six-year-old request; 

"How about you be the....., and I’ll be the......" 

This developmental sequence is significant and worth reiterating because play lays the foundation for thinking. First the young child’s play is fantasy that is determined by her surroundings. As she develops, imagination begins to arise. Now play is determined by the child’s inner picture, by her own budding world of concepts. When we are in the world of concepts, we are thinking. Creative play imagination transforms into the ability to form images which then transforms into thinking.

"How about I'm a horse and my name is Jack."

This is one big reason that plenty of time for free creative play is important for child development in the early years, whether it is at home or in nursery, pre-school and kindergarten programs. Play lays the foundation for thinking. 

[Please don’t get too hung up on the ages I mentioned above. Ages of stages are always approximate.]

P.S. If you find this interesting, your friends probably will too. Please forward it to them.

Looking for a Middle Path

Acknowledgement: In the sharing of my ideas and observations there is the risk of seeming as if my ideas are ‘the one and only way’ to think about the subjects at hand. I may come across as sounding like I think that I know something. I do not want to offer any recipes. I do want to offer my ideas and experiences, and actions I have chosen. 

I am continually trying to overcome the human affliction of thinking that what I am thinking are the right and only thoughts possible. For this post, and all past and future posts, I offer my apologies and acknowledge my communication shortcomings. 

‘Nuff said.

The other day I saw an announcement for a class for parents that would teach how to develop “listening and cooperation” from their young children. To me, the flyer said that what they were going to learn was how to be more authoritarian and bossy, and that 'listening and cooperation' in this context meant that the children would do what the parents told them. That isn’t what I think of as listening and cooperation.

Don’t get me wrong. I think boundaries are important. In previous posts I have addressed the importance of establishing boundaries for the children, and ideas of how to respond when the children say ‘No’ to what we are wanting. Discipline is a challenging realm for parents and children alike. First and foremost discipline makes me think of self discipline in the adult. Parents are older and have a more developed brain, and have had more time to develop some self discipline. It is up to us to teach the children by example how to manage challenges when things don’t go as planned or desired. 

Authoritarian parenting offers lots of guidance and direction for the child by the parent who is in control, but not so much parental warmth. The child experiences this as being ruled by threat - 'something bad will happen to me if I don't follow orders.' Young children learn primarily by imitation, and how we adults deal with the realm of ‘discipline’ is absorbed by the children. 

The main motivational techniques developed and passed down over thousands of years are threatening and bribing, AKA the stick and the carrot.  Anytime you get your needs met by a strategy of rewards, bribes, guilt, threats or punishment, the result is a loss of connection, immediate and/or longterm. All of these strategies are coercion. When our child doesn’t do what we want, what strategy does our unconscious habit-self want to do? Most of us use both threats and bribes in various situations. Which is your default mode? What did your own parents use?

The extreme opposite parenting style is that of giving the young children full autonomy to do what and when they want - freedom to be led by impulse without boundaries. This type of parent thinks that loving their child translates into letting the child do whatever the child wants. Perhaps there is a lot of warmth and love from parent to child, but little guidance and leadership. Here love is the predominant parenting intention and the parent doesn’t offer much in terms of guidance and boundaries. Too much freedom and choice for the young child leads to insecurity and a later lack of self confidence. The child needs guidance from adults. Without this guidance, the child is insecure and confused. Young children simply cannot understand in the same way as adults because their neurology is not fully developed. Boundaries create a feeling of safety and protection for the child.

How do you speak to your young children when they do something other than what you want? Scolding, threatening, and moralizing aren’t effective, neither are lecturing and reasoning. Freezing up, walking away and ignoring are also unsatisfactory for both parent and child. “Don’t, don’t, don’t…” is too often what the children hear. Instead we can present a positive alternative in simple words, accompanied be actions. Instead of saying, “Don’t run inside,” you can try, “We walk inside, we run outside.” Instead of “Don’t slam the door,” try, “We close the door gently,” in a quiet voice while demonstrating. “Hands are for work and play and taking care of others,” while gently stroking the hands that have hit, is a favorite of mine. Patience is essential because we will have to repeat many times over many days before we start to see changes. It’s important to keep in mind that young children are not naughty or bad! They are by nature adventurers and explorers searching for understanding of the world. When we understand and remember that, our job of guiding and leading is easier. We can keep our calm and patience longer and the children experience our love for them through our actions and words.

Here are some techniques that people unconsciously use when things don’t go the way they want. If you learn to live without these habits, I guarantee that your interactions with your children will go much more smoothly and you will feel a stronger connection. Do YOU do or have any of these?

1. A need to be right and have the last word
2. Attempting to control 
3. Blaming and shaming
4. Retaliation and Punishment
5. Bribes or Threats, Demands, Ultimatums, Should/Shouldn’t
6. Withdrawal from challenging situations

I have exaggerated the two extremes in parenting style so I could delineate a middle way between authoritarian parenting and stand-back-parenting. This is what I like to call loving firmness (a la Margret Meyerkort). Loving firmness means we try to determine the real needs of the child, and lovingly create and hold the boundaries we think will best serve those needs, and the needs of the others in the child’s life. Loving firmness means guidance and love as equal intentions for the parent. Loving firmness is a middle path that fuses love and warmth and interest with guidance and boundaries to deliver to the child what the child needs. Children are more likely to go along with what we want when they feel our love and our interest in them. They know when we are seeing their potential rather than what we think is wrong with them. Just like all of us, young children thrive on interest and recognition. If we connect with our children and listen to them truly, and then create boundaries that will serve their needs, then the children are more likely to cooperate.

“At the end of the day, there truly is a “one and only way” to care for young children...It is the way in which you, as an individual, can be your most creative and honest self, based on practices, inner and outer, which encompass a deep understanding of the developing child, and in which you are filled with love...” (from an article by Cynthia Aldinger, Executive Director of Lifeways North America)  

Let me know what you think about all this. 

P.S. And please forward it to your friends.

Real Things Real Children Said

A while back I was going to give a speech and was planning to include things real children really said over my years in kindergarten. I never got a chance to give that speech, but here are some things children really said over my years in kindergarten. All of these were things I overheard. I did not initiate these conversations. I had my eyes and ears open, and my mouth was closed, except in those instances when I was directly engaged by the children. I did change the names of the children involved.

I hope you enjoy and learn something from these wise people. Let me know.

Social difficulties and solutions

“I knew he wouldn’t listen so I had to push him.”

“I got my loud voice from my mom.”

“They are teasing me, just like I tease my brother.”

When Jack, the largest child in kindergarten, walked in, he went straight over to George, who was building a house to play in. Nothing happened prior to Jack saying, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

Metaphysics

“You used to be a grown-up, and now you are not.”

“Stars are dead people.”

“It’s true. When you see a shooting star it’s a person going up to heaven.”

Sam - “I don’t have any grandparents anymore. They all died.”

Joe - “That’s ok. Someday you’ll see them again. Someday you’ll die and go up to heaven and be with them.”

Sam - “And then I’ll come down again.”

Joe - “When you die you turn into an angel.”

Sam - “No, but the angels help you.”

Charles - “When you die you turn into a spirit. First you turn into a skeleton, and then a spirit.”

“I’m sad Steve. My grandfather died.”

Me - “I’m so sorry. When?”

“Before I was born. The cigarettes did it.”

Jill - “God is here. I talk to god.”

John - “God is in heaven.”

Maya - “God is everywhere.”

Jill - “God is in us.”

Maya - “God is here. We’re sitting on him.”

Julia - “If you go to heaven you have to get nailed to the cross. I know, I saw it on TV.”

Hannah - “It’s not heaven, it’s the spiritual world.”

Michael - “God is in your stomach.”

Roles and vocations

“I’m half Italian and half vegetarian.”

“When you grow do you want to be a mother or a father?”

Marco- “In the olden days the only people on earth were mermaids.”

Emmett - “What are you talking about? They were cavemen. Cowboys and cavemen.”

Daniel - “A lawyer is a guy on TV.”

Peter - “No, a lawyer is a guy who lives in a mobile home park.”

Random snippets

“I woke up in the middle of the night with an ear infection and my dad had to scream at me to stop crying.”

Hannah, shouting - “Go away. Get out of this room you guys. I’m trying to meditate. Quiet you guys.”

“Steve, you should put up a sign that says to lift up the seat to pee.”

“But the children in kindergarten don’t read yet.”

“Oh.”

“At kindergarten I play over and over and over.”

Sarah whispered something to the back of Katie’s head.

Sofia, to Sarah - “There are no secrets in kindergarten.”

Sarah - “I didn’t tell it to her ear so it’s not a secret.”

“I don’t want to learn any Spanish because I just talk.”

And two sad ones to end

“Oh good, Eileen [the regular kindergarten teacher who was absent] is not here. Now we can play!”

“When I woke up I thought I was a grown up because I was so serious.”

What have you heard lately out of the mouths of babes? Please let me know. And please share this with your friends.

Play is the Secret Ingredient for Creativity, Confidence and Neural Development

Everyone wants their children to grow up into creative and confident adults, able to solve problems and resolve conflicts. Everyone wants their child’s brain to develop to the fullest potential. I’m going to tell you a secret, though it is a secret that I wish everyone knew. President Obama, are you listening? The way to develop creativity and neural capacity is to give young children ample time for unstructured free, creative play. In spite of worldwide trends in education, it is NOT through regimented testing-oriented academic programs for young children where they are instructed in how to spell and read and more - programs where there is no time for recess or inside play, no time for naps and even no time for rehearsed play performances. 

There are many reasons why plentiful time for play is essential in a child’s development. In the youngest children, play is how they grasp the world. Play gives the opportunity to explore the physical world around them and discover the processes and laws of nature. Through creative, unstructured, children can integrate into existence in the physical world. Play activities have an explorative, experimenting element that allows the child to make sense of the world around them.

A most important evolutionary function of play is 

finding out what is fun and fair or not-fair on the 

field of life. - Jaak Panksepp

Play is also the way to learn about the social world through its improvisational aspects. Young children learn by imitating, and in their play they try out various behaviors they have observed. They learn how to interact with other human beings, and they learn what activities they like and what they don’t like. They also learn what their playmates like and don’t like. This is an essential step toward developing social awareness and is a basis for the eventual possibility of compassion and empathy. Through creative, unstructured, children can integrate into existence in the social world.

 If play is strongly regulated and children are made 

to direct their play toward a particular goal, 

then it is no longer play. The essence of play is 

that it is free. - Rudolf Steiner

In the play activity of the young child there is total engagement of all aspects of the child; body, feelings, thinking and doing. Adults have to pretend to be able to engage in play. The adult intellect is engaged in the pretending. The young child completely transforms into something else when truly engaged in play. Play is the ultimate learning opportunity because it provides the essentials for the archetypal learning situation. Play has the intensity of total engagement. It has personal value and relevance for the child since they have created it. It has duration - it lasts for a notable length of time. It has novelty - it is newly created by the child. And play involves all the senses, and movement, and speech. This multi-modality activity involves many parts of the brain. These five elements are the basis for all successful learning situations.

An additional element that has recently been getting a lot of attention is risk. Play that the child perceives as risky and challenging is important in developing self-confidence and a feeling of self-esteem. Joan Almon of the Alliance for Childhood has just finished a book on the subject called "Adventure: The Value of Risk in Children's Play." Read the introduction.

Play gives children a chance to practice what they 

are learning...They have to play with what they know 

to be true in order to find out more, and then they can 

use what they learn in new forms of play.  

Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

Dr. Paul MacLean of the U.S. National Institutes of Health ties the process of imaginative development to play. For MacLean, play is the pathway to creativity and high level reasoning. Play helps develop the emotional limbic brain and the frontal lobe of the neocortex which allow for the ultimate expression of human creativity and development.

When you think of play and its effects, consider your new 

equation: PLAY = LEARNING. Research has shown that 

the more advanced children's pretend play, the better they 

do on divergent problem solving tasks. 

Robert Bradley of the University of Arkansas

Much of the brain is involved in play and it also seems to activate higher cognitive processes. "There's enormous cognitive involvement in play," says Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado. He points out that play often involves complex assessments of playmates, ideas of reciprocity and the use of specialized signals and rules. He believes that play creates a brain that has greater behavioral flexibility and improved potential for learning later in life. "It's about more connectedness throughout the brain.”

This idea is backed up by the work of neuropsychologist Stephen Siviy of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Siviy studied how bouts of play affect the brain's levels of a protein called c-FOS, a substance associated with the stimulation and growth of nerve cells. He was surprised by the extent of the activation. "Play just lights everything up," he says. He speculates that by allowing connections between brain areas that might not normally be connected, play may be enhancing creativity.

Now the secret is out. 

Please tell everyone that play is the way!

And here are seven ways to foster creativity, imagination and neural development in our young children, and in early childhood programs:

1. Allow time for free, unstructured play – without intervention and interruption. (The adult eyes are open, mouth is closed a la Helle Heckmann)
2. Provide suitable play areas/environment where they can explore and get messy.
3. Provide suitable and simple toys that allow the child to ‘complete’ with their own imagination. 
4. Contact with world of nature and the elements. Let them get messy.
5. Let the children see you, the adult, doing necessary work around the house thereby providing examples for their play of real human work activity.
6. Provide artistic activities and supplies that allow the children to freely express what is within them. Let them get messy.
7. Provide nourishing images from stories you tell and songs you sing with the children.

P.S. Please share this with your friends and let me know what you think. Comments are welcome!

Inside the 'Terrible Twos'

Do you love it when your toddler says “No” to you? When your 2-year-old child who has only recently begun to walk and to speak in words is rejecting your guidance and replying “No” to you over and over again, you understand why it is called the ‘terrible twos.’ It’s terrible for you and it’s so easy to get frustrated and lose your cool, especially when you didn’t get enough sleep and you are trying to do all the many things on your to-do list. 

“No Mommy No!” 

“Daddy, NO!” 

“No, no nooooooo.”

Maybe there is a way to increase your patience and even find a way to rejoice in this stage of your child’s development. Maybe understanding the child’s experience of being two can help you enjoy this phase of development. Maybe you can even discover a way to enjoy the experience.

When a baby is born, the whole world is new for him. The world reveals itself in colors, sounds, shapes, textures, brightness, warmth and more. The baby is awash in a sea of sensory experiences. It is hard for an adult to imagine the infant’s experience because adults live in a world of intellect and ideas. We categorize our sense perceptions and relate them to other sense impressions. We adults connect our perceptions to concepts. We are thinking most of the time and in the center of our thought is our very own self. The sense of self is something that develops over time in each individual. The two-year-old is just beginning to wake up to a sense of self.

For the infant, there is just perception - no concepts, no intellect, and no sense of self yet. It is hard to imagine this state of being since you who are reading this has an intellect and knows your ‘self’ in relation to others and the world around you. A newborn does not have a sense of self. His world IS his sense experiences. Already at birth, his senses are active and ‘transmitting information’ to the brain. The organs for sight, hearing, taste, warmth, touch and smell are functional at birth, and the nerves that carry the information to the brain are present. The sensory information is received but is processed quite differently than an adult.

One way to describe the situation is that an infant is at one with their perceptions. They do not separate what they are perceiving from self (the one who is perceiving). The infant does not have the experience of ‘this is me, and that is not me.’ Looking at the world in terms of self and other is not the infant’s experience. So at this age, the child is truly one with the parents. It is a crucial part of individual development to separate from your parents to become your own individual self. The child must push away from the parents in his own unique style in various ways at different stages of development. 

The sense of self is a significant aspect of the human experience. We rely on it to guide us in social settings. It is our compass for personal space and boundaries. It is the core by which we process all of our experiences. And like many other human capacities and qualities, it only gradually awakens. Developing into ‘the one who is sensing,’ the self that is experiencing, takes a long time to fully develop. Infants are like enlightened beings - they are literally at one with everything. A fully developed sense of self can finally arise in early adulthood, it’s continuous small steps until then.

When the baby starts to sit up, stand and then walk, it indicates significant development on the road to discovery of self. A walking toddler, walking away from mommy and daddy, is trying to find himself. When he switches from speaking in the third person to first person, he is moving along that road. From “Billy want more” to “Me want more” or “I want,” we can see something new coming into being.

When your 2-year-old is saying “No” to you remember that his sense of self is waking up. He may be experiencing something like this: “No to this, no to that, no to all that is not me. Yes to me. No to you. That is not me. Yes to me. Yes. Yes. Yes. No to what is not me...”

An additional feature of the 2-year-old is that he is at a stage of vastly increased self-mobility. He is drawn to explore and discover - and is now mobile. This exploration is natural and an important mechanism to be able to begin to grasp the world. We adults are concerned about safety, and perhaps neatness, so we try and set boundaries for our young children. Our boundaries. And our boundaries meet the newly arising sense of self. That is the conundrum of the 2-year-old. 

So try and rejoice when he is saying “No” to dinner time, “No” to washing hands, “No” to you. He is growing in an important realm - self is waking up. Hooray. It is the beginning of many years of tension between his awakening sense of self and your creating limits that satisfy your needs for safety, cleanliness and efficiency. The ‘terrible twos’ is a practice ground for the next many years. If you start out with the understanding that the developing sense of self must reject what is not itself, then perhaps your understanding can better carry you through the challenge. If you remember while your child is rejecting what you request and demand, that to your child’s awakening sense of self you are becoming other and this is a necessary element in human development.

“No, no, no....” for the two-year-old means “Yes” to himself. Hooray for development. Your child is two now. This stage too WILL pass. And then the challenges will be different, and harder, and easier.

Start now to develop the patience and ability to respond to your child. Your buttons don’t need to be pushed by your child’s “challenging your authority.” It is not about you. It is about the natural processes of developing a sense of self. It is inevitable. Maybe you can find some humor in it. Maybe when he is two you can develop tools for connecting with your child that will serve you for the many years to come. Start now. “Yes. Yes. Yes!”

P.S. I would love to hear about your experiences and challenges with your young children. Please share this with your friends who have young children.

And for some tips on keeping the stress levels down here is an article from Dr. Rick Hanson http://www.rickhanson.net/just-one-thing/lower-stress

The Importance of Saying "No"

Why is it so hard to say ‘No’ to our young children? Here are 5 reasons why it is so hard, and why I think it’s important to be able to say ‘No.’ Let me know what you think.

1. We want our children to be happy and to do and have what they want. We want them to have everything to their hearts’ content. We see their sadness when they don’t get to do or have want they want. Our saying ‘No’ leads to our child’s unhappiness.
2. We want our child to like us. If we say ‘No’ to their desires then they won’t like us. If we always give them what they want then they will like us.
3. We don’t want to be thought of as the ‘mean’ parent. Our child will tell the other children, their grandparents and their teachers that we are mean because we never let them do what they want.
4. We read a book explaining that a parent should never say ‘No’ to their children because the children will grow up with repressed desires and resentment.
5. All the other parents are saying ‘Yes’ and you want your child to 'fit in.' And we don’t want our children to have to wait for something we will probably eventually give them or let them do anyway. Why not let it be now?

Young children look to us to guide them into life as a human being. Part of that guidance is the delivery of our values for physical and emotional safety, and healthy life habits as expressed by the boundaries and limits we hold for our children. We don’t have to explain our values. Explaining is not effective with young children anyway. However, we do have to be clear and consistent with our boundaries for the sake of the child’s healthy development, and we can express these boundaries simply and with few words. “No throwing sand. I want everyone to be safe.” Boundaries are a way for the child to experience our care and values, and leads to the child’s feeling of security in the embrace of our care. Even though the child may experience feelings of sadness or anger when they meet our boundaries, the boundaries help to define the child’s world and hence they are free to explore within those boundaries. If your boundaries for the children are clear, their life is less anxious because they are not constantly pushing the limits to find the boundaries.

Children are natural explorers and some children experience ‘No’ way too often in the course of their daily explorations. Their natural impulse to touch and taste and move and drop and experiment is squashed. That surely is not healthy for the child. One approach is to create your young child’s home environment so that your prized possessions are not accessible and you won’t have to say ‘No’ so much. Lock up the hazardous stuff, make it inaccessible. Put away the fragile and ‘special’ things until your child is older and can understand what to touch and what not to. Find ways to create the boundaries without having to use the ‘No’ word so much. Rather than saying what you don’t want, tell your child what you do want. Tell them what they can do. And if you have to say no, offer also what to do instead. “No drawing on the wall. You can draw on paper.”

As your child gets older, it is important that the boundaries loosen gradually. Boundaries are not a static form, they evolve as the child matures and can take more and more self-responsibility. In fact, healthy boundaries for the young child leads to taking self-responsibility as they mature.

Advertisers rely on adults to succumb to whining. They target children with their ads and packaging. If you must bring your child when you go shopping, it is a helpful practice to 

develop the habit of not buying something for them when you shop with them. Then the times you bring something home for them it can be more special and appreciated.

Remember that just because you said ‘No’ once, or many times, doesn’t mean your child won’t ask again, or attempt to do the same behavior you already said ‘No’ to. If we understand that the child is not being malicious and trying to get us upset (they are not!), then perhaps we can be calmer in our saying ‘No’ for the hundreth time. Or thousandth. 

The child is simply trying to do what he wants and uses the strategies he has already found to be successful from his experiences. These strategies were developed through a dynamic interaction with his parents. With us. It is not useful to blame him for not listening, or be angry with him for his purposeful attempt to get us angry. That is not the case. Calmly and patiently we CAN help our children develop new strategies to get what they want, strategies that don’t upset those around them. It takes time and repetition. Lots of it.

So here are 5 reasons why ‘No’ is important in the life of the young child.

1. No one likes to hear ‘whining.’ Whining is the result of parents not wanting their child to be sad. If at the first sign of sadness a ‘No’ turns into a ‘Yes,’ then our child learns that whining is a very successful strategy to get what they want. Also, it's okay for our child to be sad. Then they will develop the capacity to deal with their own sadness. Sadness is one of the basic feelings that undoubtedly will arise at various times in our child's life. Allow children to have the whole range of feelings.
2. Our child will love us all the more for the healthy boundaries and limits we create for them. In the moment they may feel the sadness or anger of their desires thwarted, but in the big picture they will feel secure in our care and guidance for them. Did you read my post about ‘How to Handle a Home Wrecker?” 
3. Saying ‘No’ does not make someone mean. Meanness is trying to make someone feel bad. Creating boundaries for your child is healthy and important. As long as you have reasons for what you are doing to support your child’s development, and calmness in how you are delivering the boundaries then what other adults think about you is their problem. If they ever ask why we said ‘No’ we can explain our reasons and then they can think whatever they choose to think. 
4. We set limits for our young children so they will feel secure and confident. Without clear boundaries the children might be doing behaviors increasingly outlandish as a way to find the boundaries they unconsciously know they need.
5. We live in a consumer culture where we are trained to say ‘Yes’ to all sorts of products and services, and get it immediately - instant gratification. I think experiences of delaying gratification are important so the children can develop capacities for waiting. Honestly, I think our culture is dysfunctional and is causing massive social, economic, health and environmental problems. Going the other way from the ‘mainstream’ seems like a really good idea to me.

P.S. Please let me know what you think about this post, and here is another short article that might be helpful about boundaries and learning to say 'No.'  http://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/discipline/tips/discipline-without-saying-no/ 

Spanking? No thanks!

The other day I was driving with the radio on. A parent advice show came on so I listened. I don’t know who the speaker was or what the show was called because my radio soon lost reception for that station. One thing the speaker said was, “Now, I am not recommending spanking your young child, but if you do spank make sure your child understands why they are being spanked.” I wanted to call in but it wasn’t a call-in show. To put it mildly, I was appalled and angry. The speaker spoke as an authority and had a captive audience with no space for different perspectives. I have a different perspective!

First I’ll get to the point. I recommend never spanking your child. Don’t spank in anger, and don’t choose to spank while calm. I don’t like hitting as a persuasion method or boundary delivery technique. There, I said it. Now I’ll explain. 

I want to acknowledge how hard it is to be a parent. As a grandpa, I am one step removed from the level of stress parents experience. I am no longer engaged in the day-to-day activity of parenting while trying to maintain the other necessary realms of daily life. I am guessing that everyone at one time or another feels like hitting someone. I know I sometimes felt that way as a parent. The question becomes how to deal with the triggered feeling that often leads to the reaction response of hitting.

The primary learning modality for young children is imitation. They copy from the example of the loved ones around them. It is not a conscious choice to copy though. It is if the children are compelled to copy by some invisible impulse. Imitation is an unconscious method of learning for the young child.

When babies are born, they cannot walk or talk. How they learn to walk and speak is by copying other the human beings in their environment. If they were not around other human beings they would not learn how to walk and speak like a human. (For example the ‘wolf child of Aveyron’). The children also learn many other things from parents through imitation, notably their strategies to deal with frustration and stress. Simply put, spanking teaches the children that hitting is a way to get the message across when they are frustrated.

Boundaries are important for the children. One of the child’s needs is safety and adults have to hold safe boundaries so the children can develop and thrive within those boundaries. There are other ways than spanking or hitting to show the child boundaries. In fact, using hitting as a tool for creating boundaries shows the child that he or she is not safe because if they do certain things they get hit. What an anxious world that creates.

Staying calm and centered and responsive is not easy. Stress sends most of us into our reactive mode and if spanking and hitting is programmed into us from our own childhood, it is very hard to choose non-violent actions. Parenting is a spiritual journey really because we get the chance to look at our own reactiveness and behavior patterns and work on overcoming those. Parenting is really a path. And if we understand that we are participating in the programming of the reaction patterns in our children, maybe that is enough to help us hold back our impulse to spank. Even if we think we are calm and centered and choosing in the moment to apply a spank to get the message across, we are still teaching the child that one hits when others don’t appear to listen.

Along with any practices you take up to maintain your calm and patience, I also suggest thinking in advance of an alternative you can put in place if the time comes. Plan ahead! There are many resources in print (my book Connecting With Young Children for example) and online (Dr. Rick Hanson’s website and the Parenting Beyond Punishment website) to give you ideas for alternative actions and practices for staying in your responsive centered mode. 

Additionally, the parenting ‘expert’ on the radio mentioned that if you do spank, ‘make sure the child understands why they are being spanked.’ Just a minute here. The part of the brain that does ‘executive function,’ that is involved in understanding consequences, cause and effect, and logic, is named the frontal lobes. It is simply not present in the young child. That part of the brain is the last part of the brain to mature and during adolescence it is still undergoing extensive changes. It continues developing until one is almost thirty years old.  Your young child doesn’t have the neurology to understand why they are being spanked.

How do you get a radio show? Maybe I could have one too. In the meantime, I’ll use this newsletter to get the message to you all.

Please be present enough to THINK of an alternative to spanking. Eventually our whole world will be a better place for it. 

This coming Saturday, March 29, from 11am to 3pm, NEW FORM TECHNOLOGY is having their 1st Anniversary Celebration. New Form Technology is involved in a science of the future -  a science that looks at the objective structure of form and tries to find the intention behind the form. One form they are working with extensively is a discovered geometric solid named the 'Chestahedron.' The NFT center in San Carlos, California is an exciting place of creation, design, conversation and research. The anniversary celebration includes demonstrations of research and projects, food and a lecture by Frank Chester on the relationship of form to the human heart. Don't miss this event!
More information about New Form Technology at their website.