Parenting

Adam and I have been meaning to do this since we moved into this house a year ago, and we finally got around to it last week – we hung a mirror at Sam’s height near the front door!

(Link to video)

I’ve found that Sammy is more willing to brush her hair or have it brushed as part of the “get out the door” routine.  It’s also a good way for me to remember it.  She didn’t have enough hair to brush until she was around 2, so I never really developed a routine that worked until we started doing this.   She likes to brush and “style” her hair along with me, but that’s not a daily occurrence.  We tried brushing her hair when she got dressed, but the brush kept going missing and then I’d forget about it.

Now, we keep the brush in her “shoe basket.”  The shoe basket was one of our very first physical tools to help Sammy with her independence.  I got the idea from Cornelia Lockitch in her parenting coaching sessions.  Not only does Sam like to pick out her own shoes and put them on, but we’ve have never had any issue with her leaving her shoes and socks all over the place.  She loves to put them in the proper place, and actually gets quite upset if we try to do it for her.

Keeping the brush there is probably not the most hygienic option, but I’ll take convenience over hygiene any day.

As an aside, we’ve also had a Sammy-height coat rack since she was old enough to walk:

So as we got used to the hair brushing routine, Sam became more and more adamant about doing the brushing herself.  She definitely needed a mirror, so we finally got it done, and she loves it!  She does a pretty good job at brushing her own hair now.  Many mornings I don’t do anything at all, although her hair tangles extremely easily so sometimes she needs some help.

When it is time to get out the door, the only things that I need to do for Sammy are helping her get her socks on and getting the zipper on her coat started.  I might not be so anxious for the end of winter if I use this time to help her master those last 2 skills.  If summer comes and socks and coats go away, she probably won’t try again until next year.  But that’s ok, too.  In the meantime, we’ll work on getting out the door in under 20 minutes.  Now that’s a challenge!

Last week I participated in my first focus group!  One of the other moms at Sammy’s school works for a marketing company, so I had an “in.”  (I hear it can be hard to get into these things, but I’d never tried before.)

I’m probably not supposed to talk about the products we looked at, but it was a group of moms of 3-year-olds so you can guess what kind of thing we’re talking about.  It was a lot of fun, Sammy came home with 2 new toys, and I got quite a nice paycheck for 3 hours work.  I’m hoping they invite me back again.

I really enjoyed seeing what other moms found important.  In some ways we were all the same, but in others we were all quite different.  I wish I could talk about it more, but they had me sign papers so quickly that I might have signed a confidentiality agreement without noticing it.

One funny thing happened that I can explain without giving out any important information.  We were reviewing something about the product and the facilitator said, “What about safety?  You’ve all mentioned safety but you didn’t comment about [this aspect of the product].  You wouldn’t let your 3-year-olds use knives or hammers or anything, so where is your concern for safety here?”

I had to pipe up about that one.  ”I let my daughter use real knives, and I let her try to use the hammer and other tools too.  She does a fine job.”  I wish I could say that jaws dropped, but there wasn’t a strong reaction.  Still, I felt like a real Free Range mama at that moment, and it felt good!

Sammy has grown up so much in the past month.  She now sleeps in a real bed, in a room that feels more like a kid’s than a baby’s.  She’s learning how to deal with social situations in a more independent way, such as learning to introduce herself, ask someone’s name, and to interrupt with, “Excuse me.”  And, she’s had a lot of new experiences lately.  There was the New York trip in December, then the chaos of home improvement in January, the snow in February, and in the past week, she’s gone ice skating and to her first rock concert.

Ice skating was about what I had expected.  It took about 20 minutes to get her skates on.  NO, MOMMY, THEY’RE TOO TIGHT!  DO IT RIGHT, MOMMY!  She had a valid complaint.  It’s very difficult to know just how tight to pull those laces.  We went to an outdoor rink and it was about 34 degrees out, so it was deserted, which was perfect.  If there had been skaters whizzing by, I don’t think she would have gotten on the ice at all.  As it was, she watched me a bit, and was willing to come out on the ice 4 times, each time starting out scared-curious, each time ending with just scared, but after returning to the safety of non-slippery ground, each time wanting more.

Sam has really turned a corner with her persistence.  She seems to have learned the lesson that practice and trying lead to success, at least at a rudimentary level.  She now works on things.  She’s been working on buttons, getting her shoes on, locking the front door, and other things that I can’t think of right now.  But I definitely see a difference in her willingness to try and fail.  Hopefully this is a lesson that will be naturally reinforced as she tries and succeeds with all the new things that she continues to work on.

On Saturday, we took Sammy to a bar where some neighborhood kids were playing in their band which is organized through their music school, The School of Rock.  It was a real rock concert – loud and raw, with covers of songs from “The Monster Mash” to “Sympathy for the Devil.”  Our neighbors were great!  As usual, it took Sammy about a half-hour to get used to the new situation.  Her M.O. is to just sit and observe quietly until she decides something is ok.  She looks spaced out, and won’t engage, and if you didn’t know her, you’d say she was just off on another planet.  But she is observing, taking it all in, and judging.  Adam and I didn’t know how this outing would go because last year, Sammy decided she didn’t like loud things.  She wouldn’t even go to a movie.  But we sat in the back and it was tolerable.  And after her usual half-hour, she let loose and started dancing and doing the rocker’s headbanging.  Unfortunately, when she started, she was sitting at the table and literally banged her head on the table twice before she got to her feet and had some space!  But after that, she was the star of the bar.  It was unbearably cute – this tiny girl rockin’ out, flipping her hair up and down, falling to her knees and banging the floor with her fists, and, of course, spinning, her trademark dance move.  She really listens to the music – when there is a pause she’ll stop in a dramatic pose, and then when it kicks in again she’ll be back to her crazy moves.  It was also interesting to see how differently she dances to loud rock music than she does to the stuff we play at home.  It all just confirms to me how musical she is.

Adam tried to get some video of the whole thing, but it was too dark.  What a shame.  Luckily, I can give you a little taste of the dancing with this video I took after the ice skating.  Her concert performance was much better, but you can see a bit of the head movements here.  Imagine the head flipping doubled in intensity with jumping and wiggling and spinning mixed in, and you’ll have an idea of what a born rocker our daughter is:

We have three new rules in our house:

1. Sammy may only have one bite of any candy, dessert, or other sugary sweet treat. 
2. Protein for breakfast every day.  No more cereal for breakfast.
3. Every day, including weekends, Sammy gets dressed immediately after waking up.

As Sammy has gotten older, her reaction to too much sugar has gotten more severe.  The other day, I let her have a cup of hot chocolate (half a package of the powdered stuff) with no food to go along with it, and she was a monster until the moment she took a bite of yogurt.  Then she became totally normal.  The very next day we attended a birthday party, and since the children were only given about 10 minutes to eat their pizza, Sammy probably only managed to have 3-4 bites.  (She’ll take up to an hour to eat a meal if we let her.)  Then they had cupcakes.  Within seconds, the birthday girl (who ate 2 cupcakes!) turned from a sweet, calm little girl into some strange spastic creature who couldn’t stop pointing and grunting and laughing maniacally.  Sammy’s version of the insanity was to throw a fit about getting her coat on and continue the pissy behavior for the next hour.

I noted a long time ago that Sammy’s major shift into the tyrannical threes came at the same time she started school.  Since then, I’ve noticed that the snacks at her school are always some form of carbs and sugar.  Crackers and fruit, usually.  I tried the “protein for breakfast” rule early on, but I gave it up because of the time involved in cooking eggs or sausage in the morning.  But I think it’s worth another shot.

And the getting dressed thing.  Lordy lordy.  That girl takes so long to get dressed, even when she is cooperating fully.  She was 20 minutes late to the birthday party because she just wouldn’t put on her pants.  (Of course, she was exactly 20 minutes late because I had told her that if she made us more than 20 minutes late, we weren’t going at all.  I know she can’t read a clock, but she can sure read her mommy.)  I figure that it’s best to get this particular hurdle over and done with before anything else, and when there is the least pressure to get out the door.  Thank god for timers!  They turn an hour long battle into a 20 minute bore, but I’ll take it.

The potty situation here at the Mossoff house is a bit more under control.  Now, Sammy has what I would call accidents, as opposed to simply refusing to use the potty.  She no longer poops in her pants several times a day, but only once every other day or so. 

Until now, though, she’d been holding out for the naptime diaper a lot of the time, so that even when she didn’t have an accident, she also didn’t use the potty.  Sometimes she could go through the whole day without even peeing in the potty at home (although I’m pretty sure she went at school).  That naptime diaper was a crutch.

However, over the weekend she achieved a milestone:  she took her nap without a diaper for the first time.  This is a thrilling development!   She’s been able to fall asleep in the car without accidents for a while, so I knew she could physically do it.  I was just waiting for a good opportunity.  We had a confluence of good circumstances on Sunday:  her big-girl mattress was being delivered that afternoon, and I had previously told her that as soon as it arrived, we’d try naps without diapers.  (We couldn’t coordinate moving her to her new room with the arrival of the new mattress, so she’s been in the new room on an air mattress for a week or so.)  Even though the new mattress hadn’t arrived yet, she pooped and peed on the potty right before nap and she was in a great mood and not being particularly anti-mommy, so I siezed the opportunity.  I didn’t make a big deal out of it, but told her that since she had used the potty, that she could wear underwear for her nap, and that if she needed to use the bathroom she was free to come out of her room and go anytime she needed to.

Directly after leaving her room, I heard her get up and use the potty and go right back in and go to sleep.  I’m quite certain that she loved this new privilege!  She was dry when she woke up, and very proud of it.

I know we’re in for a lot of dirty sheets, but from now on, there will be no more diapers at nap time in this house.  Yea!

Sammy’s favorite Christmas character seems to be Frosty the Snowman.  Ever since we watched the old animated movie just before the holidays, Sammy can’t stop talking about how Frosty melted and how Santa made the little girl feel better and the fact that frosty has a CORN COP BIPE and a BUTTON NOSE and TWO EYES MADE OUT OF COLE.  Yes, Cole, because she doesn’t understand that “coal” is something different that the boy who lives down the street.  (It must be so confusing to be 3.)

She’s also been drawing snowmen, asking me to make them out of Play-Doh, and begging me to sing the song.  Too bad for her, but I told her that I’m not singing any more Christmas songs until next year, because I want to save them for that special time.  She still asks me several times a day, though.

The other day, I wore these earrings for the first time in a while, and I’ll leave it to you to guess what she said:

A while back I made the unfortunate mistake of teaching Samantha the phrase, “zip your lip.”  I didn’t tell her to zip her lip; that would have been obnoxious.  I used the phrase as an example of something she could say to express her desire for me to be quiet.  I think I was trying to lighten the mood or something by finding a cute way for her to say it, but now the damage is done.  You see, she always wants me to shut up.  Not only does she resent it when I try to do things for her, she can’t stand it when I give her instructions when she doesn’t need or want them.

So she is constantly telling me:  MOMMY, WILL YOU PLEASE ZIP YOUR LIP?  As long as she uses a respectful tone of voice, I don’t mind.  It’s just her way of saying, I WANT YOU TO BE QUIET NOW.  When she wants to emphasize how important it is to her, she asks me to run my fingers over my lips in a zipping motion – another little gem that I wish I had never taught her.  But, alas, this is her way of controlling her world and getting too-helpful-Mommy to just butt out.  I respect that.

So, when we were at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Sam was totally into the dinosaurs.  She was fascinated.  I think it took her a while to get the idea of bones; these were the bones of the dead dinosaurs.  (We did a lot of explaining beforehand, but that’s a tough concept for a 3-year-old, don’t you think?)  But I do think she got some sense of it – that this was all that was left of them.  The point is, she really, really loved it.

She was being really good on this trip in general, but at one point I asked her to do something and she started to yell at me.  I told her that if she wanted to stay at the museum and see the dinosaurs, she had to speak kindly to us, or we might have to leave.  She started to yell again, but then she took her fingers and zipped her lip.  Over and over, she zipped her lip, until she was sure that she would not yell at me again.  And it worked!

Sam started spitting recently.  It’s a new way of acting out her anger.  Usually, she makes a noise and dribbles down her chin, but once she spat directly at me.  I let her have it for that, giving her a stern lecture in a way that I reserve for really heinous behavior.  It seemed to work, as she has stopped (at least for the moment).

But now she is back to hitting and screaming at us.  She has just shifted the form of her angry response, and there is no reason to believe that she won’t start spitting again at any moment.

Before I knew that the specific spitting problem was resolved, I posted a question about it on two parenting lists I belong to.  The responses fell into three essential categories:

• Explain why spitting is wrong and give alternatives for expressing angry feelings
• The child cannot control her body so, as a last resort, do it for her by covering her mouth
• The child is showing that she cannot behave properly in a social context, so remove the social context by sending her to her room (or to time-out)

(There were other points about how to handle things like spitting bath water and playing with one’s spit, but those did not apply to Sam’s situation, which is all about expressing anger.)

The first response is a Positive Discipline approach and definitely needs to happen.  Before you can take any other action, as a parent your first responsibility is to assume positive intent, respect the child’s intelligence, and give reasons.  Sometimes the child just doesn’t know how to express her feelings in an appropriate way. 

But, “assume positive intent” does not mean “your child always acts with positive intent.”  Sam’s hitting and spitting is (usually) done precisely because she wants to make an impact by doing the “wrong” thing.  (Although there are certainly times where she just forgets, but I can tell the difference now.)  The first approach would be worse than a waste of breath in these cases – it would be a default on proper judgment of really inappropriate behavior.  It would be an injustice.

The second response is kind of like the last resort of Positive Discipline and it’s what I’ve been doing with the hitting (restraining her body) for the past year or so.  But the hitting has continued, off and on.

The third is a more traditional approach, and something that PD advocates might call a “punishment.”  But in the end, I think the third approach is best for our situation.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the problems with Positive Discipline.  I don’t think it’s a really good concept to begin with, although I think a lot of the techniques are fabulous.  (I don’t have any clear, overall, positive principle of my own, but I’m working on it.)  Here is one area where I think PD falls short.  With PD, you have to be willing to make the correction or give the guidance hundreds of times before the child gets it.  This is fine and dandy for most things (table manners, treating toys respectfully, cleaning up, etc.).  But for some things, I’m not willing to allow the behavior to happen over and over.  With hitting, I’m not willing any more to have it happen 20 times a day for a week and go through the restraint and explanations and apologies and all of that before she stops.  It’s not something I’m willing to continue to be a patient “guide” about any more.  The behavior needs to end now, and for good, for my own, selfish reasons.  I feel like a punching bag, and that is not ok.  (And honestly, it gets to the point where I fantasize about hitting her back, and that is scary, and a real signal that something is wrong.)  Selfishness is always a good guide, but I also do think that it is in the child’s interest to understand that hitting is not just another way of being impolite, but is in a different category from those other things.  This is not something that she has the luxury of taking any more time to “learn.”  It does need to be treated differently. Spitting is in the same category.  It is out of bounds.  Period.

This was my original instinct a year ago and the reason that I tried time-outs.  But making a child sit on the step for a couple of minutes is not a clear way of isolating her and removing her from the social context.  And the endless Supernanny method of returning the child to the step when she gets up is too painful, and really just too much trouble.  Why should I spend an hour physically battling my child when I’m trying to teach her the lesson that force is not ok?  Sure, I’m using force as a response to force, which we adults know is not only acceptable, but a requirement, but can a child really understand that in the heat of the moment?  I think the child would see this as bullying.  And that’s the way it felt when I used that technique.  It was miserable, and it didn’t make sense.

So even before I got those three responses, we had started sending Sammy to her room for certain things, not as punishment, but because the minute she hits or spits, she has declared herself incapable of acting properly in a social context, and so must be removed from it.  PD has some techniques to deal with this in a similar way, like removing yourself from the child.  But for some reason, time-outs and sending the child to her room are seen as punishments, and therefore, not ok. 

Well, I’m coming to strongly disagree with this view.  We cannot walk away from Sam when she hits because she follows us and continues to hit us.  I could lock myself in my own room, but I don’t think I should have to stop what I am doing because she is acting improperly.  If she hits me at the dinner table, am I supposed to leave?  No.  It is she who needs to be isolated, not me.  And if she cannot stay in her room on her own, I am ok with locking her in there.  (That has happened a couple of times.)  And there is no arbitrary time that she must spend in her room, like one minute for each year of age.  She must stay there until she is ready to act like a human being.  Sometimes this means that she comes out and asks if she can come downstairs.  Sometimes it means we go in to her.  There are no formulas for this, but simply our perception of exactly what is going on, and whether she has truly changed her attitude.

I’m gaining a little bit more respect for this traditional, “go to your room” technique.  Sure, it can be abused (see Betty Draper in Mad Men), but I think it can also be used properly.

So, thanks to Betsy Speicher on the Rational Parenting List for the identification of the “social context” issue.  I was already using it, but having it stated this way has helped me to clarify why it is an appropriate measure to take.  It can be a logical consequence, not an arbitrary punishment, if used the right way.

Have you noticed that I haven’t done The Sam Update for a while?  I thought I might change it from monthly to quarterly, but I just realized that I should have done it on Dec. 2.  I guess that’s the end of that tradition.  It makes me sad, but now that Sammy is 3, a regular update doesn’t seem to capture her development as well as the more subject-specific updates I’ve been doing like those for potty training and how we use rewards.  Besides, I’ll never be able to do a monthly update for 2 children, and I’m hoping that will be the situation soon enough.

Speaking of which, I’m finally back to normal, physically, and we can start trying again.  We’ve had luck in December twice in the past.  It’s a good month for us.

A few updates on Sammy:  she went 4 days without an accident last week, and on one of those days she skipped her nap so there was no mid-day diaper for her to rely on.  Yesterday she had 2 accidents, but she also had 2 successes.  I know there will be more setbacks, but at least for now, I have some relief.

Adam and I are so proud of our girl because she is really learning to control her emotions and use nice words and questions instead of throwing tantrums.  She went through that angry period a couple of months ago, and even after she improved, we’ve had to remind her dozens of times a day to “use a question, not a demand,” and to say “I can’t understand you when you scream; try talking in a normal voice,” and “Can you ask me nicely?”  But it seems that we’re getting through.  When she screams, whines, or demands, we try really hard not to get angry or react emotionally, and we also try not to take the easy, range-of-the-moment solution and just give her what she wants.  This takes huge effort and focus, but once we really knuckled down on ourselves and gave her a few weeks of consistency, she started responding.  I’ve seen her change from yelling to talking in mid-sentence.  Sometimes she’ll demand something and I’ll just look at her and she’ll use a polite question instead.  A friend of mine made me realize how self-aware Sammy is for her age when I told her about something Sammy does that I didn’t know was unusual:  When Sammy gets really upset, she likes to be alone.  So, now, when she really loses it, she’ll say, I’M GOING AWAY NOW. I GO TO MY ROOM AND CLOSE THE DOOR AND FEEL BETTER.  THEN I COME BACK AND TALK NICELY AND HAVE HUGS AND KISSES.  And she’ll do exactly that.  My friend thought that was amazing self-awareness for a 3-year-old, and I suppose it is. 

Our newest challenge with Sammy is a sleep issue.  She has decided to pull out all the stops to get us to come to her in the middle of the night.  First, it was that she wanted the hallway light on.  She would open her door (but not come out, since her Teach Me Time Clock was not green) and demand that the hallway light be turned on.  Once we convinced her that we were not going to turn it on, she decided that she just had to check on the hallway light a hundred times a night.  So she’d wake up and open her door and say, HALLWAY LIGHT OFF, and then close the door.  Over…and over…and over.  So then we had to convince her that she was keeping us awake and she needed to keep the door closed.  She could turn on her light and play with her toys or read books if she was not sleepy, but she had to be quiet.  So she gave up on the hallway light and now she just opens her door and screams, I WANT MY MOMMY!  I WANT MOMMY TO COME IN MY ROOM AND MAKE ME FEEL BETTER. 

There’s nothing particularly confusing about this.  We just need to stay consistent and not go in her room.  (Simple to say, but torture to do.)  If she opens the door and yells out, we tell her that if she can’t keep it closed, we’ll have to lock it.  (We reversed the handle on her door a long time ago to make sure she didn’t accidentally lock herself in, so now the lock is on the outside.)  Locking her door is not a threat meant to punish her.  We always explain that we will do it to help both her and us sleep.  She certainly does not like the idea, though, and one warning has been enough so far.  Sometimes before bed, I’ll ask her if she wants me to lock the door so that she is not tempted to open it.  She always says NO, but it’s my way of showing her that it is something meant to help her, not punish her.  I’m sure we’ll have to do it someday, because she’s testing every limit lately.  But in the meantime, we’re a very tired family.