Parenting Aritcles Round Up (Food for Thought)

I've had a number of articles in tabs on my browser that I've been meaning to share. Here we go:

This article is about a method of getting your child to open up about his day. We're a little ways away from this, but worth the read.

This article is about the culture of childhood and it's destruction. One take away is that when kids play with each other, they are testing out the adult world with their peers. Interesting.

This is a compilation of links with parenting resources from The Objective Standard.

This is an article about sleep routines, which might help with a few struggles we've been having. I'm also reading Ferber's Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems. The original article led me to Magda Gerber, who I would like to know more about.

This subreddit about "Things you never thought you'd say as a parent" is hysterical. "The cat's butt hole is yucky. Please don't touch it again."

Which Style of Parenting is Best? - Lecture 7

Scientific Secrets for Raising Children Who Thrive

Research on parenting styles.

My comment: Long before I was ever even thinking of becoming a parent, I had a friend tell me that good parenting is half unconditional love and half high expectations. I think this lecture bears this out. It talks about research into different parenting styles and their affects on children. I still think the Master Question is a great principle to frame challenges, and this provides a perspective from a slightly different angle. One tip: Strive to be an authoritative as opposed to authoritarian or permissive.

Lecture notes:
Authoritarian parents are strict. The "because I said so" parent.

Permissive parents are nurturing and warm, but imposes few limits. They seem to be unaware of misbehaving children.

Authoritative are warm and controlling. Clear limits with sensitivity. They may be strict, but will explain why.

Uninvolved parents don't seem interested in their children's development. All of the outcomes related to uninvolved parents are worse than the other three categories.

Parental style is typically identified by questionnaires with statements reflecting one of the three styles along with a spectrum of agreement. Also, in home observation and clinical types of studies help to identify parenting styles. Very few parents end up falling on one of the extremes. There is also a "mixed" style which is inconsistent.

Children of authoritarian parents tend to be more "well behaved" but also are likely to have depression and anxiety issues and social issues. They fall short on self regulation tests as well (cf Lecture 1). They also tend to go through bigger rebellious phases.

Children of permissive parents tend to watch more children and have trouble with obesity and drug/alcohol abuse.

Finding the line of being in charge and being warm with your children is the trick. Taking the time to give explanations of limits matters a lot. Also, involving children in setting the limits also helps.

Inductive discipline-explain how the change may affect others, not just him. Craig Heart studied inductive discipline. There is a correlation between positive playground behavior and inductive discipline. (I think it will be interesting to revisit this when I read Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson.)

Consistent hard work at age 7 is a real challenge. For example, practicing the violin may be a real challenge to a 7 year old. Andre Agassi's dad drove his child to practice, but Andre ended up hating the practice. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother also showed this method. These are both anecdotal forms of evidence. Scientific studies with lots of children show there are problems with this approach.

Encouraging children along with explaining pros and cons of not practicing seems to be a better approach.

One additional payoff is "moral development". Children from authoritarian homes are more likely to lie about misdeeds. Children of authoritative parents tend to show more of a sense of right and wrong.

How Kids and Rats Differ (Lecture 6)

Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive

(Comment: I struggle with this lecture. It does a good job of making sure that we know that humans are not rats, but it still smuggles in the behaviorism. I know this is an area of future reading for me, so I'll leave it at this.)

Conditioning and Behaviors

Tip 1. Don't treat your child like a rat.

Tip 2. Never hit your kids. (It never works.)

Tip 3. Catch your children being good and reward them.

Tip 4. Explain things to children in more detail than you think they need.

Chang did an experiment with rats where he would try to get rats to figure out where food was within a room. He would place food in one corner, remove the rat, then place the rat back in the room in a different orientation. He tried this with colored walls, etc. He found that rats could use some information but not others to help determine where the food is. Specifically, they are bad at using color for this.

Some researchers have replicated this with 1.5 to 2 year olds. Children don't seem to be able to use color either.

Skinner was the father of the school of behaviorism. Four types of results: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment.

Positive reinforcement is doing something and receiving a reward.
Negative reinforcement is the reduction of something bad.
Positive punishment is the increase in something bad on some action.
Negative punishment don't get something good if you do something bad.

(I didn't understand the explanation of this in the lecture. It was fast and unclear. Here is a  better explanation: LINK.)

He tells a story of a group of students who perked up only when he was on the left side of the stage and when he was on the right side, they would act bored. Within a few lectures, he only lectured from the left side of the stage.

One of the central tenants is that all stimuli will act equally. Original behaviorist theory said do whichever is most convenient. Studies show this isn't true. Specifically, spanking as a punishment teaches the child a strategy is to avoid doing it when the punisher is around. Further, they learn to hit other kids. There is a broad consensus that spanking is counterproductive.

There are some longitudinal studies that work to isolate the effects of individual differences in children and show that the more spanking, the less productive it is.

Positively reinforcement is the most effective way to help shape children's good behavior. Notice that the kids are playing nicely with one another and say something to them. A sticker based system can be helpful in helping kids behave as you'd like. Reinforce positive behavior and be sure to explain why you want them to change their behavior. The bedtime sticker game faded with them.

Human children are far more influenced by their own thinking and decisions.

Baby Talk, Sign Language, and Speech - Lecture 5

 There is no doubt that helping your child learn a language is a huge part of raising a child. Language is how we are able to think and ultimately how we can live. These were some helpful hings.

Tip one: Talk to your baby from the very beginning. 


The first word usually happens around one year. The first sentence is around two years. Babies can start using sign language as early as 8 months.

Tip two: Try using baby sign language.
Baby sign language helps with language all around.

Learning to speak requires several different muscles and is a complicated process to learn. Think about the difference between what we need to do with our mouths to distinguish between "ch" and "sh" sounds. As opposed to sign language, which requires only gross motor movement.

Children's sign language doesn't result in speech delays. Susan Goodwin did a study that showed that children with sign language abilities don't lag their non-signing peers.

Tip three: "Motherese" or sing-song baby talk.

Our pitch changes more, our grammar is simpler, our annunciation is more clear. This all helps infants learn language and they often will be more attracted to this. A study shows that an infant will learn the meaning of a word easier if it was taught in "motherese".

Tip four: Talk to a baby as if they are an adult. Regular spoken language is helpful to understand the cadence, tonality, etc of a language. 

The more language a child hears, the more they can start to parse the separation of words and sentences as they acquire language. 

Eating Well for Life - Raising Kids Who Thrive Lecture 4

This was a great lecture. It reinforced all of the things I've been reading about how to introduce foods to children. It cited several studied that reinforced what was mentioned in the book "First Bite" by Bee Wilson.

My favorite study cited was the one where parents were given education about healthy eating, mainly around fruits and veggies. The result of the study showed that if the parents changed their behavior, the children were more likely to change theirs. It reinforced this notion that the best thing we can be for our children is great role models.

Highlights from the lecture:

Key suggestions:
1. Pair new foods with familiar foods.
2. Encourage children to eat new foods without being harsh or forceful.
3. Eat the food yourself in front of the kids.
4. Avoid filling up with sweets before introducing new foods.
5. Be patient and let your child eventually adapt to new foods.



Babies are influenced by what mom's eat in utero and while breastfeeding.
Exposure to foods is key.Moms who eat healthy produce kids who prefer healthy foods.

Around 2 years, there is a shift towards pickiness. Why? Small children don't have as much of a buffer regarding new foods that may be dangerous, so the evolutionary mechanism is a phobia of new foods. The novelty avoidance happens during the historical end of breastfeeding.

Food tastes better when you're hungry. It is better not to let a child fill up on familiar foods when trying new foods.

Historically we went from being hunter/gatherers to being more sedentary. So we move less and have abundant calories available.

Be careful about associating foods with nausea. Don't introduce new foods when a child is coming down with something.

Clean your plate pressure backfires. Children who are pressured don't eat more than those who don't.

Eat more healthy foods yourself. Studies have shown that if parents increase their eating of fruits and veggies, their children will too.

Raising Kids who Thrive, Lecture 3 -- Sleep

This was a great post on sleep. We haven't had much trouble in our house, but I think that's because we followed a lot of this advice to begin with.












I liked the "science tip" that suggested relying on "meta-analysis" that looks at myriad studied to draw conclusions. So often we see a headline that says a new study says X, only to have a contradictory study come out the following week. With a meta-analysis, you're looking at a variety of studies to draw conclusions.


Here's the lecture summary:

Tip 1: Establish and maintain a consistent bedtime routine at 4 or 5 months old.

Tip 2: Roughly follow the guidelines for sleep at different ages. Watch for signs of too much or too little sleep.

Tip 3: Avoid screens prior to bedtime.

Prior to the invention of the light bulb, there was pressure to sleep, or be inactive,  when it was dark. Now we have more choice about when to sleep. We've found that sleep is necessary, with signs similar to  intoxication with sleep deprivation.

Our bodies and minds do certain "housekeeping" processes during sleep. Kids grow during sleep. Weight gain is often associated with too little sleep.

Breast milk can provide tryptophan which can help regulate sleep. Swaddling helps avoid startle events.  Loud white noise can mimic the sounds from the womb.

Provide lots of sensory and behavioral cues during the bedtime ritual.

Bright lights, particularly blue light, negatively affect the ability to go to sleep.

(Science tip: if an study is based on a meta-analysis, it typically is based on a collection of many studies.)

Recommended book: Ferber Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems. Helps the baby get more ability to self soothe.


Karp, The Happiest Baby on the Block.  The video of the same name helped us immensely when we had to work on getting our LO to sleep.

Sleep is important throughout life. Keeping a sleep diary may be helpful to see if there are any troubles regarding sleep. 

Sleep descriptions (what kids typically get):
1 month - 16 hours total
2-12 months - 14 hours
1 year to 3 years -  12 hours
age 4 to 10 -  10 hours
over 12 - 8-9 hours
best tip is to know what your child's habits are.

Cleaning Up

Now that our little guy is starting to feed himself, I think this is going to be very helpful:

Ryobi Cordless Vacuum

I've recently adopted the Ryobi brand because their batteries are interchangeable and they seem to keep the same style from year to year and version to version.

Raising Kids who Thrive Lecture 2

Seeing, Hearing, Thinking Infants


My thoughts: 

This lecture reinforced the idea that I've had all along: children begin learning right away and the more you can interact with them and give them experience with the world the better. 

I really enjoy his description of the experiments. It's interesting to me how they are able to create experiments that help to show some aspect of childhood development.

Main Points:

This lecture focuses on evidence that infants are seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling beings from much earlier than commonly believed.

For example: Potty training in the US happens between two and three years of age. There is evidence of children being semi-potty trained as early as 7 months of age. (Mostly the children will wait to go until the parent brings them to the toilet.)

Tip 1- Interact with your child in high level ways. 

One study indicates that babies can do some simple counting. The study procedure shows a baby a doll. A curtain then blocks the baby's view of the doll. The baby is shown a second doll going behind the curtain. The curtain is removed showing two dolls. The second phase repeats the process, but shows one doll instead of two. The babies attention to the missing doll is evidence that this is a surprise for them. (Kind of like a magic trick.) This study has been repeated in several variations showing addition, subtraction, etc. The conclusion is that children have a rudimentary understanding of the number of objects.

Five month olds can't do more complicated math (5-2), but 7 month old starts to be able to discern this. Gravity, sounds, rolling, etc have all been tested indicating they are all trying to understand these things in the world.

It's helpful to give a baby a rich environment from the beginning, talking to the baby about everything in the world. "Humans are born very dependent on adults for their survival, but they are seeing, hearing and thinking right from the start."


Tip 2 - Don't go overboard with Tip 1. 

There is no evidence that providing "super enriching" experiences have any effect at all. 

Tip 3 - Provide physical action opportunities. 

Tummy time is a good example. Another example is to play catch with a small ball--rolling the ball to them. This gives them the opportunity to learn to anticipate the action of objects.

At two months, you can play "Velcro catch" by giving the baby mittens with Velcro on them. Then put Velcro on selective toys. (Always use caution here.)

Raising Kids who Thrive Lecture 1

This is the first post of summarizing and commenting on the Scientific Secrets For Raising Kids Who Thrive. 

I've decided to summarize the main points and write a few paragraphs with my thoughts. Here's lecture one.

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Lecture 1--Self Control: From Tummy Time to Tae Kwon Do

Main Points:

• Science provides a set of tools to determine what works and doesn't work. This course focuses on parenting ideas that have been supported by careful research as opposed to anecdotal evidence.

• Give your child supervised tummy time. Since people have started having their children sleep on their backs to avoid SIDS, crawling has been delayed. Fifteen minutes of tummy time a day can counteract this.

• Motor development is a long series of problems children learn to solve, which generally occur in the same order.

• Crawling infants begin to code locations based on a world-centric. Precrawling infants code locations relative to themselves.

• Set up a cruising course with hand holds that allow the child to explore a room.

• For older kids, involvement in a disciplined form of physical activity like Tae Kwon Do promotes self mastery. The study cited randomly assigned students to Tae Kwon Do vs non-TKD activity. Students in the TKD class showed more self control and improvement in other cognitive areas. The TKD instructors had the kids ask themselves, where am I? What am I doing? What should I be doing? This supported self monitoring, self regulation, and self discipline. It worked well with 3,4 and 5 graders. More benefits for boys than girls. It's the mental control portion that helps.

• The marshmallow test was discussed. See the video below. Five year olds were the one's who struggled with waiting for the second marshmallows. Three year olds would just eat it; seven year olds would wait.

The lecturer discussed some principles of science:
Was there a careful study?
Were kids randomly assigned?
Are there biases in how the groups were assigned?
Results of studies. How they were done? What are the results?

My comments:
 I enjoyed this as an introductory lecture. As I remember, he does a good job of discussing how studies were done and when they were supported by additional research. 

Great Courses: Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids who Thrive

Before our LO was born Theresa and I listened to this lecture series put on by The Great Courses. The course gives tons helpful hints and ideas for child rearing with a basis in scientific studies. The topics include everything from tummy time to eating habits to reading to sleep. I particularly enjoyed the teacher's emphasis on the studies, how they are interpreted (and misinterpreted). 

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to be relistening to the course and summarizing the lectures on this blog. If you want to listen or watch, you can find the DVD's here, the audible version here, and the CDs here.

The Master Question

I want my child to grow up to be responsible, hard working, creative, independent, and happy.

When polled, these are among the most common responses American parents give when they ask what they want their kids to be when they grow up. Just as our little guy was born, The Objective Standard published an article titled "How to Raise a Life Loving Child." In it, the authors apply the idea of the purpose of parenting is to "enable a child to learn about the world, to develop his mind and skills, and to make his own choices so that he can live well and love life—not only in adulthood, but also throughout childhood."

With the "end in mind" thinking, they transformed the purpose into an organizing question:

What can I do (or refrain from doing) to enable my child to learn about reality to develop his mind and skills and to make his own choices so that he can live well and love life?

This is the "master question," which can be modified to be more concrete in various situations.

My wife and I have a weekly meeting and we use this question as one of the triggers to help us focus on what we might need to do with our little one over the next week.

We have applied it in three concrete ways so far:

First, as covered in the TOS article, reading is one of the most important things related to living life well. Reading opens the door to all education and to the entire world. It helps to expand language skills at all levels of growing up. I listed some of our favorite board books in an previous post. We also have been reading Anne of Green Gables to him to break it up.

A second way we have approached this is by trying to help our guy be an adventurous eater, who is willing to eat healthy foods throughout life. The book I mentioned in last week's post, First Bite by Bee Wilson mentioned that children around four months go through a phase where they will eat nearly anything. Familiar foods stay with children for life. However, after this adventurous phase, there is a picky phase where new foods become difficult to introduce. We have tried to be aggressive in introducing new foods while he's in the adventurous phase.

A final thing we've done is to try to create an environment which he can explore the world. The floor bed and baby-proofing among them. I talked about this in a previous post as well. The authors of the article above also discuss how they approached it.

I have found this master question a good organizing principle for our parenting over the last nine months. It helps keep the end goal in mind. The specific tactics and strategies are in lots of places, but master question helps guide them all.

Foods and Book Recommendations

In the first year of life, you have to focus on the basics: eat, sleep, and poop. Today's post is a collection of the thoughts on the first of those: food.

As our LO gets older, we have started introducing him to new foods in pureed form since he's still toothless. Going into parenting, I had the impression that there would be a very specific order we had to follow rigorously to avoid food allergies.

After a little bit of research, it seems the whole idea of a specific order is out the window. The two main articles I read were: here and here.

Basically, it seems like as long as we introduce foods slowly and watch for signs of allergic reactions, we're good.

Along the same line, I just finished by Bee Wilson, First Bite.  I recommend reading this book if you are worried about food pickiness.

In it, she discusses how we learn to eat and like different foods. The best tip I got from this book was a method of introducing foods to picky eaters. In one case, she describes a woman who had one of those 4 food diets: chips, ketchup sandwiches, etc. The conflict arose when the woman got an offer to teach in Asia. The woman used a this gradual introduction method in order to expand her list of acceptable foods.

The other book was French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Billon. It's also worth a read, but its is much more focused on the French way of doing things and about Ms. Billon's family. Entertaining, but if you chose one, chose First Bite.

Another book I've added to my list from the articles above is: Hungry Monkey: A Food Loving Father's Quest to Raise and Adventurous Eater.

Floor Beds and Babyproofing

We have a floor bed for our LO, which has worked out really well for us. I wont go into the philosophy behind this, but "How We Montessori" has a good article: Here. Another blogger has THIS article with a few more examples of Montessori child rooms.

Now, we have a bit of a problem. Our guy started turning over. The other night he rolled off the bed and he has rolled himself into the corner. Don't worry, no harm done.

However, we are going to have to baby proof his room this weekend, so I've collected a few articles to help us prepare. They are posted at the bottom.

There are a lot more articles than I posted. The most important stuff is covered in the ones I did post. The trouble I'm having is the babyproofing articles are based around fear. Fear that your child is going to end up in the emergency room, or worse. I posted an article on not babyproofing as a counter point. The Montessori articles tend towards a more growth centered approach.

I think it's important to rely on principles when you do anything. First, the prime principle of parenting is to raise an independent life loving adult. To do this, the child has to survive into adulthood AND needs to learn to understand his environment. So the balance is: at our child's age, what is he capable of learning to contend with and what might get him into serious trouble.

Any parents out there with additional thoughts?

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Joyful Abode has an article titled 10 Tips for Foolproof Babyproofing. This was helpful, particularly in creating a list of most important items. (I don't like the item titled: dont be stupid. It could be relabeled, prioritize.)

This Baby Center article, Childproofing Around the House, was a little more complete. It think it is helpful, but is seems to have an checklist.
undertone of fear behind it. YMMV. They also have a

Here is a food for thought item. The Decision Not To Babyproof.

And another on the Montessori Infant Home.

How to Install a Carseat without a base

This video was very helpful. I'm putting it here for future reference.

Traveling With A Kiddo

We just got back from a week long vacation with our seven-month-old in tow. Here are a few things we learned.
 
Airlines

We flew on Southwest. Their open seating policy is still a bit of a mystery to me. Fortunately, my wife knows the ins and outs. Getting "A" boarding is important if you can pull it off. If you can’t, they’ll let you board between A and B if you have a child under 7. This was a big score for us. 

We flew with our son on our lap. It would have been nice to have the extra seat, so we’ll likely purchase a seat for him in the future. Another plus of Southwest’s open seating policy is that most people don’t want to sit next to a baby, so on one leg, there was a single vacant seat on the plane, and we ended up with that vacant seat next to us.

The airlines gate checked our stroller and accompanying car seat. It was great to be able to have the stroller with us while we were waiting for the flight to board and during our layover. Note: During our layover, there was a deluge at the airport and the car seat was soaked, so we pulled out a diaper and put it face down in the seat to soak up some of the wetness. We now understand why some people put their seats in plastic bags.

 Airports

 

If you are doing formula, people are very good about giving you hot water to make a bottle. Changing tables in the restrooms were hit or miss, and sometimes, an empty gate on the floor was a better option. The bathrooms are definitely not a place to wash bottles, you may have to get creative.

Security

Getting through security is even more of a hassle with a little one. 

To make it easier we did a few things. First, we decided to check our luggage (at the curb no less), which is not our normal practice. It was a lot easier than hauling any luggage around, but we had to be strategic about what our LO might need during the flight. Diapers, formula, etc. Second, we made sure to have the easy-to-remove shoes. I know this is kind of a given, but it's a good reminder. Last, we gave ourselves tons of time before our flight. 

Tips for next time: 

1. I would not have brought the laptop. I didn't end up using it much and it takes that one extra step during TSA. 

2. I would make sure to have enough clean bottles. 

3. Remember to put the car seat face down through the x-ray machine.

Hotels

 

My Thoughts: 

• They provided us with a PackN Play. Since our little guy was uncomfortable, he slept between us on the king sized bed.
• The hotel had hot water for tea readily available. This was great, except that it tasted a little like coffee due to an incomplete rinse. 
• Our room had a fridge and microwave. This was a definite plus for baby food and some snacks for us. 

We would might have opted for a nicer hotel in retrospect. Our LO spends lots of time on the floor at home and we didn’t like putting him on the carpet in the Choice Inn. They only provided two large towels and no extra bedding, so we didn’t have great options for letting him have some time alone on the floor.

The Buy It There (BIT) List

I got this idea from Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work Week. We packed what we needed for the first day or two and created a list of stuff to buy at the local grocery or general merchandise store.

Here was our initial list:

1. Diapers (roughly 10 per day, and we used far less)

2. Formula

3. Baby food

4. Beaudreaux's Buttpaste

5. Bottled Water

6. Bottle Brush

This was a great idea and we will repeat this again when we travel next.  

Final Thoughts

This was a successful trip. The hardest part was dealing with jet lag for both us and the LO. If you have any tips, comments are welcome.

I plan to use this a a resource for any time we travel, so I'll be updating this. Bookmark this if you want the updates.  

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Update 1: My wife consulted this website as part of our prep:
Have Baby Will Travel