Parenting with your first child is 90% guesswork and 10% ‘etc’.. advice, experience, reading, experts, whatever.. Maybe I’m wrong but that is how it feels. Guessing. All the time.. Looking at Chris.. shrugging my shoulders as if to say “Well, what do we do now?” She runs the show.. that’s the way it goes. Now, Cate.. will have the benefit of experience. Eh.. okay, more like 60% experience, 20% guesswork and 20% “having learned from our mistakes with Grace”.. For example. Cate already loves more foods than Grace. She eats things with gusto that Grace won’t even touch. Because we learned that we were way too timid with trying new things with Grace when first feeding her solids. Too nervous of her choking to give her soft table foods when she was a year old. With Cate we’re too short on time to make three meals. So we make one meal, modified for Grace..chopped for Cate. Cate eats it. Grace doesn’t.
Anyway, in the past 2 months, since Grace turned 3.. we’ve come to terms with the fact that we don’t know anything about toddlers. And we’re now willing to try harder to get through this time with her with our sanities intact even if our dignities aren’t. After all, even when I “try” to dress up.. I still just look like an aging college student. I struggled with fashion even before having kids. Now, forget about it. Half the time I end up walking around with strange stains on my clothes.
Anyway, in the past month I’ve glanced through 3 books on parenting. A Supernanny book (love her!), Childwise, and a self-esteem book. I’ve taken some of the things that I felt best reflected us, and our children and our needs. We knew we needed to make some changes.. so slowly over the past couple weeks.. we have. We discussed our feelings with each other and tried to pinpoint the largest issues we had where she was concerned. We both agreed on one thing. The problem? Not her. Us. 100%. We understood that to put any blame on her was ridiculous. She’s 3. She’s not the enemy no matter how much it may seem so during the many stand-offs we have with her. And granted, sometimes it feels like an old west street.. us at one end, her at another, hands on her waist.. staring each other down.
But we knew at the end of each tough day that we were the ones we should have been screaming at. We need to do a parenting about-face.
So.. here are some of the changes we’ve made.
We’ve stopped spending so much time on our computers, reading, etc while the girls are awake. If we have household chores we include her as much as we can. I’ve been so surprised how much she enjoys helping with the dishes, with cooking, setting the table for dinner, cleaning around the house. We still have trouble getting her to clean up her toys.. but the girl loves to help daddy set the table for dinner. So instead of spending so much time on our computers and all that.. we play with Grace and Cate. We put together puzzles and make up games.. Yesterday we played with stickers. It was a team effort. I picked the stickers out of the book and handed them to Cate. Cate handed them to Grace. Grace stuck them on the paper. It’s amazing how much less of a fight we have with her on a daily basis when she’s not having to fight for our attention.
Positive reinforcement. We’ve used this in the past some. Never enough to make a difference. And therefore we came to the conclusion that it just didn’t work. So we decided to really shower her with positive reinforcement. Not that she gets away with everything. Not that we sit there smiling as she does a tasmanian-devil run around the room or praise her for throwing things or hitting Cate or anything like that. But when she does things that are great like helping out with things and being nice to Cate and all that.. we really go all out to let her know. When we’ve had a good day we really get into it. We also do more random things like hugs, smiles, winks, hair tousles, pats on the back. “No reason” type things. I get the biggest smiles when I just catch her eye in the rearview mirror in the car and wink at her or reach behind me to give her a small tickle.
We switched up our time-out methods. No more 1-2-3 you’re out. Now it’s 1 warning, then on the next offense you’re out. We’re still working on this because I find myself falling back on counting. We also had to change location. Before she wouldn’t sit in one place for timeouts. SO we would put her in her room. Then she started tearing up her room, so she had to start sitting in the “naughty chair”. But she still has issues with staying seated. “Well, just re-start the timer” you say.. okay sure.. she thinks thats a pretty fun game. So we’re working on that. Anyway, we realized with the 1-2-3 thing that she was always stretching it out as long as she could.. so we knew it was time to change.
We’ve started using one of those Responsibility charts. Eh. You know people have such mixed feelings on those. But we felt Grace really needed some incentive for things like learning to dress herself and cleaning up her toys. Something to really help her feel proud of herself.. in addition to us telling her we’re proud. So yesterday we set it up. It’s pretty basic since it’s one that I bought. I wanted to make one myself.. but in the past two weeks I’ve had no time so when I saw one at Target yesterday I grabbed it up. Anyway, the general idea is that she can earn “magnets” for things. The set comes with so many areas that she can earn magnets in. Things like cleaning up toys, sharing, brushing teeth, etc.. even some blank magnets that you can fill in your own ideas. Our own system is that she has to earn 8 magnets (in any area, though at our discretion we can alter that. For example, today I let her earn 1 magnet for saying she was sorry for something.. even though she had to say she was sorry several times.. but I let her earn 2 magnets for cleaning up her toys before nap time and before bedtime).
Okay, so once she’s earned 8 magnets, she gets to pick a prize out of her “treasure box”. This is things likes small toys from the dollar store.. alone time with mommy and daddy, an extra book read at bedtime, etc.
She also gets a larger magnet lining the top of the chart. Once she has 7 of those magnets, she’ll get to choose an envelope from another box. This will include prizes like “choose a restaurant for dinner”, “movie with mommy or daddy”, “trip to aquarium”, “trip to beach”, “picnic in the park”, “date with mommy”, “alone time with mommy and daddy”, “pick a toy” (dollar limit imposed), etc.
She’s pretty excited about this, although at this point she only knows that she gets to pick from the treasure box after 8 magnets. So she’s been very enthusiastic about cleaning up and helping around the house. I’m hoping to make some headway with her sharing toys with Cate and pushing Cate when she gets too close to her toys. But, baby steps.
In any case, I have to say (and I know Chris would agree) that while we’re still facing some frustrations.. we’ve had a couple of the best weeks we’ve had in a long time with the girls. And our main goal here is to help her develop a strong self-esteem. At least, we want to do whatever we can to help her along on that.
She earned her first ‘prize’ today. She chose a Cinderella figurine and I gave her a ribbon to celebrate. By the way, I don’t know if i mentioned it but the poor girl has a little tooth blemish. She was kicked on a slide about a month ago.. At first it appeared to be just a fat lip, but as the week went on, her tooth started looking grey. So we took her to the dentist and the poor thing is going to have this until it falls out when her adult teeth are ready to come in. It’s one of her upper-front ones. I’m extremely upset, because of course… we’re already facing issues with thumb-sucking and these fluoride spots.. But Chris says not to worry so much.. he says he had a grey tooth growing up too.. ugh. Also, please ignore the fact that she needs a haircut. She refuses to let us cut her hair. So, thats fine. It’s her hair.
