9781785045998 by Smakprov Media AB

JANET LANSBURY

ELEVATING CHILD CARE a guide to respectful parenting

ELEVATING CHILD CARE

A Guide to Respectful Parenting

Janet Lansbury

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14. The Therapeutic Power of Play

15. Seven Myths That Discourage Independent Play

16. Nourishing Our Babies’ Healthy Eating Habits

17. Best Ways to Encourage Toddlers to Talk

18. Nurturing Creativity: How I Learned to Shut Up

19. “Sportscasting” Our Child’s Struggles

20. Toddlers and Sharing (The S Word)

21. The Trouble with Potty Training

22. No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame

23. Struggling with Boundaries (Three Common Reasons)

24. What Your Toddler Thinks of Discipline

25. Toddler Discipline That Works

26. Let Your Kids Be Mad at You

27. The Easily Forgotten Gift

28. This May Be Why You’re Yelling

29. Never Too Late for Respectful Parenting

30. The Parent I Might Have Been

INTRODUCTION

Finding a Passion for Parenting

Parenting is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. It can also be exhausting, frustrating, and utterly confounding.

The diﬃculties I faced as a new mother caught me oﬀ guard. I had looked forward to motherhood all my life and assumed that caring for a baby would happen naturally. Instead, I soon found that I had no clue.

My baby was adorable, yet never in my life had I felt so tired, lost, inept, and disappointed in myself. The mothering instincts I had assumed would provide me with clarity and guidance never materialized. My life had become a monotonous succession of feeding, burping, diapering, entertaining, and soothing tears (lots and lots of tears, most of them my daughter’s). Though I combed desperately through stacks of popular parenting books, I found nothing that resonated.

At my wit’s end, I fatefully stumbled upon RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers), the respectful approach to parenting founded by infant specialist Magda Gerber, which had been inspired by the groundbreaking theories

of Magda’s friend and mentor, pediatrician Emmi Pikler. The approach made immediate sense to me, and I embraced it like a drowning victim with a life preserver.

Before long I had experienced a radical transformation in both perception and experience: first, by discovering my baby’s astounding natural abilities to learn without being taught, to develop motor and cognitive skills, communicate, face age-appropriate struggles, initiate and direct independent play for extended periods, and much more; then by realizing the tremendous energy and stress I had been wasting by struggling to entertain and second-guess my child.

Over the years, Magda became my dear friend and mentor, and her philosophy of child care my passion. I became an RIE parenting teacher, a lecturer at Early Childhood conferences, an active blogger with millions of readers worldwide, a personal parenting consultant, and an author.

This book is a collection of thirty popular and widely read articles from my website. They focus on some of the most common aspects of infant and toddler child care and how respectful parenting can be applied.

You will find Magda’s name or a quote from her on nearly every page of this book. Everything I know and write about springs from her wisdom and my own experience—with the hundreds of infants and toddlers who have come through my classes, and with my own three children (now twenty-one, seventeen, and twelve).

RIE parenting can be summed up as an awareness of our baby’s perspective. We perceive and acknowledge our infants to be unique, separate people. We enhance our awareness by observing them—allowing them the bit of

space they need to show us who they are and what they need.

RIE parenting also makes us more self-aware. Through our sensitive observations we learn not to jump to conclusions; for example, that our babies are bored, tired, cold, hungry, or want to hold the toy they seem to notice across the room.

We learn not to assume that grumbling or fussing means babies need to be propped to sitting, picked up, or rocked or bounced to sleep. We recognize that, like us, babies sometimes have feelings that they want to share and will express them in their own way with our support.

We learn to diﬀerentiate our children’s signals from our own projections. We become more aware of the habits we create (like sitting babies up or jiggling them to sleep), habits that can then become our child’s needs. These are artificially created needs rather than organic ones.

In short, RIE parenting asks us to use our minds as well as our instincts, to look and listen closely and carefully before we respond.

Sensitive observation proves to us that our babies are competent individuals with thoughts, wishes, and needs of their own. Once we discover this truth there’s no turning back. Then, like Alison Gopnik, one of several psychologists on the forefront of an exciting new wave of infant brain research, we might wonder: “Why were we so wrong about babies for so long?”

Practiced observers like Magda Gerber were not wrong. More than sixty years ago, she and her mentor, pediatrician Emmi Pikler, knew what Gopnik’s research is finally

now proving: Infants are born with phenomenal learning abilities, unique gifts, deep thoughts, and emotions. Pikler and Gerber dismissed the notion of babies as “cute blobs” years ago—understood them as whole people deserving of our respect.

Magda’s RIE approach can perhaps be best described as putting respect for babies into action. Here’s how:

1. We communicate authentically. We speak in our authentic voices (though a bit more slowly with babies and toddlers), use real words, and talk about real things, especially things that directly pertain to our babies and things that are happening now.

2. We encourage babies to build communication skills by including them, asking questions, aﬀording them plenty of time to respond, always acknowledging their communication.

3. We invite babies to actively participate in caregiving activities like diapering, bathing, meals, and bedtime rituals, and we aim to give them our full attention during these activities. This inclusion and focused attention nurtures our parent-child relationship, providing children the sense of security they need to be able to separate and engage in selfdirected play.

4. We encourage uninterrupted, self-directed play by oﬀering even the youngest infants free play op-

portunities, sensitively observing so as not to needlessly interrupt, and trusting that our child’s play choices are enough. Perfect, actually.

5. We allow children to develop motor and cognitive skills according to their innate timetables by offering them free play and movement opportunities in an enriching environment, rather than unnecessarily teaching, restricting, or otherwise interfering with these organic processes. Our role in development is primarily trust.

6. We value intrinsic motivation and innerdirectedness, so we acknowledge eﬀort and take care not to over-praise. We trust our children to know themselves better than we know them, so we allow children to lead when they play and choose enrichment activities, rather than projecting our own interests.

7. We encourage children to express their emotions by openly accepting and acknowledging them.

8. We recognize that children need confi dent, empathetic leaders and clear boundaries—but not shaming, distractions, punishments, or time out.

9. We allow our children to problem solve, experience, and learn from age-appropriate conﬂicts with our support.

10. We understand the power of our modeling and recognize that our children are learning from us through our every word and action about love, relationships, empathy, generosity, gratitude, patience, tolerance, kindness, honesty, and respect. Most profoundly, they’re learning about themselves, their abilities, their worth, and their place in our hearts and in the world.

Please know, the goal of this approach is to inspire, not to overwhelm. None of this is about rules or dogma. It’s practicing our awareness, trying out a new lens.

The articles I’ve chosen for this book describe my experiences learning and implementing this approach as both a parent and a teacher and oﬀer lots of practical examples. Together, I hope these give you a well-rounded introduction to the perspective that has profoundly enhanced my experience as a parent and reordered my life. (If these ideas entice you to learn more, there is a bounty of resources for you to explore listed at the end of this book.)

What I am most grateful to Magda Gerber for is the deeply trusting, mutually respectful relationships I have with my own children. Respect and trust have a boomerang eﬀect—they come right back at you. As Magda promised me would happen, I’ve raised kids I not only love, but “in whose company I love being.”

Magda died in 2007, well into her nineties. I think about her every day, and she continues to inspire my life and work. I miss her.

ELEVATING CHILD CARE

1. WHAT YOUR BABY CAN’T TELL YOU (IN

THE BEGINNING)

Years ago, I had a major awakening. It hit me that my three-month-old baby was an actual person. I had brought her to an RIE parenting class and was asked to place her on her back on a blanket next to me. She lay there for two hours—peaceful, alert, engaged, and self-contained. She didn’t make a sound, but I felt the power of her presence, a self-assuredness that at age twenty-one still knocks my socks oﬀ.

What I observed in that parenting class for the first time was not just my baby—it was a whole person with her own mind, a mind I wanted to become intimately acquainted with, and human needs no diﬀerent than yours or mine. Maybe other parents figure this out right away, but I didn’t. Without that moment of clarity, I’m not sure when I would have seen beyond the needy infant to the person— possibly not until she began walking, saying recognizable words, or at least communicating to me by pointing or gesturing. Intellectually, I knew she was all there, but not to

the extent that I would think to put myself in her shoes (or booties) and treat her in the way I would wish to be treated.

One of the most profound lessons I’ve learned since becoming a mom—reinforced by observing hundreds of other parents and babies interact—is that there is a selffulfilling prophecy to the way we view our babies: If we believe them to be helpless, dependent, needy (albeit lovely) creatures, their behavior will confirm those beliefs.

Alternatively, if we see our infants as capable, intelligent, responsive people ready to participate in life, initiate activity, receive and return our eﬀorts to communicate with them, then we find that they are all of those things.

I am not suggesting that we treat infants as small adults. They need a baby’s life, but they deserve the same level of human respect that we give to adults. Here are some examples of baby care that reﬂect the way I like to be treated: tell me what’s going on. If I had a stroke that made me as dependent as an infant—meaning that I couldn’t take care of my own needs or express myself— I would hope to be warned before I was being touched, lifted, fed, sponged, rinsed, dressed, given a shot, etc. I would want to know everything that was going on in my immediate world, especially if it directly related to my body. I would want to be invited to participate to the extent I was capable (e.g., given an opportunity to hold the spoon myself).

At first it feels awkward talking to someone who does not talk back, but we quickly get used to it. Babies begin to understand our respectful intention to include them much