Parenting Catch-all

sometimesdee wrote:
mudbunny wrote:

One piece of advice, don't insist in complete and utter silence when you are trying to put the baby to sleep. Otherwise, when they get older, they might insist on it. My daughters can go to sleep while a game of CAH is going on in the next room.

+1

YES. Also, take the kiddo on outings and even plan long trips if you can. The more often they travel, the better they are at it. If you wait until you must travel with them, expect a loooong trip. They need to know the routine.

KaterinLHC wrote:

Holy cow, all this advice is crazy useful. Thank you so much, everyone. Days like these I wish I could hug an internet thread.

gamerparent wrote:

We got a soothing music CD to use at bedtime, and we incorporated that into our eventual bedtime routine (Story reading, lullaby, etc). We would play it in their room on repeat, all night. Even to this day (they are 9 and 11), we've continued to use it, and it helps them get to sleep when we're travelling, sleeping in hotels or whatever.

So for soothing, would you recommend we go for Motörhead or Maiden?

Try it and see? But pick something you can live with, as you'll be listening to that music in the middle of the night as you're dealing with a feeding, half passed out in the glider. Oh wait, that was me. YMMV.

OH! Another advice tidbit I just remembered. If you get a glider (which is great if you're planning on breastfeeding) do get one with a lockout lever. It makes the whole thing a lot safer when your baby becomes a toddler. We made the mistake of not getting that, and we were constantly blocking off the glider so baby wouldn't get her fingers caught in the bottom. Kind of a pain.

Oooh, advice: get into a routine early. Young kids especially are all about routine. Bedtime is at the same time every day, with the same twenty routine beforehand. Getting ready to go out the door involves the same steps every time. Nap time is inviolate, and woe be to those who disturb it. (That last one has the added benefit of helping your kids fall asleep wherever they are at nap time, so mommy can get a nice lunch in or some friend-time.)

Or a nap herself.

The theme music thing is surprisingly effective, for reasons I don't fully understand. Keep a consistent theme music for particular activities, and you can subliminally suggest those activities to children just by playing the music. I suspect it's a universal human response.

We've had particular success with sleep music. Once "sleepytime music" was nailed down as Mozart, all we had to do was place tired kids in a comfortable spot and play the thing. Out in 5 minutes. It's like magic.

Eleima wrote:

When he was 22 months old, he figured out how to climb out of his crib and it got more complicated. He started fighting bedtime. Now we're lucky if we wrangle him in his bed by 9pm. And his father usually has to lie down beside him or he won't sleep and will keep getting up again. He usually sleeps two to three hours during nap time.

Our twins moved to toddler beds around this time, and they share a room with their older sister. They would get her to open the door for them and run around the house laughing. It would go on for hours. Put them in their beds and they'd be out again seconds later.

We ultimately ended up having to wedge the door shut by closing it on a piece of clothing so they couldn't get out. Then they'd end up going to sleep from the boredom of being stuck in a dark room (plus their sister is a morning person and would yell at them to go to bed). So once things got quiet we'd go in and move them from the floor where they passed out to their beds. Over time they ended up moving to their beds before falling asleep and these days we're back to a normal, sane bedtime for all of them.

We've had a bedtime routine and schedule for all of our kids basically from birth. Dinner, bath, story, bedtime, at the same time every night forever. Having the routine helped I think, and it was invaluable when traveling since we could at least follow the same routine even if they weren't sleeping in their own beds. But once they hit that sleep training stage everything just went crazy for a while. I think it's unavoidable.

KaterinLHC wrote:

Here's a question from someone staring down the barrel of impending parenthood: What was the one baby item you either bought or received as a gift ahead of time that you found most useful once baby arrived?

Cloth burp rags, onesies, and muslin swaddle blankets. The blankets are large for a baby blanket and very thin, and we'd often drape one over their baby carrier when out to block the sun and such, in addition to just using them for swaddling. For the burp rags and onesies, you really can't have too many. Oh, and a Boppy. Those were great when the kids were itty bitty. Honestly, I don't know how I'd have bottle fed the twins without them, and they're great for naps or having the kids nearby when they're newborns. Put one of those muslin blankets over the top and push it down a bit to make a divot, plop the kid in, and they're good.

A lot of the rest really comes down to experimentation. No two kids like things the same. Try something, and if it doesn't work, box it back up and sell it at the next consignment sale. We have a huge one called Outrageous Outgrowns around here. Not sure what the equivalent is in the northeast.

Gravey wrote:
KaterinLHC wrote:

Here's a question from someone staring down the barrel of impending parenthood: What was the one baby item you either bought or received as a gift ahead of time that you found most useful once baby arrived?

So much good advice already—I'll add one thing:

Freezable dinners.

Casseroles, pasta sauce, soup, chilli, whatever. This will be one of the most important things you can have. For the first few weeks you and your partner are going to be zombies taking care of this infant every second of the day, and yet somehow you still have to take care of yourselves.

When you get into nesting mode: start cooking freezable dinners.

If anyone asks what they can get the baby: freezable dinners (for you).

If anyone—anyone—wants to see the newborn, the price of admission is: a freezable dinner.

QMFT!

Also, it helps you decide who will be in the future seeings. Silly people bring you stuff with chilli and spices (chilli flavoured breastmilk, not so good for bub). The 'silly' tag is negated of course if there is a 'his and hers' option supplied. We did this for friends of ours, aromatics in both, but made a second batch with some heat in it just for him.

Also, freeze them in disposable plastic containers. No-one wants to be doing dishes in zombie mode.

People who hate you bring you stuff that sounds nice, but then... Let's just say, no matter how tired you are, pumpkin lasagne is NEVER a great thing to eat (basically, replace all the good meatiness, with effing pumpkin).

Meat ragu is prime stuff for freezable ingredients. You can just blast it and set it over pasta, make "pizza" over loaf bread, mix it with salads, pour over grilled baked eggplants. Very versatile.

I bought a good solid saucepan, non-stick base, that would accomodate all of our frozen 'food slabs'.

Low heat, it would defrost and reheat over the space of an hour, giving us the freedom to eat 'when we could', without microwaves whirring, beeping, and pinging. Then, when we were ready, we'd drop by the stove and either eat it 'as is', over bread, on a pizza base... Larry has the rest

We did this thing once where we were too tired to want to wash dishes or anything. Happens often between years 1-3. Found some crisp lettuce in the fridge while the ragu was defrosting. I figured I'd just use the lettuce leaves as a wrap to hold the ragu, stuck some sliced cheese in it, and reused the freeze container to cart the wraps to the bedroom. Good eats!

I offer 1 piece of advice I wish I'd known at the time:

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted".

Basically any advice you get is subordinate to your own judgement. Any method anyone tries to sell you on is almost certainly snakeoil. Never worry about what you should do: just ask yourself "is this acceptable to our family?". Every child is different, every family is different.

Maq wrote:

I offer 1 piece of advice I wish I'd known at the time:

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted".

Basically any advice you get is subordinate to your own judgement. Any method anyone tries to sell you on is almost certainly snakeoil. Never worry about what you should do: just ask yourself "is this acceptable to our family?". Every child is different, every family is different.

This this this this!!!!!!

In the first days and weeks, as sleep deprivation set in, we made a rule that anything my wife or I said to each other in the middle of the night, we didn't mean.

Waking up at all hours makes you super cranky and irritable and we knew that it wasn't really us talking, but the sleep deprivation.

Wanted to give advice and pose a question.

First the advice: if one parent has to work and the other is home with the newborn, you can swap nightshifts to make sure the working parent gets enough sleep to function and give the SAHP some much needed rest. My wife would do the wake-ups Mon-Thurs while I would grab a bottle and take the late night watch on Fri-Sat (we would split the difference on Sun depending on if I had a hard Monday or not). It really saved me in a job where my boss was a single workaholic with zero compassion for parents with little kids.

Now the question - I was sitting with some buddies from my Southern hometown and we started talking about spanking. Pretty much most kids of my generation were spanked, and we all agreed that it was rather effective in getting our attention when we were really misbehaving. My friends still spank at home and have for the most part well behaved kids. I haven't spanked my son in years but lately he has his moments of being OOC and time outs don't always work. I'm seriously considering bringing back spanking as a nuclear option.

Highly against spanking as "nuclear option," both from personal experience in childhood, and in bringing up various kids since then. Spanking is useful in isolated contexts, but more trouble than it's worth outside of those contexts. If your screwdriver isn't working, don't head for the backhoe. You may be destroying more than you're building.

I have given my son a swat on the behind a few times and generally regret having done it. He responds much better to praise when he's doing things right. He really wants to please us, so we are relying on that rather than on negative methods.

I tried spanking and found it to cause more harm than good, even in extreme circumstances. There's the potential for the kid to end up afraid of you, and you're also reinforcing the idea that violence is sometimes the appropriate response to emotional situations.

I think even the nuclear option is kind of situational, but more that you deprive the kid of their favorite thing. Maybe that's TV time, maybe a toy, maybe even privacy (my wife's parents removed her bedroom door at one point). It's important with any punishment that you establish it beforehand though as something that might happen, so the kid is acting with knowledge of the consequences. Otherwise your response can just seem arbitrary and cruel. Sometimes this isn't possible when the punishment needs to fit the crime, as in the case of my wife's bedroom door or like when my bike was taken away for riding into the street without looking, but outside of that some rules and consequences are important to establish.

jdzappa wrote:

My friends still spank at home and have for the most part well behaved kids.

Correlation doesn't mean causation. How do your friends know that their kids are well-behaved because they spank, and not because of other things they may or may not be doing?

I mean, do what you feel is right, obvs, but I'm skeptical about just how effective spanking really is. I've trained plenty of dogs, and while of course they're not the same as babies, the communication problems are kinda/sorta similar -- and hitting is pretty much the least effective thing you can do to correct a pup's behavior. It just freaks them out. Thinking back to my own experiences being spanked, the same was pretty true of me too.

I'm not aware of a single reputable source within paediatrics or child psychology that claims spanking is anything but harmful.

I'm prone to bursts of temper when stressed and I know without a shadow of a doubt that any spanking my son received would be born of my own anger and frustration and have nothing to do with meaningful learning and discipline.

My parents wailed on me all the time. I sure as hell to this day don't remember what I did to deserve it.

Pain can teach, certainly, but should be confined to "don't touch that or it will hurt". What I don't want to be teaching my son is "if people don't do what you want and that makes you angry, beat them until they stop resisting".

I'm sure your daughters don't want me teaching my son that lesson once they're teenagers either.

It can be used to teach very going children to stay away from a pool without adult presence, stay away from dangerous ledges, and to follow certain commands instantly. Basically, anything that would be lethal. Obviously, you have to point out the lethal thing they shouldn't engage with.

It's very limited, IMO. Basically, you use it to teach them to obey without question when you tell them to run to you quickly when you have a desperate tone of fear in your voice.

Other than that... I dunno. I'm not seeing how it could work, and I haven't ever seen it be a good instruction tool.

Spanking... *sigh* The only memory I have if being spanked was for something my sister did (who knows what the truth is but that's how I remember it, definitely didn't feel like justice or a teaching moment).

I won't lie and say I've never spanked my son but I'm not proud of it. Like Maq said, it was more a result of my frustration, exhaustion and beig pushed. Being pregnant, with a full-time job, a very long commute and a very eager, extremely active toddler is hard. And he never ever listens. He's at this stage in which his own amusement and pleasure come before everything else, and he won't take "no" for an answer. And he won't talk, so he's very bad at expressin his anger or frustration any other way than with tantrums.

And guess what? Spanking didn't help, didn't change his behavior at all. He'll still gleefully shove both hands in the cat's food dish, upturn the bin full of plastics (recycling), he still climbs on the furniture.
The other day, hubby decided he'd restrict spanking to dangerous situations, pretty much like what LarryC described: when he runs into the street, when he jumps into the pool or ocean without his water wings. Hasn't really worked either, even the threat of danger doesn't seem to faze him.

I won't lie, I'm worried about him. Two and a half and he isn't potty trained, he barely speaks, he isn't particularly well behaved and has trouble sitting still for longer than it takes to eat half a yogurt. But spanking doesn't solve that.

At two and a half our daughter ate on the run. Literally. We have an island in the kitchen and she'd run laps around it, pausing only long enough to occasionally take a bite off the fork or spoon we held out for her. It does get easier.

Haha. The house was a royal mess for 4 years. It was basically a dump and we were the slobs living in it. I have a very vivid memory of my childhood, so I used it to inform my parenting decisions. Basically, teach one thing at a time, teach everything as explicitly as possible, and then just ignore everything else that isn't going to kill them.

The excellent book, "Gentle Measures in the Raising of Young Children" advises strict enforcement of compliance when it is necessary, but very liberal indulgence in everything else. I find this approach very effective with many children. Even my most recalcitrant godchildren respect me when I speak seriously.

Thanks all. Just to clarify I don't think my friends are actively hurting their children. They were just surprised I had only spanked my son once and hadn't done do since he was 3.

My son is for the most part a sweet boy but his pre school buddies have been teaching him a lot of BS lately. I'm glad though to get some other ideas and also to hear how effective or not spanking is from parents with older children.

As far as spanking being torture or teaching violence, I have mixed feelings on that. As a boxer, martial artist, and soldier, there was only one time that my parents spanked me that came even close to an average sparring session in pain/intensity. I had been trying to climb mom's China cabinet, broke some heirlooms and got belted for it. But in that situation I pretty much deserved what I got.

There's also something to be said for teaching your kids that while violence for the sake of violence is never acceptable, you can't say go antagonize a cop and expect a time out. I see far too young (teens/early twenties) kids who seem to have no fear of any consequence when dealing with cops or bosses and wonder how the hell their parents let them get that way.

(Im still leaning towards not spanking but just wanted to give counter examples why I'm not convinced it's necessarily pointless/cruel.)

I hear you, jdzappa. It'll probably be a minority opinion here, but I do really think that literally teaching children death, the fear of death and the consequences of killing is something that can't be taught early enough.

jdzappa wrote:

There's also something to be said for teaching your kids that while violence for the sake of violence is never acceptable, you can't say go antagonize a cop and expect a time out. I see far too young (teens/early twenties) kids who seem to have no fear of any consequence when dealing with cops or bosses and wonder how the hell their parents let them get that way.

Would spanking teach them that, though? If so, how? And is there another way to teach this kind of cause-and-effect via non-violent means?

Also it may be misplaced to entirely blame young people's disregard of consequence on too-lenient parents, since teenagers and early 20-somethings actually have a good scientific reason for their rudimentary grasp of cause-and-effect.

Oh thank you so much for that. This is why I'm liking this catch all better than the self indulgent thread, because lately, I feel like I'm a bit of a failure in the parenting department, or at least that's what I dread hearing when visiting the relatives later this month.

We also have bouts of "I'm just gonna run around the dinning table now - what do you mean it's dinner time?" Also, any attempt to put a bib on him for meals results in screaming fits that are so bad I'm afraid the neighbors would call CPS on us. At this juncture, I've just resigned myself to doing more laundry.

And then there are the moments when he grabs my head and plants a big sloppy kiss on my lips and it makes it all worth it.

Wouldn't want to scare off the parents to be.

"Bringing Up Bebe" has an interesting way of enforcing food behavior - starvation. Basically, food is only ever served at meal times. You can always opt not to eat as a child, but no one eats anything between. No exceptions. If you skipped your lunch and you're hungry? Suck it.

Both of my daughters spent at least 6 months grazing at supper time. We would sit them down to eat as much as they could, then they were allowed to get up an play. However, we would call them back for a bite every couple of minutes.

It just wasn't worth the fighting to keep them at the table.