I know I have written already about growth mindset, but I feel like I am constantly learning about it from different angles. In my own life, for sure, but also through my children's eyes. One thing that I am a firm believer in is that it is very hard to teach kids things like growth mindset and resilience in a vacuum. In order for kids to learn how to foster growth mindset and how to maintain resilience, they must actually feel challenged. The greater that challenge they have to overcome, the more of an opportunity we have to help them shatter existing negative self-beliefs.
When we first started feeding therapy, and I noticed my son having some traction right away with the exercises, I idly wondered whether learning to eat new foods would help him in building a growth mindset in other areas of his life as well. Then, we started OT and (more recently) working with him actively on his fear of stairs, and in the past week, I noticed some amazing changes about him. The first is that he has been trying lots of new foods -- almost every couple of days, he is trying a food that is slightly new to him, and usually on his own accord. Even though there are plenty of things he still won't eat, he has started eating lots of foods with mixed texture and 3 or 4 ingredients mixed together, which he used to only eat in de-constructed form. And, amazingly, his risk-taking does not stop there... A few days ago, my son suggested that I could ride my bike, carrying his little sister, and he could ride his bike behind me, and we could head to a little green area 1.25 miles from our house. To get there, he would have to ride in the (mostly residential) streets, because I couldn't ride carrying his sister in the street and keep an eye on him on the sidewalk. I was a little nervous, because I didn't know how it would go, with me carrying a toddler and keeping an eye on a new rider behind me. But, since it was his idea completely, I didn't want to discourage his enthusiasm. We did it! It was an adventure! The roundtrip distance was 2.5 miles, and that was the longest distance he had ever ridden in the streets. It was a nice adventure for all of us, and I was impressed that my son was the one who suggested the trip, and that from beginning to end, he did not complain or express any negativity. My son has always been extremely resistant to drawing. This has always been a concern for me, because drawing is not only an emotional outlet, it is a way to practice being creative, to practice risk-taking, and to communicate our understanding in non-verbal ways. To encourage him to draw, we even had some family crafts nights, so that he could have some positive associations with the act of drawing. But, maybe seeing us drawing actually discouraged him from drawing on his own? I don't know, but that is one theory I have read in a RIE parenting group, offered by Janet Lansbury herself. Anyhow, this week I have been super excited to see L draw a variety of objects via chalk, on our sidewalk! He drew a steam train, an octopus, a spider, a backpack, a bumble bee, a rainbow, a bike trail, balloons, and some stop signs. I try very deliberately not to give him feedback on his drawings, because I don't want him to feel self-conscious at all in his budding hobby. I am just so thrilled that he has immersed himself, on two consecutive days, on drawing chalk on the sidewalk and really seeming to be "in the zone." Today, I took L to his first gymnastics class ever. Since he has physical anxieties on the playground and still some anxiety about descending stairs (although they are getting so much better), my husband and I felt that we wanted to make a conscious effort in working with him on gross-motor development. I took him last week to an indoor playground at our local gymnastics academy, and he loved it. (He had been there previous to COVID, but this was the first time going in well over a year.) When I looked into wait-listing him for gymnastics classes, I saw that one weekday introductory class at a different gym actually had an opening. I immediately jumped on it, with plans to take him there through the end of the summer, if he is interested. (The program charges month-by-month.) Before the class today, my son was extremely nervous, and told me that he definitely would not participate in the gymnastics class. His tone was such that he was looking for a fight. Instead of giving him a fight, however, I said, "You are feeling very anxious about the class. I understand how you feel, and that is totally normal, because it's new and new is always scary. Here, I will take you there and you can just check it out. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to; you can just sit there. I just want you to check it out." I also reminded him that recently, he was super nervous to go indoor-climbing with his dad, but ended up enjoying it (with lots of gummy bear bribes). A little while after, shortly before we left for the class, L told me -- to my huge surprise and trying-to-act-very-casual delight -- that he had decided he would participate in the gymnastics class today. After we got to gymnastics, I could tell that it was very challenging for my son. He is such a bright kid in many ways, but he is usually awkward in navigating physical tasks. He was visibly (and audibly) super nervous about all of the tasks, but he participated 100% and tried so hard to do every drill. He even climbed up a steep (almost vertical) A-frame that was almost 5 feet tall and climbed down on the other side, all by himself without the coach nearby, which I would never, EVER have imagined him to do today. This kid is a rock star!!! My husband was not there to see his risk-taking, but when I relayed what had happened at the gym, we agreed that it is a glimpse into the kind of learner that our son is -- he doubts himself almost always, but he will still give things his best shot, and in that process, he can sometimes shatter his self-doubt and surprise himself. It made me wonder if all of the work that we have been doing with him across eating and OT are starting to pay off in other areas of his life, like I had hoped? I don't really understand child development and psychology, but if those therapies are the reason for his change and willingness to take on new risks and experiences, I am just so hugely grateful.
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This week marks the end of early intervention services for my daughter! I feel so excited. By all measures, she is thriving developmentally. (She still has anxiety around strangers, but I think that is mostly because of COVID and the fact that she has been at home with me instead of in daycare.) It has made such a tremendous difference in her skills and confidence.
When I told my son that his sister is ending her therapy services, he said to me that he plans on continuing feeding therapy and OT forever. That made me laugh, because I thought that he hates both of those services, based on his poor behavior during the sessions. Whether or not it's just him saying it in the moment, that's a good sign that he finds some tangible value in those therapies, right? (And he has already come a noticeable way in growing as an eater!!) I have been reading Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating to help my big kid with his eating issues. I love this book. It is so clearly respectful to the child and emphasizes all the reasons why it is important to lessen pressure around meal times and to trust that the child will explore new foods on their own timeline. I also live in the real world and understand that maintaining that trust is hard when you are facing a challenging eater, but the book helps me to at least wrap my mind around this philosophy so that I can really give it a shot. The thing I like the most about the book is that it makes me feel like the authors really see my child. I know that they are writing about a general category of kids, but the descriptions they use feel so vivid to our family's experience, that they might as well be sitting in my dining room.
Feeding therapy is going surprisingly well, actually. We are only five weeks in, and miraculously, every week my son has gained and kept up with one new food item! (Each week, we try about three new foods during the 45-minute feeding therapy session, so he is still rejecting plenty of foods. I feel that the feeding therapy was a very good decision on our part, and it has already moved us in the right direction, but it is clearly still necessary for him to continue the professional help.) I don't take this progress for granted, because I have read threads on different forums about picky eaters either trying a new food during the therapy session and then not keeping the food up at home, or picky eaters not trying any food at all per suggestions. One thing that has been very powerful for us in the therapy process is introducing new foods that are related to existing favorites. For example, last week we tried to introduce guacamole, immediately after my son ate some avocados. (If you are wondering why guacamole would be challenging for a child who eats avocados, this is what I am saying -- you and I are living two separate parenting realities. This is why I feel so supported and seen by this book, as a parent struggling with this issue.) My son ended up eating the entire serving of guacamole that day, even though initially he would not even touch it with his fingers. In the book I am reading, they describe this as a "bridging" strategy for connecting what the child already eats with what you would like them to eat. (They also offer other bridging strategies.) I used to think that you can just keep putting any food item in front of a child, and offer it enough times until they eventually try it. Now, I understand that for my son, at least, that strategy is very unlikely to work. He needs to be offered tiny little steps from where he is, to go all the way to the new food. It takes a lot of patience and forethought, but it seems to make a difference. For example, my son has been successfully eating small pieces of new (unfamiliar) cheeses tucked inside a tiny Cheezit cracker sandwich (2 crackers holding a piece of cheese in the middle), as a treat at the end of every lunch meal that I serve at home. He likes these fun / funny Cheezit "sandwiches," because he likes the cracker and he thinks that this way, he can't really taste the cheese. But, after eating the Cheezit sandwich for a few days in a row, I was able to convince him to open up the sandwich to eat the cheese on top of a single cracker (like an "open-faced sandwich"). This way, over time, I can change it up to put the cheese on more bland crackers, and -- tada! -- he will just be eating regular crackers with those new cheese varieties at that point. These are many tiny bridges, intentionally connecting where he started and where he needs to go as an eater. It sounds a little exhausting, perhaps, to think ahead this way, but trust me, it is way less exhausting than trying to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of a child who skips meals because they feel overwhelmed by everything on the table. I also feel incredibly grateful that we decided to get feeding help when we did, because I don't have actual caloric concerns at the moment for L, and I don't believe we have permanently damaged his relationship to food. I think ideally, we would have found feeding help even sooner, before L fell into the rhythm of being served a separate meal from us. But, when I read through the book Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, I was affirmed that we did not do too many things to cause further food-related anxiety. (We only bargained with him minimally, and we never tried things like sticker charts or bribing with desserts.) We did start to go down the route of inviting conflict during meal times about two months ago, but stopped things from spiraling downhill when we sought help from a feeding specialist, and for that, I am so grateful. Related to this, I have been thinking about the parallels between family dinners and watching my child on the playground. I accompanied my other child (my toddler) to the playground today, and frankly felt a little disappointed, because most of the time at the playground, she was carrying two tiny pieces of fruit from a tree back and forth between two places on the playground. She only used the playground equipment minimally, which made me feel a bit like, "Okay, we could have just gone outside of our house, if she was going to just do this, instead of walking 20 minutes to get here?" Although I gently suggested a couple of times for her to play on the slide or the swing, I did not insist on her playing with anything. I did not tell her, "This is a waste of my time," or confront her with, "Why are you not interested in the equipment today? What's wrong with them?" If I did do that, I think it would have been very inappropriate. But, why do we feel like we should do that at meal time? In fact, we feel like it's our job to get our kids to eat "enough", and that if our kids decide to ignore meats for 6 months, that there is a real problem to fix, maybe through coercion. Maybe we feel like they need to eat because we spent so much time cooking the food, and what's wrong with this food anyway? --Today, on the playground, I was reflecting about how kids will be kids; thinking about the connection between trusting them to have autonomy on the playground and trusting them to make their decisions at the dinner table, helps me to refocus on why Division of Responsibility makes sense. I always think about how we, as people, have a hard time learning abstract things in a vacuum. It's hard to really teach a child about growth mindset, when they are not actively working through a challenge. It's hard to teach a child about compassion for others, if they rarely encounter people who are differently-abled or who are in a different socioeconomic situation. Likewise, I try to look at situations like the one we are in -- where we are trying to work with our son through something that is really tough for him -- and consider what insights we are gaining as parents, as we work through this challenge together. (I am pondering this from a parenting perspective, because I think it's a bit more obvious what my child is gaining from this? He is slowly gaining more confidence with food, which must indirectly impact other aspects of his confidence and self-perception.) I am still thinking about this, but I know that what we gain as parents has something to do with deeper trust, joy, empathy, and patience. Viewing through that lens, we are maybe exactly where we need to be in our journey to grow as parents. I have had a brain dump that I wanted to write about, but have not had the time or energy to do so. So, here we go. It's mostly for myself in hindsight, but maybe it will be interesting to another parent.
My son, who is 4.5, is just starting weekly feeding therapy with an SLP. That's a statement that probably requires a lot of unpacking, but basically he is so averse to trying new foods, that we decided to get him help. When he was about 1.5, he started skipping lunches at school on a daily basis. My husband recommended that we offer him frozen-food entrees every night, after we offered him something else to eat off of our plates. Sounds reasonable, right? If you have a kid who is a picky eater, you might guess what happened next. Soon, the frozen foods were all that he would eat. Fast-forward three years, he was becoming more and more choosy. He started to refuse things like pizza, or Mac n Cheese that is not a particular brand. I decided one night to say to him, that if he refused to eat any of the pizza his dad had made especially to his taste, then from that night on, we would stop offering him any frozen foods. He would just have to eat our food everyday. My child and I are similarly stubborn. That night, he refused to eat. For the next five nights, he skipped five dinners in a row because he did not want to eat the same food as us. On the 6th day, I weighed him to get a baseline weight, and I called the pediatrician, worried that all of this food protesting was going to cause permanent issues. The nurse at our pediatrician's office advised us to stay on course. She said, "Don't offer him a separate dinner. Keep dinner conversations light, and don't talk about who is eating how many bites. Call us back if he starts to lose weight, or if things have not gotten better in a month, but it should sort itself out." Over the next month, things did get better... until they got worse again. He started to eat parts of our dinner, until he started to skip entire dinners again, several times in one week. We tried to keep dinner conversations light, but "how many bites" and "I definitely won't eat" were the only things our son wanted to talk about. Desperate, I looked up feeding therapy help and got connected with an SLP who does virtual sessions within our insurance network. Well, we are only one week in. I really have no idea how well it will or will not work, but I will say that it has already alleviated my own anxiety to have someone who is qualified guiding us through this tricky transition. From the time when we stopped offering frozen food until now, our son has made some progress (small in my eyes, but probably huge to him). He will now eat parts of most of the dishes that I cook, even though it's just a few bites some nights (more on other nights). The SLP diagnosed him with an oral-motor delay as well, that may be impacting his eating of complex foods. She is optimistic about being able to help him make improvements in eating; I am optimistic as well, because after the first session with her, his attitude towards new foods has already shown a small positive improvement. (I could be wrong about this, but it's my maternal intuition, anyway.) But, this post isn't about the feeding therapy. It's actually about something that I have been thinking about, related to being a parent. A friend said to me at some point, that her child (like my big kid) struggles with taking risks and growth mindset, and she struggles between letting him be himself and trying to help him improve. I have been thinking a lot about this in the context of L starting therapy. It is incredibly emotional for a child to start and receive therapy at this age, because at a deep level, we all want to be loved for who we are, and requiring on-going therapy seems to suggest that who we are needs to change / is not enough as it is. (My younger child has also received a variety of therapy services, but because she is so young, she does not experience those complex emotions.) It helped me to reflect upon the fact that they are really not mutually exclusive -- I can both love someone (including my child) unconditionally and want to actively help them grow as a person. My husband and I have had a similar discussion before. One time, he gave me some feedback about the way I communicated, in the middle of an argument. To which I said, "Well, that's just how I am! You were okay with that about me before, and now you are not okay with it?" He replied, "That's not who you are. That's what you have always done, it's not constructive, and it does not have to be what you do, moving forward." His statement was hard to take at the time, but it's true -- what we have always done/been, does not have to define who we are/what we do moving forward. I can both love my child unconditionally, and help him to see that he is risk-averse and that he needs to practice taking small risks everyday. I can love my child unconditionally, and help him to get the therapy that he needs. Just writing this down for my later self. PS. I was quickly talking about this with my husband in the car yesterday. My husband goes a step further and says, "I think because we are their parents and we love them unconditionally, our role is to help them to become better versions of themselves." I also agree with that. To help someone make a fundamental shift in their natural inclination (like helping my big kid become more of a risk-taker) is a really tough task; you have to leverage a ton of relationship with that person, and who better to do it than a parent? |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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