A Facebook memory popped up recently that reminded me of a quote from a parenting book that I read a while ago. This quote seems more relevant now than ever. The source of this quote is How Toddlers Thrive:
"Remember, it's not your job to make your child happy. ... The truth is this: No parent can make his or her child happy all the time. Children know how to be happy. What they are not so good at is handling the hard times. This is where you, the parent, come in. Want happiness? Our job is to set them up to handle life more and more on their own, and to gradually let go. At the center of this is helping them deal with life's hurdles. ...By supporting them to handle negatives in life--negative feelings, disappointments, rejections, errors, and setbacks. That is the biggest gift you can give your child...From there emerges happiness. ...The catch is that a child can only have this competence if we let them face the tough times...and help them through." I wanted to reflect a little bit about this, because recently I have noticed that my son is just on an emotional rollercoaster. Around his birthday, he really wanted a birthday party. My husband and I didn't think it was going to turn out well, since he had been in and out of school all year (due to the pandemic) and has not had steady in-school friendships as a result. But I can't protect him from social disappointment forever, right? He really wanted a birthday party because we had done a just-us-at-home celebration for him in 2020, and he was willing to take the risk that maybe only a few kids would come to his party. We ended up hosting an outdoors party at a neighborhood playground, and it went fine, even though I was nail-biting for two weeks after sending out the invites, because we were only receiving No's in return. It was not a birthday rager, but my son was happy to have a few of his classmates and a few family friends come to celebrate with him. He even wrote out party invitations to his stuffed animals and told me that "the stuffies RSVP'ed and said they would definitely be there!" And, in the end, he told me that he had a great day because his friends came and made him feel very special. Then, my son had a real heartbreak when his beloved grandparents left to return home after a month of staying with us this summer. I don't know when the next time will be that we could see them, because we don't feel comfortable flying until the kids are both vaccinated. But, I held him multiple days and let him cry in my arms, until he started to feel better. We read a book about a grandma (The Most Beautiful Thing by Kao Kalia Yang), and talked about how even when grandparents are not physically next to us, the memories that we made with them stay with us and become a part of us. I talked to him about how, even though my mom has passed, she is still with me because I have so many wonderful memories of her, and that while his grandparents are far away, we can look at photos and be reminded of those special times he spent with them. I helped him print out some photos, let him take charge of updating our family album, and I hung up in his room a photo of him holding hands with his grandparents, so that he can look at it often and be reminded daily of how much they love him. The day that we switched my son to a new gymnastics class (shortly after he turned 5, he aged out of his previous gymnastics class), I was nervous about that transition. When we took him to the new gym location, we learned that because of their lack of windows and COVID precautions, they do not allow parents to hang out and watch the kids. So, it was a drop-off-and-see-ya-later situation. Given that it was a new class, a new coach, and a new location, I did not know how it would go, but my son was totally fine in the end. Currently, my son is undergoing a lot of emotions as his friends are transitioning out of the pre-K class at different points in the summer. It is mixed, I am sure, with anxiety about Kindergarten. I have not talked to any parent who has an incoming Kindergartener, who is not nervous about the transition, but I think about how the Kindergarten teachers are pros at managing this transition, and how much personal confidence my son is going to gain after managing this transition (which will take a little while, I am sure). As people learning to find themselves, our kids need this type of challenge to help them grow beyond what is already comfortable. I have to remind myself that it is good -- and necessary -- for them to be challenged this way. Without smaller challenges, they cannot gain the confidence that they need to tackle bigger challenges. On a related note, I recently read the book Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne, a long-term counselor and Waldorf educator. I love his book and his podcast by the same name, both of which advocate for simplifying our kids' lives (fewer activities, fewer toys, less screen time, less adult news, narrower set of choices, stricter daily rhythm, and fewer books even!) in order to give their brains a chance to self-heal and to grow at an appropriate pace that maximizes their mental health. When our kids feel challenged, his podcast and book offer many practical ways to ease the tension/balance between what is asked of the kids and what they are able to give. I highly recommend it. As a parent, what do you worry about? What part of those worries can you reframe as necessary and beneficial for your child's growth?
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This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another. 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. The past few weeks of parenthood have been a bit of a rollercoaster. During 2020, my son developed a sudden fear of the stairs in our house. He had trouble descending the stairs without help. Since this coincided with our keeping him at home during COVID, we chalked it up to mental health impacts from being kept at home. (Our friends' kids had potty regressions around the same time, so we felt like all kids were understandably struggling with COVID disruptions.) I worked with him to climb and descend the stairs from the bottom, first just 3 steps and back down. Then, 5 steps and back down. Then, 7 steps... etc. until he was able to mostly get down the steps by himself. (Our stairs have 14 consecutive steps, straight up and down without spiraling.) He was still nervous and would hold the handrail with both hands, gingerly taking each step. We figured it was a fear that might ease up over time, as he would need to take the stairs everyday to get out of our townhouse. When we finally sent him back to school (around October 2020), we felt sure that his remaining fear of the stairs would naturally dissipate, but it did not. It lingered, until recently I noticed that he was so scared of letting go of his second hand on the railing, that he could not carry anything down the stairs with him. If he wanted to carry something small, he would throw it down a few steps, onto the middle of the stair well, and then descend half of the stairs with both hands on the rails, and then pick up the object.
When I mentioned to my son that we would begin to practice carrying an object down the stairs, he felt panicked and actually regressed even more. One morning soon after, he was unable to walk down the stairs at all. We had to carry him down the entire set of stairs a couple of times that morning, just to get him to school. (I thought about keeping him home that day from school, but we also did not want to disrupt his routine so much that we created an even bigger problem in the long run.) That day, I called his pediatrician and left a detailed message, but did not actually get in touch with them for a few days (they have a pretty frustrating system of leaving phone messages, no direct line that can go through to a nurse). That day, without having heard from his doctor, I decided to try something new on my own. After doing the same practice of walking up and down the stairs in small chunks, I tried asking him to stand with me on the top step of the stairs (eg. one step down from the very top) and to sing a nursery rhyme with me. I wanted him to sing, because it gives him a somewhat lengthy exposure to being in that scary part of the stairs, while breathing in and out to help him stay somewhat relaxed. (And he loves singing, so it was a good way to distract him.) That first day, we sang three or four times during different parts of the day -- when he came home from school, before nap, after nap, and before bedtime. By the end of the day, he began to be able to sing on the top step while patting his second hand quickly on the hand rail (still holding on to the rail tightly with his first hand). Over the course of the next few days, we would repeat this exercise multiple times a day, and he began to be able to take his second hand farther and farther away, high-fiving me and waving at me and even laughing at my fabricated fart sounds interleaved into the nursery rhymes. We kept doing this exercise, and I could see that my son was feeling more and more relaxed going down the stairs each day. Today, we started practicing singing on that top step while he patted both hands on the hand rail, and he was able to let go of the hand rail completely and give me a double-handed high-five while singing. After singing, he casually walked down the stairs, like himself in pre-COVID times. Tonight, he remembered at bed time that he had forgotten his toy airplane upstairs. I casually asked him to go fetch it himself, and he was at first resistant. But, with a little nudging, he went upstairs to get the airplane and came down the stairs with no issue. I stayed inside his bedroom to wait for him, to show him that I felt confident he could do it without me there to even watch him and cheer him on. Once he came downstairs, I gave him a high-five and felt so proud of this kid for pushing through so many times. What I learned from this experience and from the experience of working with my son on feeding therapy (and from working with my daughter on early-intervention physical therapy to address torticollis) is that our kids' brains are very plastic. They can learn, and more importantly, they can un-learn ways of thinking and being. What feels to them like a huge wall of impossibility can be taken apart, piece by piece. It takes trust and joy to make that happen, and when it does, it is the greatest lesson on growth mindset. It has not been an easy year, but I feel so proud of my son for having made strides in the things that are the hardest for him. (Next steps: we signed him up for a very basic gymnastics class, and my husband plans to take him rock-climbing semi-regularly to help him to work on gross motor skills. They went together for the first time yesterday, and although my husband had to bribe our son with a bunch of gummy bears, my son was able to push through his fears and do some successful climbs at the end -- and enjoyed it! We are also working with his OT on simple daily exercises that we could do at home to improve his balance and comfort on un-even surfaces.) I love this kid to the moon and back, and we feel SO proud of him for trusting us deeply and constantly working with us to push through his self-doubts. I read somewhere that we cannot guarantee our kids a happy life. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that they will have many obstacles that we cannot foresee, and it is our job to teach them perseverance, so that they will be prepared when the time comes. Parenthood is such an amazing journey, and I feel so privileged to already see how my kids are both able to persevere on their own terms. I want to confess that I am not a religious person. I am not religious, and I would not really say that I am even spiritual. I believe in a general moral compass and doing our best everyday. I know that is dangerous, in a way, because we are human and our view of what is right or wrong is limited to our subjective experiences. But, I also have trouble reconciling that scripts handed down from ancient times could do better to dictate what is right or wrong, than what we are able to collectively perceive and understand right now as humans. So, there it goes, my imperfect faith in humanity.
Anyway, that is a roundabout way to explain that often, when I am in a place of struggle, I have to look inward for optimism or inspiration. I don't look outwards because I think that someone else might come and save/comfort me from my troubles, but I look inward and try to shift my perspective, so that I can find something to appreciate about every moment, even the challenging ones. I don't know what it says about me that I was able to do this even when my (beloved) late mother was very ill. I remember visiting her while she was undergoing one of her last rounds of chemo treatment, and she looked so frail and ill and deeply unhappy. I remember talking to her when she had the energy to talk, and then silently telling myself that those days were hard -- so hard, in fact, to see someone who was always such a source of optimism and strength in my own life to be so devoid of life -- but that some day, I was going to look back on even those days as still the "good days", when I still had her around. I felt so much gratitude that not only did she make it until the birth of my son, but that they always had a mutually joyful relationship in their brief interactions. (He's much more challenging these days, and he also cannot remember her, besides recognizing her from pictures. A part of me laments that she can't be here to see him having grown so much and accomplished so much, but another part of me thinks it's probably better that she only had sweet baby interactions with him.) During the pandemic, looking inward for optimism has been extremely helpful. 2020 was very hard as a whole, but I found myself constantly shifting to a mode of deep gratitude for health, family, nature, and love. Today, I wanted to sit down and write a love letter to my husband, particularly through the lens of my son's recent therapy. (He started feeding therapy a couple of months ago, and is due to start OT in May, when we get back from our road trip, to address some vestibular and sensory issues.) My husband won't actually read this, because he's not much of a blog-reader or a social media person. But, I wanted to write it for myself, as I have wanted to for some time. We have been together since September 2006, and married since March 2013. During that time, things have not always been peachy sweet, but I have always appreciated our deep love, friendship, support, and partnership. Over time, I have come to learn that my husband is very different from me. I love and appreciate him for our differences, even though sometimes I do feel frustrated for our differences as well. I try to focus on how our differences strengthen both our marriage and parenthood -- as my friend recently said to me, "I have always thought that you and G complement each other very well, both as humans and as parents." My husband is a self-taught, engineering, persevering kind of person. From things small to large, he likes to always try to do it by himself. When the toilet breaks, instead of calling a plumber, he would happily spend two days on the bathroom floor, taking apart all parts of the toilet, fixing the leak and learning about how the toilet works (and then refer fondly to the incident for years afterwards). When our wooden shutters broke in Berlin, he parked himself in the living room for over an hour, trying to fix it, instead of heading outside with me as promised. This guy converted our grill to a natural gas grill, even though technically you are only supposed to do it if you are a certified plumber. He has written an entire distributed database from scratch and is in the process of creating a new programming language. No biggie, but this guy likes to do everything by himself. He once started a company from scratch and then sold it, and he has started multiple business ideas since. I adore and respect that can-do spirit about him. --BUT, the flip side is that my husband never likes to ask for help. He does not like to follow recipes or Lego instructions; he does not like to watch YouTube tutorial videos; he does not like to read parenting books; and he does not like to seek therapy (for us or our kids). He feels like other people's insights are mostly too general / not that useful. The most sensible way to learn, he thinks, is by trying things out yourself and then adjusting the course based on your own intuition. I feel like that is where I come in. In school, I was proficient at playing the "school game." As a student, I did not like ambiguity (something that I still struggle with as an adult sometimes). If I started a task, I wanted feedback right away to know if I was on track or not. I liked drafts of assignments, and then improving based on feedback. How that translates to me being a parent is that I devour parenting books, digest their philosophies, try them on my kids, read tons of articles, talk to other parents in my community, and am enthusiastic about seeking additional professional help if I am still in doubt. I am the over-researching antidote to G's under-researching self. By ourselves, I think each of us would have floundered perhaps as parents. Trusting others' professional opinions on everything and trusting others on nothing seems each to be too extreme, by itself. Together, however, I think we do strike the right balance. With both of our kids, I would suggest here and there that they might be a little off-the-norm in certain areas. Like, our 4-month-old is taking an hour to drink just 4 ounces of milk? Our 6-month-old still can't really roll over or push her chest up with both hands? Our 4.5-year-old still is scared to walk down the stairs and to lather on sunscreen? My husband would do his part to resist, resist, re-s-i-s-t.... until he breaks down and says, "Okay, fine, you seem very concerned, so let's just look into it." I know that therapy is not his thing, and he would rather see our kids experimenting, persevering, and finding their own way through to the other side of any challenge, but the important thing is, he acquiesces and compromises. And then once the therapy starts, although I still take the lead in filling out the forms, scheduling the visits, and running the show, my husband shows up with his warmest, most enthusiastic self. As far as the kids could tell, we are on the same front, rooting for their therapy success. And for that, I love and appreciate my husband more everyday. We don't need to be the same person, or to see eye to eye on everything in parenthood. Maybe he is right, and maybe I am just a paranoid mom. Or, maybe I am right, and our kids need extra help. But, I love that in spite of his preconceived notions and inclinations, he supports my decisions, big and small, in our marriage. And that has always been the most defining character of our relationship. I often feel like parenting is challenging, because it's the ultimate projects-based learning experience. You go into it with almost zero expertise, and you hope that after 18 years (or in our case, 18+3 years, because our kids are 3 years apart), you would still want to hang out with this partner. So far, so good. <3 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? It's a new year, and with it, I feel invigorated with new hope for the future, as well as some trepidation. Since I last posted, my son had stayed home for a while, until yesterday when we finally sent him back to school. It has been a good run at home. He worked on biking, math, and Chinese many days. After the holidays though, he started feeling sad and really missing his friends, so when the local COVID numbers became more reasonable, we sent him back to school. We are still incrementally working on Chinese with L, in order to maintain some academic rhythm to our days. I think he is now up to recognizing about 50+ Chinese characters. I still make and use the flashcards, where I put out the recent characters and their associated pictures for him to match up, but when he picks up a pair, he also uses it in a sentence. I find it is both a good way to make the review feel less tedious (more active on his part, and he can make it fun by constructing whatever sentences he wants), and also a sneaky way to encourage him to speak in more complex ways. A little while ago, I also pushed back and asked him -- my first time ever making this explicit request -- to try to speak to me only in Chinese. When he asked me why, I explained it this way: "We should always be improving and practicing something. You can already express yourself very clearly in English, so now it is time for you to practice speaking in Chinese. Once you are able to speak Chinese fluently, we can practice something else, like maybe Spanish." I found that framing language learning this way helped to avoid power struggle, because I did not say, "Chinese is part of my heritage and I think it's important for you." At his age (4.5), anything that helps to diminish power struggle is a win in my book. I also struck a compromise with him that if I notice he is trying to mostly speak Chinese to me during the day, then at bedtime, I would read to him bilingually. Else, I would read only in Chinese, since he needs the extra Chinese exposure. He thinks that is a reasonable compromise, and overall I have noticed a really good effort from him most days. When he forgets, I remind him either with an exaggerated, "Haaa??" or I give him a sentence starter in Mandarin, by translating the first part of his thought into Mandarin. He responds pretty well to both forms of reminder, and I am so proud to see that his language grasp is slowly improving. (He now asks me to teach him transitional phrases like "because" and "therefore", instead of just saying them in English, interleaved with Chinese. I think that is a really positive sign.) We have been biking and hiking a lot as a family since I last blogged, which has been a sanity-saver, because during this COVID winter we have not been seeing many friends, even outdoors. We also went sledding twice since winter started. Since my son was out of school between Thanksgiving and mid-January, for two recent weekends in a row, we have met up with his daycare friends for a playdate on bikes. Super surprising to me is that my son, who is physically VERY anxious to take risks, is actually a pretty confident pedal biker now. I honestly attribute it to him learning to bike on hand-me-down cheapo bikes that cost either nothing or just $20. He is on a free-to-us 16-inch bike at the moment, and it has a solid frame and weighs quite a lot. It is far from the fast, light bikes that I initially considered buying for him, but he has adjusted to it and rides it up a small, steady hill (130 feet of elevation over a mile) without resting. That particular route to the park includes some minor street riding as well, along a quiet street, and one time he was ahead of me at an intersection (I was walking his baby sister in a stroller) when I saw him waving to signal a driver through the roundabout. My big kid is growing up so fast! (I can't believe we are signing him up for Kindergarten right now!!) A particular delight for me recently has been to see my younger toddler blossom. Due to torticollis, she has received PT and OT help since last February, and SLP help since October. In the last couple of months, she has grown an astonishing amount, that all of her experts are ready to graduate her from their services. It has been amazing to see her improvement, and as her mom and primary caretaker during the day, I know it is no accident. More than any help she has received, she is such a determined little gal and just chooses a task and works herself at it until she gets it. She learned how to put together a jigsaw puzzle this way, over the course of several weeks, even though in my mind I thought it was way out of her reach, and similarly, just this week I saw her slaying a pretty complicated shape sorter stacking toy that she definitely could not do at the start of January. I forgot to mention Christmas, but this was the first year that my son wrote a letter to Santa. (He wrote it himself because I thought it would be a cool and semi-academic task for him to do, and actually it was pretty legible except for two important words being jumbled together. He asked for "a train" and Mercy Watson chapter books. "Santa" gave him train pajamas and two Mercy Watson books, which he promptly started reading on Christmas.) We dropped the letter off, and he was able to get a personalized response back in the mail! He was pretty excited that Santa's elves commented on his good manners in saying "Please" and "Thank you" in his request. We managed to make it a special Christmas, filled with many new traditions, even though we definitely missed traveling to visit the grandparents. Lastly, we are embarking on some new endeavors at the moment. I am currently food-training my 4.5-year-old, potty-training my 1.5-year-old, trying to sign up for Kindergarten / research after-school care options for next school year, learning new digital-teaching tools, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching job for the fall while still being a SAHM and tutoring on the side. That's probably story for another time, but, needless to say, there is never a dull moment around here.
At the moment, miraculously, I feel the least anxious that I have felt in months! We sent our son back to daycare for about a month, and then a few days before Thanksgiving, I decided to pull him out again. We told him that he would stay home with me for at least two weeks after Thanksgiving and for two weeks after Christmas, but in reality, I am prepared to keep him home all through December and mid-January if the local COVID numbers don't look good. I was really hoping that his daycare families would be cautious for Thanksgiving, but he came home the week of Thanksgiving to let me know that most of his friends were planning to go over to someone's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and that one of his daycare families kept one sick and coughing twin at home while sending the other one to school. The combination of those two pieces of news was just a wee bit too stressful for me, so I was honest with my son and asked him if he would feel alright if we kept him home even for the few days before Thanksgiving. He responded brightly, "Sure," much to my relief and surprise. So, back to being holed up with just our sweet and screamy little family, for a little while. Even though my kids are loud and needy and they suck up all of my energy, I really enjoy having both of my kids home. We have had a rare stretch of sunny, dry weather this week, and my son was able to get back on his pedal bike for the first time in about two months. This week, he has been riding his bike, while I push his little sister in a trike stroller, to go to a park a mile away from our house. It's a decent ride because it's uphill to the park and downhill back, and because he was out of practice, the first day I had to push his bike uphill for the last few blocks leading up to the park. After the first day though, he has been able to make it there and back, and is quickly re-gaining his confidence on the bike. (We don't have a fancy bike for him. Actually, the bike he rides is heavy, rusted, and very basic. It has back-pedal brakes and no gear-shifting, the handlebar looks quite worn, and I got it for free. So, I empathize when he finds the hills challenging and thinks hopping on and off the bike is cumbersome, but I also think it builds... stamina?!) We usually spend most of a dry morning getting to the park, playing, and getting back. I do squeeze in a short math lesson every few days, mostly to keep him thinking mathematically. Speaking of math, L is doing very well with visualizing quantities under 10, which makes this math mama very proud! For example, if I show him a picture of 7 dots, he can quickly tell me that he sees 7 dots, because he sees 3 and 3 and 1 more. I am starting to work with him on making subtractive statements like, "I have 7 dots on my card, and you have 2. I win this round (of War) because I have FIVE extras!" With only a little bit of help from me, he also has learned to skip-count by 2's, up to 10. He says, "2, 4, 6, 8, 10!" and actually understands what it means to count by 2's, so I am now trying to add on a bit more, to encourage him to skip-count by 2's up to 20. Recently, he looked at our scrambled Advent calendar and re-arranged the drawers to be in the correct order. He also told me that he counted there to be 12 Advent drawers on each side of the train, which made a total of (he counted) 24 drawers, "because 2 and 2 make 4!" It is so fun to hear him making his own mathematical observations, even though he would probably not peg himself as being particularly mathematical. We have also been continuing with our Chinese lessons, which happily only last about 5-10 minutes per (week)day. I alternate daily between doing 1 or 2 new characters out of the Sagebooks, and just doing review. When we review, L either fishes out the characters to form a sentence that I dictate, or he reads sentences that I create. I think we are up to about 35 characters now that he recognizes, and the best part is that he is still enjoying it! We are moving at the right pace for both him and me, and 5-10 minutes is just the amount of focus I can get from him at the end of a day, with his rambunctious sister running around. (See below - picture from about a month ago!) Lastly, I am a proud mama today of my son, because he learned to zip up TWO of his jackets by himself. He did those two zippers each once yesterday and twice today! He also recently learned to put on his socks without stretching them out. He's just emerging to be a big kid all around. So proud of this kid! Now, if he could just be consistently nice to his little sister...
A couple of days before Halloween, my son went to the bathroom to pee one morning after eating breakfast and noticed there were a few drops of water on the bathroom floor, presumably from when one of us had washed our hands earlier. He came outside to grab the kitchen rag to wipe the bathroom floor, and when told that we didn't want him to use the kitchen rag in the bathroom, he broke down sobbing. He sobbed so hard, that it could not have been about the rag or the water. It was not the first time in recent weeks when he had broken down crying at the drop of a hat. I held him and asked him what was wrong, and eventually it came out in broken pieces, that he just felt desperately sad about being at home without seeing his friends. He had been home with us from the start of March to the end of October, with only a handful of interactions with kids his own age during that time. My son, who is normally a bright and happy child, was really struggling mentally to cope with what seemed to be a permanent predicament.
It broke my heart. A week or so prior to this, I had grieved when we saw other kids at the park and he ran away from them. I had grieved when his bestie saw us outside and ignored his multiple attempts to say hello. I had grieved when we were over visiting a newborn's family, and the older child sprayed a few drops of liquid on his neck and my son had cried and screamed. My husband and I had a long chat that day of the bathroom sobbing incident. We decided after consulting our pediatrician, (tons of) mom friends, our daycare director, another daycare parent, and a friend who works in public health in our city, that we would send L back to school even though it means greater COVID exposure risk for our family. We made that decision because our son's mental health was clearly suffering, and at age 4, we had asked him to be at home for 8 months with no end in sight, and it was cruel to continue to shut him off from the world when he did not have the emotional capacity to cope with the indefinite wait. Once we made the decision to send him back to school, it lightened my own mental load immediately. We sent our son back to daycare on October 30, and within a couple of days, he went back to his normal, chatty, rambunctious, and happy self. It was a really tough decision, as the COVID numbers in our area are still going up, and there are some outbreaks at local daycares (not ours yet, thankfully). We plan to keep him out of school for a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving and after Christmas, assuming that other families will be seeing extended family members during those holidays. We try to balance the risk by sending him to school for only the first half of everyday. At school, the kids nap without their masks on, and I wanted to avoid that needless exposure. So, he wears his mask during the first half of the day and then I pick him up after lunch, while his little sister is napping at home. It's not perfectly safe, of course, but I feel like daycare is a necessary risk, considering that we don't know what the next school year will look like and whether there will be another long stretch of time without regular peer interactions for L. As I know is true for every family, parenting in 2020 is just being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was incredibly grateful to read today that one of the vaccines in the works has the potential of being 90% effective. Last week, I was immeasurably happy that the Biden-Harris ticket won the election. Among other things, it gives me a glimmer of hope that our country could be on track to curbing the spread of the virus in 2021. Keeping fingers crossed for 2021. |
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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