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General Parenting advice


Elessar78

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I have a toddler (3 YO) now and another one on the way. Aside from spending less time on ES, do you who have been at this longer or work with kids as a living have any good tips? I was reading a book for work last night and taking notes and realized that I don't spend 1/10 the time educating myself on better parenting skills.

Particularly on discipline not just punishment but proactive methods to get them behaving correctly in the first place. Also on starting the educational process at home. I mean reading to them is one thing. Are there other things? Age appropriate things?

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instilling self discipline beats punishing, best accomplished by demonstrating choices matter when it comes to results.

there is always math games and of course building/making/growing things, demonstrating fundamentals and principles can be fun as well as developmental.

disciplining yourself to do do those things is the biggest challenge....but even your choices matter

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I have a toddler (3 YO) now and another one on the way. Aside from spending less time on ES, do you who have been at this longer or work with kids as a living have any good tips? I was reading a book for work last night and taking notes and realized that I don't spend 1/10 the time educating myself on better parenting skills.

Particularly on discipline not just punishment but proactive methods to get them behaving correctly in the first place. Also on starting the educational process at home. I mean reading to them is one thing. Are there other things? Age appropriate things?

My daughter is about to turn five. But, before I attempt to offer any tips/suggestions I have a few questions.

1] Is your child in daycare (full-time or half-time)

2] Is your todler a boy or girl? This will help on games/activities.

3] If your child is not in daycare, who is watching them during the day? Nanny, friend, wife, you, grandparent, etc.?

4] If they are not in daycare, what is their routine? Do they watch TV/cartoons all day, or is anyone teaching them math, spelling, etc?

5] Do they have a lot of interaction or minimal interaction with other children (i.e. friends to play with, random kids at playgrounds).

***these questions are not meant to insult you in any way or judge you on how your kids are being raised*****

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Even at age 3, you can begin to help your kids make informed choices. Like picking out what clothes to wear that day, give them 2 choices when they are around age 3, so they aren't overwhelmed. also, explain the choices. Say if they don't want to pick from your choices, and they want to wear a t shirt when it's 30 degrees out, explain why they have to wear weather/activity appropriate apparel. Remember, you control the choices. twa had some good suggestions.

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I'm the last perso to ask. Every person I know raises perfect kids except me. Everyone else's kids are bumped up two grades in school, they are all-county or all-state in several sports, they all donate their Christmas presents to orphanages, they never fight with each other, they never watch tv or play video games... It's like I live in this bizzaro world where everyone is a perfect parent except me. My kids are doomed.

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It'll take you all of about 5 seconds to realize that every child is different and has very different needs.

It took us about 5 minutes longer to toss all the expert advice out the window.

It's taken 11 years and 7 years again to realize that the single best thing I can do is give my time and energy to my children.

You're going to do stuff right...don't get a big head. You're going to mess stuff up...get over it.

Do the best you can at the time, second guessing will kill you.

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I'm the last perso to ask. Every person I know raises perfect kids except me. Everyone else's kids are bumped up two grades in school, they are all-county or all-state in several sports, they all donate their Christmas presents to orphanages, they never fight with each other, they never watch tv or play video games... It's like I live in this bizzaro world where everyone is a perfect parent except me. My kids are doomed.

You just have friends that don't mind lying to you. ;)

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It'll take you all of about 5 seconds to realize that every child is different and has very different needs.

It took us about 5 minutes longer to toss all the expert advice out the window.

It's taken 11 years and 7 years again to realize that the single best thing I can do is give my time and energy to my children.

You're going to do stuff right...don't get a big head. You're going to mess stuff up...get over it.

Do the best you can at the time, second guessing will kill you.

Yes

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Spend time together doing things. Reading, playing, visiting farms/kids museums.

time well invested,and never forget to have fun (as trying as that can be between dealing with the little monsters and life )

ASF is right ..Do the best you can at the time, second guessing will kill you.

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I gotta agree with those saying "time" dedicated is most important. Early on, due to work/travel time back and forth, I sometimes didnt get to see our daughter as much as I wanted to. The traffic got even worse in Charlotte due to construction on I-85 North, so my drive into the office was 35 mins, the drive home sometimes was 1.5 hours. Most of the time, my wife would have to go ahead and feed her, so I'd have to stop off somewhere and get dinner/carry-out so even if I left the office at 6pm, it would be at least 8pm before I got home, which meant I only got 20-30 mins with her cause it was bath/bed time.

Now I work from home, its great. I take her to daycare every morning, sometimes pick her up too and I get the mornings and hours each evening to spend with her and our relationship has really developed into the bond I always dreamed of it being. She is Daddy's girl again and it makes me incredibly happy. But most important, it makes her happy because of all the time I get to spend with her now.

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http://www.positivediscipline.com/files/MistakenGoalChart.pdf

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/childdevelopment/positiveparenting/index.html

http://www.amazon.com/Positive-Discipline-Jane-Nelsen-Ed-D/dp/0345487672/ref=pd_sim_b_15

Do not use guilt or shame, try to remember that they they are (and feel) really small and you (and the world) looks really big to them. Get on their eye level when you're talking to them if you can. Remember that their #1 priority is to feel secure, safe, like they matter, they belong, etc... Be open to admitting your own mistakes and do not feel bad about them. Everybody makes mistakes.

A few years back I used to make DVDs of our daughter for the family. This included editing raw footage and splicing it together. Oh my what a humbling experience. I really felt like I was on top of things at the time of filming, understanding what's going on, what she was doing, etc. In some cases, after watching it from the side, I often realized just how much I missed of what was going on, what she was thinking, what she was trying to tell me, etc. So I try to stay humble and pay attention.

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Be honest. Use your past mistakes to teach, don't hide them.

TWA is right on with instilling self discipline through choice / consequence.

~Bang

I was going to say the opposite. Don't be honest. If they have a favorite Redskins who leaves through a trade, free agency, injury, tell your child that it was drugs and he can't play anymore because of it. If you see a police car stopping someone on the side of the road, tell your son that the person cheated on a test in 2nd grade and the police finally found out. If strasburg doesn't pitch a good game, tell your kids that he didn't eat his vegetable the night before.

:dunce::dunce:

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I would lve to give advice but feel like I make 10 mistakes per day with my two. The only silver lining is that I believe most of my mistakes are coming with their best intentions at heart. One thing I wish I did more of with my oldest is making him do more on his own earlier on in life.

Best of luck. In some ways, the fact that you care enough to ask these questions speaks volumes of where your heart is with this!

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It'll take you all of about 5 seconds to realize that every child is different and has very different needs.

It took us about 5 minutes longer to toss all the expert advice out the window.

It's taken 11 years and 7 years again to realize that the single best thing I can do is give my time and energy to my children.

You're going to do stuff right...don't get a big head. You're going to mess stuff up...get over it.

Do the best you can at the time, second guessing will kill you.

This.

I cant stress enough how important the bit about kids being different is and the need to treat them as individuals. We have 3 - 7, 10 and 18. Youngest two are boys and they are chalk and cheese. One is really gifted athletically and treats academic work as a necessary evil - he skates by doing the bare minimum meanwhile his younger brother has the athletic ability of a house brick but thought himself phonics and therefore reading by the age of 3 using the on screen TV guide and copying the names of his favourite shows into Google to find games to play !! Focus on their strengths and what they do well and encourage them rather than picking them up for what they dont do as well all the time.

Try to be as consistent as you can, but accept you are human and will make mistakes and try to model the behaviour you would like to see in your kids. I think the hardest bit is finding the balance between protecting them and allowing them the freedom to grow up an develop their independence.

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  • 10 months later...

First we had helicopter parents, now snowplow parents:

 

‘Snowplow parents’ may be trapping their children

 

Cold_Snap-058d3-1751.jpg

What a snowplow may look like

 

A new moniker, snowplow parents, refers to those who not only hover like helicopter parents but also plow ahead to preemptively eliminate any obstacles from their child’s path. These are the folks who would like to hand-select their young child’s classmates, or who bribe coaches for more playing time, or who encourage teachers to pay extra attention to their child at the expense of other students. For those of us who work with college students there are tales of parent calls for notes from a missed class, daily requests for lists of salad-bar ingredients and parental involvement, via Skype, regarding a dispute between roommates over a missing jar of peanut butter.

 

As a student affairs administrator, I’ve worked with my share of snowplow parents. I hear the concern in their voices. Often such calls end with a better understanding — for me, of their kid; for parents, of our policies. Sometimes the calls are more frustrating and sound more like a scraping plow than an invested parent.

 

But I feel for these parents. The passing agonies of the everyday are shared quickly and easily — texts about a disappointing grade, photos of a roommate’s overflowing garbage, tweets about the heat in a dorm room. The instantaneous nature of the complaints can give the impression that only an immediate solution will do. And some students relying on their phones, with their parents at the other end, are losing the opportunity to stop and think, assuming that their parents are more capable. Perpetuating this belief is a disservice to their development and may contribute to the increasing amount of anxiety students experience about small inconveniences.

 

Click on the link for the full article

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When my daughter turned 18, I gave her the "Now that you are legally an adult" talk.  I also learned not to give advice unless asked, but just giving advice didn't work so well.  (Can you just see the words bouncing off your child while she's silently going LALALALALALA?)  She now asks me for advice when she wants my wisdom.  Otherwise I leave her alone to make her own decisions.

 

It's what I wanted when I became an adult, and received lots of unwanted advice from my mom.

 

And if parents haven't given their children the tools to make their way in the world, making their own decisions, I feel that those parents haven't done their primary job.

 

We need to let our children learn from THEIR mistakes, we certainly learned from ours.

 

Edited to change "our" to their

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I think that my siblings and I turned out pretty well and my parents had unorthodox techniques. For example one time we did not get dinner, so we could go to bed hungry, so that we knew what it was like to "be poor" so that we would work harder in school. Or being screamed at when you can't figure out a math problem that "if you don't figure out the ********  easy math problem then you're going to end up in the army and get your ******** arm blown off! Do you want to be a ******** amputee?!?!" Or when we left our things on the floor my parents would hide them like our shoes for example and not tell us where they were so that we would learn not to leave things out or people would take them. Being told that school is the most important thing in the world because without it you're going to end up in a 1 bedroom apartment with only a mattress and no electricity. Being taught the value of money by telling us Mcdonalds was too expensive because we could go home and have a PB&J for less. Or when it was winter and we forgot our keys we had to stay outside so that next time we would not forget our keys.

 

Now I know that some of these things could be considered abuse but I love my parents for it I think they did an excellent job of giving us everything we needed to be successful. No one has ever been in trouble out of school or in school, my 3 siblings and I all got academic scholarships to attend major universities because we worked VERY hard in school. And we also don't lock ourselves outside the house anymore! lmao

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Wow, Mo, I thought my parents were harda**es!  But I agree...you learn a hard lesson once, and you don't forget.  And it was taught BEFORE it was absolutely necessary...I'm living through someone else's crap because lessons are apparently not important to some, now or ever.  I feel like I'm in Groundhog Day, smh.

Thanks.  For the last 13 years, I've heard, "You can't parent kids nowadays like you were parented."  What?  The word was NO.  She's (to this day) never heard it.  And when I say never, I mean it.  She could come up with some big lie for a grand right now, and he'd find a way to get it to her, ****ing, but never changing the end result...no consequences for your actions.

In contrast, it's all I ever heard.  And if I went ahead & did it?  You don't wanna know.  I doubt I'd be walking the Earth if I'd done to my folks what she's done to hers/me.  I know for a fact that I wouldn't have "folks" anymore.

Sorry, yall know I go through this every friggin' year, so I apologize for repeated yearly posts. LOL, but not really... :angry:

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Good advice in here. One book (it's from a Christian view point) that helped my wife and I most was "Love and Respect in the Family" by Emerson Eggerich. Touches on how parents feel disrespected by kids (when most of the time it's kids being kids, irresponsible not disrespectful) and kids feeling unloved (when most of the time it's parents reacting to perceived disrespect). It forms a vicious circle and parents have to defuse it at the start. Did miracles for our relationship with our children. I've got a 12, 9, 7 year old and one with Sensory Processing Disorder, so things used to get really stressful, not nearly as much now.

One thing to remember, as TWA said, self discipline, but also as parents we fall into the trap of telling them they are not adults but then somehow want them to act like adults. So they get frustrated,

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