Parenting Babies, Toddlers & Teens

Posts Tagged ‘parenting’

Does Your Toddler Run in the Street?
This One Key Phrase Will Stop Him in His Tracks!

By Michelle Shelton, Parenting Coach
Keys2Kids.com

Does your toddler run away from you? Does he run into the street at times or run towards it, nearly giving you a heart attack? All mothers have felt the panic of seeing their little guy sprinting toward the street! My mother used to say; “you’ll die a million deaths before you get em raised”.

I often see mothers chasing their toddlers. The little guy is charging wildly toward the street and the mother has a frightened look in her eye. Once she catches Jr. she usually has some harsh words for him and in turn, he giggles and attempts to wiggle away from her. She might even give him a little swat on his diapered bottom to let him know she really means business. The mother then calms down because, after all, he is still a just a baby.

What are you supposed to do as a mother?

Let’s start with a question. What is your job as a mother? Is it to simply protect your child from harm? To feed him, clothe him and take care of his needs? Since the role of a mother is not clearly defined in our culture, we think mothers are supposed to love our child. Period. That’s it. Loving them means taking care of them and doing everything for them, right? Wrong! Get ready because I am about to define your real role as a mother and I want you to write this down! Your job as a mother is to…….TEACH. That’s it. Teach your children how to get along without you. God gave children a mother for this one thing in mind.

You are saying, yeah, but what about training? Isn’t it my job as a good mother to train my children in the way they should go? Yes and no. Training shows your children “how” to do something. Teaching gives them the reason “why” they do something. It is imperative to teach and not just train.

Jeffery Gitomer said it best when he said, “pretend you have a teenage daughter, do you want her to have sex EDUCATION…or…sex TRAINING? Yikes! When you put it that way, it makes sense, doesn’t it?

When you teach your children, you give them the concrete information they need to make wise decisions on their own. They have to think and decide for themselves. They have the information needed to embrace your reasons in a clear, logical way. It is even more imperative to do this with boys than it is girls because boys are usually more logical.

By now you are thinking I forgot about the toddler in the street. Well, I didn’t. My children never went into the street because I taught them “why” they shouldn’t go in the street. Now I will teach you how to teach your children the same thing.

A TRAINING statement would be, “If you go in the street, you will get hit by a car.” Haven’t most little kids been hit by a brother, sister, playmate, or cousin? If they haven’t personally been hit, they have seen people hit or they have hit others! The point is, no one died. No one wiggled around in severe paid and then disappeared. They know they WILL recover if the car HITS them. Hitting is not life threatening, is it?

Scare Them

Now, let’s do a TEACHING situation. Scare them. Does this go against your motherly instinct? Sorry. Reality is, if they run in front of a car, they are most likely going to die. This is scary. They need to fear the cars. How can you scare your own child you ask? First of all, I am not saying go out and rent a copy of Stephen King’s, “The Car” and show it to your child. I am saying fear is sometimes healthy.

If you go in the street, the cars will eat you!

What is a realistic way to make sure your child would have a healthy fear of cars? When my children were little I had a stroke of genius when I said, If you go in the street, the cars will eat you! Children know about eating. They know that chewing would have to hurt. Most have bitten their own finger hard enough to know it would hurt and hurt BAD. They also know that anything they eat is GONE FOREVER.

Once you learn to develop healthy fears in your child, your child will see that the world is a delightful yet scary place and it does have boundaries that limit all of us. After all, that is the truth. Doesn’t your child deserve the truth?

© 2003 by Michelle Shelton. All rights reserved

About the Author
Michelle Shelton is an author, parenting coach, parent consultant, acclaimed public speaker, and parent educator. Michelle is the author of the well known column Life with all these Kids. www.keys2kids.com or contact her at 480-888-9352 or michelleshelton@yahoo.com.

Babies Online can not garauntee that this statement will keep your child safe – this article is posted as an educational resource only.

Keys2kids.com

Way back in 1998 or 1999 I started to play with making my own website. I built a very crude looking website and my domain name was keys2kids.com I was writing for the newspaper and had my own column writing parenting articles. My column was called Life with all these kids! I enjoyed writing and started to post some of my writings on my new website, keys2kids.com

Pretty soon I was getting emails and all sorts of activity on my site. My articles were showing up all over the web and I really wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve such attention. One thing I knew was I did like it! Now for the bad news. I had a site analyst look at my site and he said I had 64,000 UNIQUE visitors a DAY. Yes, you read that right! I didn’t know what that meant at the time and now I would give my eyeteeth for that kind of traffic. I asked him what this meant…he said, are you kidding me? The average time on your site is nearly 15 minutes! He told me a site was called sticky if someone stayed on it longer than 30 SECONDS. I wasn’t really sure what all this meant but he sure was excited. He wanted to know everything I was doing and how I was doing it.

The thing was, I didn’t really know what I was doing and this hurt me in the end. One day I was going to post a new article on my site and …ut oh. There was no site. I didn’t know what was going on and I called my hosting guy. His wife had recently found out she had cancer and he was pretty consumed with that…understandably so. A few days later I get an email from a gentleman (using this word generously), offering to sell me my domain for $8,000. dollars.

What? I didn’t have $8,000. dollars. I was a stay at home mom with a bunch of kids. How did he come to get my domain in the first place?

Well, it turns out my guy was very consumed with his wife and her illness, he didn’t renew the domain and it expired. I was too green to know what to do or even realize it would expire. And there you have it.

Now for the good news. Recently I went into godaddy and guess what? I took a peek for my old domain name and there it was so I snagged it up!

The next time you are looking for parenting tips and advice, simply type in www.keys2kids.com and come read some of my articles. The kids are bigger and I am sharing results.

Happy parenting!

Parenting Babies was Easy Work!
by Michelle Shelton

I remember when I had babies and I thought it was oh so much work! Diapers, laundry, meals, baths, dressing, feeding, eating….ahhhhhhhh.

Parenting babies is EASY!

Now, fast forward 14 years or so. My youngest is about to turn 14. The oldest just turned 24. That means for at least 10-12 years I was in this mode of cooking, cleaning, dressing, feeding, cleaning and well..you get the picture. At the time I remember feeling tired. I was tired all the time. I felt like a slave must feel.

Looking back, those were the best years of my life! As children get older they are much more difficult work. They create a need for mind work. Now my body is tired because my mind has to be on all the time and it that takes a lot more energy than mindless cleaning and cooking!

Would you think that parenting ends at say, 18? Or maybe when they get out of college? That would seem reasonable, right? Doesn’t seem to be so. My 24 year old is constantly calling and asking for things and she will tap into her winning formula of having a fit when she doesn’t get what she wants. Interesting. Of course I have some responsibility in this because if it didn’t work in some way, she wouldn’t use it. *sigh*

Now you can see what I mean when I say mind work. The issue is, now when I am starting to figure out how to parent effectively, my kids are much older. If only I had been privey to this information when they were little. The good news? I am going to share my parenting ideas and concepts with you so you can do something different to create a different future.

The real work has just begun for me! Isn’t that exciting?

Learn to be a better parent from a dog?
by Michelle Shelton

I think as humans we have so much to learn from animals. My dog, Sophie, had five pups on December 18, 2009. They are cute of course. They are puppies after all.

If only I would trust myself that I have the answers like Sophie does. I was so concerned when she was about to deliver that she wouldn’t know what to do. From a human perspective, it seems disgusting…eating the placenta, chewing through the umbilical cord. I wanted to save her from having to do this stuff. She would have none of it! She knew exactly what to do and she did it with style. She kept her pups very, very clean. She cared for them and the first week, she didn’t leave their side.

Parenting from a dog

The second week she would feed them and then leave them for short periods. She still stayed close to them. If anyone went back to look at them she kept a watchful eye. After all their eyes weren’t even open yet!

The third week she fed them and then would stay away from them the majority of the time. The kids made comments about what a bad mother she was. Hmmm. I found this interesting. I reminded them that as a mother it is our job to allow you do learn to do things for yourselves. It often meant watching you make mistakes so that you can learn the ways of the world. Not bailing you out of situations that you can figure out yourself.

As the pups got bigger I brought them into my office and used a baby pool for them to play and run in during the day. I saw how they depended on each other and how Sophie encouraged that. They were really whining one day and she went and got my daughters stuffed animal and put it in with them and then left them again. I could see that she would stay close and watch them until they would comfort themselves and go to sleep. She didn’t rock them and sing and create a dependency for sleep…she allowed them to learn to comfort themselves.

This was amazing to me. As a mother to five children, I have made all the mistakes. Some bigger than others. I love all of my children. I simply can see what worked and what didn’t work. I can see a huge difference between the way I parented the older children compared to the way I parented the younger children.

I think Sophie is an excellent mother. She is the perfect blend between loving and harsh. My husband calls it pure instinct. I suppose he is right about a dog. The thing I want to know…why as humans do we question our own answers? I wonder.

So, I leave you with this…I have these puppies for sale…how many do you want?

Having the Sex Talk with your Pre-Teens? Yikes!
By Michelle Shelton

You want tips on talking to your preteens about sex? What if I told you don’t wait until they are preteens? There is a lot of risk in talking to them early as you will see in this article. However, this method has worked well. I have five children and it has worked with every last one of them! This is one of those true stories that you might question. I was there. Much to my mortified dismay, it did happened. So if you are willing to take a risk, these may be the best tips yet to talking to your preteen about sex.

So, my first question to you is this, do you know the difference between a peenie and a jina? I am not even sure how to spell it. Perhaps it would be Gyna? None the less, my two year old son knew how to say it and he did not mind sharing it with the world! I was one of those parents that insisted on honestly with the children all the way through their childhood, starting at birth.

How do some people spend time with their children from the time they are born and yet thie topic of sex doesn’t come up in conversation? How exactly does that work? Or perhaps some parents just avoid the topic altogether and change the subject when it does come up because they are not willing to get creative? No matter what it is, it is my opinion that sex is not something that difficult to talk about WHEN you start talking to them about it when they are very young. I didn’t avoid answering sex questions with my children so I don’t know the answer for you. I only know it for me.

From the time all five of my kids were toddlers we talked about sex. Well…sort of. It was right in line with everything else they were taught.

For the boys, it was proper aiming at the Cheerios I threw in the toilet and then said, “Sink em boys”.

I always have thought a boys’ aim in life is highly important. Especially when I am the boys mother that cleans up after missed targets! For the girls it was showing them feminine products and explaining to them how women have babies and periods.

When my dad had open heart surgery in 1992, my mom, sister, young daughter, two young boys and me spent a lot of time in the waiting room. As we became more comfortable in the waiting room, we sort of made it our own. We moved chairs in obtuse angles and rolled out the portable playpen. Soon, the waiting room seemed like “our room” and we became engrossed in our own little world and conversations.

My son Phillip was about 23 months old and talking pretty good. His brother was a newborn. Phillip toddled around the room and as my sister and I were having a conversation, I overheard Phillip’s small voice, quite boldly, behind me saying, “You gotta PEENIE, you gotta GYNA, you gotta GYNA, GYNA, PEENIE, PEENIE, GYNA. At first I was sort of shocked as I turned around and noticed eight or nine other people sitting in a row of chairs behind us. There was Phillip walking in front of them giving them his toddler version of anatomy.

He would walk in front of a woman, stop, look up at her and touch her knee lightly and then boldly announce, “GYNA.” and then he would walk on and continue the process with the next seated individual. I don’t know who was having more fun, the elderly observers receiving the anatomy lesson or Phillip himself. He danced like John Travolta when one woman smiled and said, “He is so smart. He knows all of our parts just by looking at us!”

You see, from the time Phillip was an infant I would teach him about the differences between men and women and what his parts would be used for when he was a daddy and how they would work. I taught him at his level of learning in simple language. I think I said something like, “When you grow up and you become a daddy, you get to cuddle in a special way with your wife and put a baby inside her body. Boys and daddies have penises and girls and mommies have vagina’s. As he grew he would ask deeper questions. I would give him deeper answers, the answers he needed, when he needed it. It is my opinion that there is no cookie cutter way to do this as some children don’t ask as many questions. Some children simply don’t ask questions that often. It is totally based on the individual child and their level of curiosity.

One thing I do remember was living in Nebraska my grandmother always grew the big, round pink flowers called Peonies. One day Phillip was a bit confused when I mentioned the big, round Peonies growing in her yard in front of her home.

He said, “Do GYNAS grow in the yard too?”

That question took some creative explaining on my part. His fears were quickly eased with my answer and all was good once again in his active little mind.

Another incident happened while waiting at Target to get photos of the kids. At the time I only had Marie and my sons Phillip and Sam. I was pregnant with Josephine, who is number four. It had been a long and stressful day with all the kids and being pregnant didn’t help. There were mothers spitting on their hands and wiping their children’s hair into place. There were crying babies, wild toddlers and frustrated amateur photographers running around the waiting room.

Marie is my oldest and she always has been quite on top of things when it comes to being in tune to adults conversations about grown up stuff. I suspect what happened next was the consequence of some such adult conversation she had overheard previously. The longer we waited and the more the woman next to me wiped her babies green, boogered nose, it was apparent I was getting quite annoyed. At least it must have been because Marie, who had run to the other side of the room to look at picture frames, quickly turned around and looked at me and loudly yelled, “Mom, is this one of those days you wanna get your tubes tied?” To say I was mortified is an understatement.

So, as a mother to five, nearly grown children, my advice to you is this…don’t wait until your kids are almost a teenager before you have the sex talks. Teach them about their bodies and all their working parts their entire life and neither of you will have anxiety when your kids reach their awkward stage. Once you choose to have the talks, one word of caution: Stay out of waiting rooms where you will be idle for long periods of time and if you must wait with others, be ready for what could come out of your child’s mouth!

Empathetic or Sympathetic? What kind of a parent are you?
by Michelle Shelton

You are responsible for your children’s health in many different forms, spiritual, physical, mental, emotional and behavioral. As parents, we have to cover a lot of ground and not get too caught up in the total protection of our children at all times. On the other hand you don’t want to neglect your children and expose them to unnecessary dangers either. You know, being a parent is hard work and it is a fine line that we must walk all the time.

Different people handle situations differently. When your child is facing a problem how do you handle the situation? Do you consider yourself sympathetic to their problems? If so, you may be a sympathetic parent or you may be an empathetic parent. Do you know the difference between empathetic and sympathetic? Most of us probably have not given it a lot of thought. Allow me to explain the difference and than decide if you are a sympathetic parent or an empathetic parent. One of these is very damaging to your children. Do you know which one?

Think about this, if your child fell into an old abandon well and you heard his cries, you would naturally run to the well and peer in. Your child would be very frightened in the dark and he may be injured, he could even die! As a good parent you of course want to help your child right away.

Now, if you are sympathetic you share the exact same feelings as your child. You are frightened and you can easily become traumatized when you look at the situation as a whole. As a matter of fact, a sympathetic parent would jump right into that well with the child and become part of the problem! Now there are two people in the well suffering with little hope. This is not a good way to be and it stems from parenting with your emotions. It produces children that are very dependent and insecure. They don’t learn effective problem solving and as they get older their lessons are severe because they tend to make decisions on their emotions.

An empathetic parent on the other hand, understands how the child must be extremely frightened and knows that the child might be injured and could die if something is not done quickly. As a matter of fact, an empathetic parent would look around and decide the fastest and most efficient way to get the child out of the well. An empathetic parent does not become part of the child’s problem; he becomes part of the solution. This is a great way to parent. When you become part of the solution for your children and you will become a partner in problem solving, a teacher, a mentor, a friend.

© 2003 by Michelle Shelton. All rights reserved
Michelle Shelton is an Author, Parenting Coach, Parent Consultant, Public Speaker, and Parent Educator. Michelle is the author of the well known column ‘Life with all these Kids’. Visit her web site www.myahha.com or www.boldtalent.com and you can contact her at 480-577-8272.