Babies Laughing

I'm not really into You Tube but I saw this on someone else's blog and it did make me smile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hooid1LJ9Kc&feature=player_embedded

There's something special about the fat chuckles of babies. But I couldn't help wondering what it was like when all four cried at once!

Superpowers for Parents by Dr Stephen Briers

Following on from the last posts about books, books, books it seems apt to comment that amazon.co.uk is dangerous; one book leads to another. They are very good at linking books so that while looking at one title, another pops up and you think “that looks interesting” and click. Before you know it there are ten books in your basket. And I’m the sucker who buys them all.

A virtual “chain of books” is how I came across Dr Stephen Brier’s Superpowers for Parents: The Psychology of Great Parenting and Happy Children. It’s a very interesting parenting book and I have really enjoyed it.

I became a fan of Dr B reading his introduction. “Previous generations of parents would probably shake their head in wonder at the idea of us all striving to be better parents. In the old days, childrearing was just common sense or a traditional way of doing things, handed down largely unquestioned from one generation to the next...our parenting, like so many aspects of modern life, is now subject to constant scrutiny and evaluation from both within and without. Never has parenting been such a self-conscious and guilt-stricken affair.”

The best summary of what the book is about is in the epilogue. SB says he wrote the book with three goals in mind. One, to try and help parents understand WHY children misbehave. Two, that skirmishes we have with our children are nothing compared to the internal battles our children have with their own feelings and impulses and three, to encourage a shift in emphasis in parenting beyond the management of children’s behaviour to embrace the broader opportunities and privileges and to acknowledge our duty to equip them with the psychological skills they need.

As I enjoy understanding the psychology of what children do I found it fascinating. Superpowers is all about how your child views the world and the emotions they are experiencing – emotions that are often more than they know how to deal with. It’s not so much about how to cope with bad behaviour but what emotions might be causing the bad behaviour and how to help control them.

I can already see it translating into my understanding of how my children are behaving, and maybe why, every day. It has already changed my approach to some situations, trying to stop and think how they are feeling and the effect that is having. (Although having written that I’ve not been terribly patient with my three year old lately, we always seem to be rushing and I always seem to be dragging him along, chivvying him to hurry – and I don’t need SB to tell me that’s not positive for anyone. We need to slow down and not always try and cram so much into every minute, but that’s not always possible, especially when you are doing everything on your own. I think we are all ready for the pause that is Half Term.)

An Amazon reviewer commented “I have found since reading this book that I am much more aware of my own responses and attitude towards children's behaviour and speech in school as well as at home.” This comment was in relation to a child who was always negative about what happened to them – “I never win because I am such a loser” etc. This is all about “core beliefs” and how important it is to “ensure our children construct healthy core beliefs about themselves”.

SB encourages us to look at problems from a different perspective – often there will be a completely unexpected cause or more involved problem. He gives an example of a boy who did a “mind map” about why he was always late for school with the result that his parents learnt he was overtired because he was keeping himself awake to avoid nightmares and anxiety attacks.

One of my favourite sections is about why children are angels at school then come home and turn into horrors. “it is precisely because he is behaving well at school...the exercise of self control in one context may be using up available resources in the other.” You may say this is obvious but appreciating the processes Dr B explains has helped me be more understanding with my children:

• the brain’s processing power, and in particular our capacity to devote conscious attention to things, is a finite resource;
• adults have already automated many aspects of our lives, children are still assimilating many of the skills we take for granted so their concentration is being taxed to a much greater degree just by the routine business of daily life;
• mental tasks involving a lot of processing power may have an effect on children’s ability to keep their behaviour in check because self control is a form of mental labour;
• self control is like a muscle and can increased with exercise but also pushed to the point of fatigue;
• if we can help our children become more efficient at some mental tasks then we can lighten the load of the “prefrontal cortex” leaving more resources available for other functions such as self control;
• to help children master themselves we need to adopt a holistic approach that recognises how the different systems connect up and influence each other;
• carrot and stick approach may take certain behaviour out of context – we can ignore the fact that children’s ability to behave well is just one outcome of the mastery of several distinct but interrelated mental skills.

At times the book deals with some pretty intense and difficult situations, more than the “why have you just hit your brother again?” issues I am currently struggling with. However, the point is that those everyday problems might be derived from deeper reasons – the superpower is to spot them. SB hopes to equip you and your child with skills to best deal with the difficult situations, or hopefully avoid them in the first place. I have definitely learnt techniques I can use now and could come back to should certain problems arise. I have also been encouraged to realise how helpful things I have been doing naturally actually are.

I also found Superpowers beneficial for my own emotional development; there are different strategies we can all learn. Harnessing your own emotions and personality is so important as a parent because your children learn by copying you.

I have enjoyed reading this book – it is not heavy going – and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about why their children are reacting in such a way and long term ways to help – there aren’t your standard “quick fixes” for behaviour. There are also some great quotes used, such as one from Thomas Edison: “I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work”.

Books Waiting on the Shelf

Thank you for the great response to my question What are you Reading. I've been really enjoying all the book conversations.

Following on from my comment to Katherine about the Paul Auster book and a conversation I had with a friend last night, I have a new question: Are there any books on your shelf that have been there for years? You know you will read them one day but it just never seems to be the right time. Or are you a "buy a book and read it immediately" type person?

I have lots of books on my shelves because I collect/hoard books, buying things that look interesting all the time, especially in charity shops and from fete book stalls! Therefore I have lots of books that have been there for years, waiting for the right time. I'll give some examples to get the discussion going:

Travel Books, or books set in specific places, like the Paul Auster New York Trilogy - when I go away I like to try and read something set in the place/country so have books waiting in anticipation.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks - this has been staring at me for years. I know that it is traumatic and I have not yet found the right time to invest the emotional energy in it.

Likewise, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. This is about a 15 year old boy who commits murders at his school and his mother who then reflects on his upbringing. Since becoming a mother I've been very interested in this book but never quite brave enough to start reading it.

So, do you have any books that have been waiting for years on your shelf?

What Are You Reading?

I’ve borrowed this idea from my friend Alastair, who in turn borrowed it from another blogger. I love books and always find it fascinating to hear what other people are reading. Therefore, the idea of this post is to get as many people as possible to share:

1. What they have just read
2. What they are reading now
3. What they are planning to read next.

What to read next is always one of my favourite decisions. I spend ages pondering it, staring at spines on my shelf wondering where to go next.

Alastair has a huge community of followers, many reading adventuring books about marathons and adventures on ice. I felt slightly conspicuous with my contribution, the only person to include a parenting book! I would love to build up a similar community of readers to respond to mine and each other’s thoughts. (I’m anxious this is a little presumptuous for a blogging nobody like me but I feel inspired to try!)

Therefore, I’m making this post in the hope of tempting you to comment and become involved. Please let me know what you enjoy – or don’t – about my blog so that I know what is most entertaining or interesting.

My book list is as follows:

1. Love My Rifle More Than You – Kayla Williams (reviewed below)
2. Superpowers for Parents – Dr Stephen Briers (I need all the help I can get! Have nearly finished and will review it here when I have).
3. Am still enjoying pondering what’s next. Might be The Book Thief by Markus Zusak because I’m hosting a book club on that in November. Or it might be Feminista by Erica Kennedy, mentioned to me by a fellow blogger.
   

I look forward to hearing what you are reading...

Perforations on Kitchen Roll

This morning I’ve been making a birthday cake. It’s a perilous occupation. I have on my shoulders the weight of expectation of a 5 turning 6 year old and it’s heavy. A few weeks ago I heard him tell someone “my daddy knows how to make a cake shaped like a six”. Sh**, I thought. His daddy is working away in Bangladesh so it falls to me to achieve the perfection that everything must be when you are six and it is your most special day of the year.

Baby J was watching in her high chair, begging for bits of cake mixture with an open mouth like a fledgling, cheeping “me-me-me-me”. We were listening to Dame Ellen MacArthur on Desert Island Discs. Something Dame Ellen said resonated with me to the extent that I went to iPlayer and have listened again and transcribed it. (I am fortunate that the relatives of the show’s founder recently agreed to make it available on iPlayer! This interesting fact I had read in The Week and disregarded as irrelevant until today!)

Why am I spending my morning transcribing this when I should be concentrating on a cake? Because it’s easy to get bogged down in the world of motherhood. As important as that role is, I believe it helps to put things in a wider context. It’s so important to me to think and reflect and other people’s perspective can be so valuable as a prompt to evaluate your own life and priorities.

Dame Ellen said: “The winter after the Round the World I went down to the southern ocean again and I went down to an island called South Georgia and I spent two months down there, part of that was camping on an island and for the first time I actually stopped. And I realised something for the first time that really jarred inside me and that was the fact that when you sail around the world on a boat you take with you the minimum of resources and you don’t waste anything. You never leave a light on, you never leave a computer screen on, everything is looked after. You only have what you have and if it doesn’t last til the end, you won’t make it, and that could be your life or it could be the fact you simply don’t break the record.

And then whilst I was in South Georgia I realised that on land we do not do the same thing. We don’t see things as precious any more, we take what we have for granted, you’d never do that on a boat. If you need some kitchen roll you tear off a corner, not a whole square because someone somewhere thought that perforated line is what everyone needs. It jarred inside me and it started to make me think and I was looking at plans for the future and it just hit home to me that we cannot keep doing that because this world I thought as a child was the biggest most adventurous place you could imagine is actually not that big and there’s an awful lot of us on it and we’re not managing the resources that we have as you would on a boat because we don’t have the impression that these resources are limited.”

I love the comment about kitchen roll, I think it’s a great analogy for our wastefulness and arrogance about what we have – why use less when a whole piece is available – and the knock-on effect that an arbitrary decision can often have.

You can listen to the whole interview (for the next week) here.

Troubleshooting the Dynamics between Siblings

Having three children can be chaotic but, interestingly, I feel a third child has brought balance and almost calm to our family because of the relationships it has created. One of my favourite things about mothering is the dynamic between the children.

Although boys T (5 – but 6 this month!) and B (3) fight constantly, they are incredibly close. Sometimes I wonder if they are too close. They share a room – this is not ideal, but unavoidable. They do everything together. B follows T around and copies everything he does and I sometimes worry if this is restraining for B. He was desperate to start at nursery, because T was there. But it upset him when T went into the school room to do different activities and unsettled him when T left to start school. I feel B is really only now establishing himself at nursery. Will the same happen at school, will he just shadow T around the playground rather than being his own person?

I also worry that this adoration and dependency is having a negative effect on behaviour. B used to be such an obedient little boy, devastated if told off. Recently he has become increasingly naughty and defiant, worryingly immune to discipline – he just responds with a cheeky grin. It has taken me too long to realise that this is just his way of seeking attention from me – and T – and that what is needed is not just discipline but positive parenting. Too much of what I do is aimed at T, with B tagging along, expected to keep up because he does.

So, I resolved to treat him more as an individual with his own needs, to make sure, for example, I also read stories for his age group – and to give him some special mummy time. Today in the car I told him about this and said he would have “special mummy time” when he came home from nursery. He could choose what we did. He said he wanted to do puzzles – and added that sister J (17 months) could join in too. I felt touched by his consideration. He’d been promised special mummy time and his first thought was to share it with his little sister.

We did the puzzles. We all enjoyed it. B is adept at puzzles and I love watching him work out where everything goes. I suggested J pass him pieces, which she did, smiling, clapping and excited when we said thank you.

Walking up to school to collect T, B said “I love you mummy”. He often says this, he is wonderfully affectionate. Then he said “I’m going to be a good boy at home now”. It was as if, with a child’s pure intuition, he knew exactly what the special mummy time had been about. I stopped walking to give him a cuddle, which he was very pleased about.

It’s not all perfect. This evening there have been the usual fights, over a Spiderman colouring book and who was washing their hands first at the basin. But I feel more confident about them because I believe I’m coping in a positive way. There will always be issues between siblings but I hope that my new strategy will help, B especially, feel more confident about his place within the family.

8 Tiny Ways in which I'm Improving My Life

This is a really interesting post from my friend Alastair Humphreys – adventurer, author, motivational speaker. I met Al when he cycled through Bishkek and stayed with us in our Soviet flat. The story of his four year cycle around the world is fascinating, as are Al’s blog posts. Like me he thinks and reflects on things, but whereas my thoughts are bogged down with children, his are more wide-reaching.

There are some good ideas for finding satisfaction in life in this 8 Ways blog post and the subsequent comments. This being a Motherhood and Anarchy blog I should probably add that not all of them are possible for parents - I can’t go for a run every morning and spend the moments when the kettle is boiling dashing around attending to chores and child demands. But, much of what is suggested I do already (I’m nauseatingly anti-television, it sucks you in with, mostly, such trivia and wastes voids of time) and I agree entirely with the sentiments; to push yourself, try harder, start small and aim big. Al is taking a photo every day; it helps him to look for something positive and interesting. There is beauty around us in the normality of every day; children help you see that. Today it was the clouds, leaves and reflected autumn light. T pointed out a tiny green caterpillar. B loved the enormous bright moon rising in the darkening sky.

Reading this post and comments I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of what is out there to do, read, browse on the Internet, listen to, reflect on, write about then start again. Oh how I wish I had endless time. As I don’t I think one of Al’s points is key – use what time you do have to maximum effect.

Ps, Al suggests having a cold shower – that one’s not for me!