Co-sleeping (By Anshu Basnyat, LCPC)

       Co-sleeping is another controversial parenting issue in the United States.  Many have used the term co-sleeping interchangeably with bed-sharing, which further confuses the issue. Here, co-sleeping with bed-sharing is being addressed. Solitary infant sleeping is a fairly new Western concept. Many cultures around the world still practice co-sleeping with bed-sharing as a natural extension of the mother-child relationship. Not to do so is considered aberrant and frowned upon.   I have witnessed and experienced this in my own Nepali culture.
       Those who support co-sleeping with bed-sharing state many reasons including that it builds a strong bond between the parent and child, fosters longer breastfeeding, facilitates good sleep for baby and parent, and provides comfort when the child needs it for various reasons.  Those who argue against it, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, do so primarily for safety and health concerns such as suffocation, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), unhealthy dependence on parents, and separation problems that can lead to anxiety for the child.  Additionally, opponents say that bed-sharing negatively impacts the parents' own relationship such as communication and intimacy issues.
      I am confident this is an issue that every parent encounters since infant and toddler's sleep pattern changes often. However, every parent deals with it differently and can be quite an emotional stage for both parents and the child. My own kids wake up frequently during the night for one reason or another.  My husband and I fall in the middle of the co-sleeping argument. When our kids were infants, we practiced co-sleeping in the same room but not in the same bed. We moved them into their own room when we all were ready to do so.  For our son, we felt he was ready when he was six months old. For our daughter, she transferred when she was 1 year old.  Today, they sleep alone in their own rooms, but there are nights when they may join us in our bed or we go to their bed if they need comforting because of teething pain, nightmares, or whatever it may be.  So, how have you handled co-sleeping with infants and/or toddlers?   

Helicopter Parenting (By Anshu Basnyat, LCPC)

    Helicopter parent is a term used to describe parents who are extremely involved in their child’s experiences and problems, especially in academic institutions.  Like a helicopter, the parent hovers over the child and is not far from reach when they are called for so-called parental duties. This expression gained notoriety in the media when the Millenium Generation started reaching college age and their professors started complaining about The Baby Boomer parents complaining about their kids’ grades and in some cases, negotiating their child's grades.  Additionally, parents have entered their children’s workforce by negotiating their salary and benefits.  You say, this is ridiculous, I’m not one of those parents!

    Now, consider this.  Your school aged child repeatedly forgets to take their lunch to school. Like a loving parent, you repeatedly take the lunch to school so they will not go hungry. Or how about this, the weather has been chilly for the past few weeks and your child insists on not wearing the jacket to school every day for the past few weeks. So, do you let them go without a jacket or insists they wear one every chilly morning and potentially have a power struggle with your child?  Or this, your school aged child has a cell phone and you instruct them to call you multiple times during the day to report how their day is going.  It's been said by some that a cell phone is the longest umbilical cord in the history of mankind!  So, is this effective parenting or helicopter parenting?

    It is hard to know where you draw the line between being an appropriately involved parent and a helicopter parent.  However, many have argued that the implications of helicopter parenting are pretty serious and the side effects do not show up until these children enter college. At college age, they are expected to become independent and self-reliant.  Some of these expectations may include cooking for themselves, managing their finances, choosing their career path, etc.  This of course, begs the question:  Is it fair to expect your child to be autonomous when they have been so used to being rescued for the past eighteen or so years?

    Find out if you are heading in the path of becoming a helicopter parent by taking this quiz at: http://www.babyzone.com/mom_dad/quiz/helicopter-parent.  Please note that this is just a fun exercise to give you an idea about the matter.

Interesting articles on helicopter parenting:
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/unhappy-helicopter-parents/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37493795/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940395,00.html

Disciplining Kids Under Two (By Anshu Basnyat, LCPC)

            Disciplining children under two years old can be very challenging because they do not have adequate speech and language skills, inability to sit still, and have short attention span.  However, it is possible to do so.  It just requires different tactics rather than strategies like time out.  Here are some of the principles and strategies to use when disciplining a child under two years old.

1.      Lay a strong foundation.  It is best to have an action plan before a problem occurs.  If you are in a two-parent household, then team up with your partner and continually discuss how you will discipline your child and execute it accordingly. Your rewards will be much sweeter if you take this route.  Keep in mind that it will take some time to get to this sweet place and sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.  Nonetheless, with patience and consistency you will get there.  

2.      Investigate. When a negative behavior occurs, try to figure out what the function of that behavior is. Is it for hunger, sleep, attention, pain, avoidance, independence, etc?  After you have identified the trigger of the behavior then take appropriate action.  

3.      Redirecting.  One of the most effective strategies is redirecting the very young ones to something else that is appropriate to do.   The parent will often have to model the appropriate behavior.  For example, let’s say that your one year old insists that spaghetti goes on top of her head, instead of the bowl.  You then simply tell her that spaghetti is for eating and it belongs in the bowl.  You can help her put it back in the bowl. This has to be done repeatedly until the child understands.   

4.      Distraction. I use this strategy a lot with my two year old daughter, who has speech and language delays. For instance, she likes to resist when I try to put on her hearing aids. I put her in front of the computer and let her play with the keyboard while I quickly insert her hearing aids.  Keep in mind that you will have to change your distraction ever so often. You will know when the child gets bored with the distraction because they resort back to the negative behavior.  With my daughter, before the computer keyboard, a Chapstick would be enough to keep her busy. She would take the top off, put it back on until I got the aids in. She got bored of the Chapstick in about two weeks.   

5.      Ignoring. I would like to spend some time explaining this strategy because people do not take it seriously. This is because they do not understand how this actually works to stop negative behaviors.  I will refer back to Psychology 101, in particular, behaviorism which states that a behavior that is reinforced is a behavior that continues. Positive attention is a great reinforcer. If a child feels they are not getting the attention they desire, then they will settle for negative attention. In turn, the negative behavior is reinforced and continues. Therefore, ignoring is an effective strategy to stop a negative behavior.  By ignoring, you are not reinforcing a negative behavior and therefore ending it.

            To exemplify how this works let’s say your 1.5 year old throws a temper tantrum. If there’s no danger of harm, you ignore the tantrum. Yes, even if it happens in public places like the supermarket or the mall! I actually believe if you practice ignoring in a public place during an dramatic temper tantrum then your success in eliminating this behavior will be quicker. Why is this? Well, children are very smart and they like to test your limits, especially when you are most vulnerable. How much more vulnerable can you be than in a mall full of people watching your every move as you handle your out of control toddler?  This has happened to me personally. I just let my son go through his tantrum in middle of the food court. I calmly picked him up and let him continue the tantrum outside the mall. The tantrum stopped, and we went home. I can honestly recall this sort of tantrum happening one more time since then and I have to take ownership of that. I didn’t prepare my son before going to ToysRUS to buy his friend’s birthday gift. I should have explained beforehand that we were going to buy only the gift and that I would be the one making the decision on what we buy.  Well, I’m sure you can imagine how that scene unfolded.

        

Teaching Kids Money Management (By Anshu Basnyat, LCPC)

            April is National Financial Literacy Month so it seemed fitting to write about teaching kids money management.  Money is one of those touchy subjects.  I am not a financial expert (my husband is), but I do understand the impact money has on people from a psychological perspective.  Money sparks a lot of different emotions in people.

            It’s amazing to me how such an abstract concept as money has so much power in our society. Relationships are broken because of money issues. Crimes are committed because of money. Why is it that some people hoard money while others spend like there’s no tomorrow? I believe it has lots to do with how people were taught money management as a child.  I’ll be the first one to say that money is not everything and cannot buy true happiness. However, money is a huge part of our lives whether we like it or not.  Ignoring this reality does not help us. Therefore, we need to teach our children the value of money and how to manage it so they can obtain a better quality of life as adults. The goal is not to worry our kids about money or for them to become scrooges, but to teach them a valuable life skill that requires constant refining.  

            We have been teaching our son about money since he was four years old. We are very conscious of how we teach him so as not to worry him about money or for him, but to do it in a fun and educational way.  There are three core principles we follow.  First, consistency is very important.  We make sure both my husband and I are on the same wavelength when communicating (verbal and nonverbal) with our son about money.  Second, we believe the sooner you start the conversation about money, the better because children have more opportunities to learn with more time. Lastly, we try our best to be good role models when managing our own money.  We have a four pronged approach when managing money: money for basic needs, money for wants, money to save, and money for gifts/donations.

            Here are some activities we do to help our son understand the value of money and learn how to manage it.  I hope this is helpful to you!

Some Activities to Consider:

1.      The Piggy Bank.  All the money our son gets as gifts goes in the piggy bank.  Sometimes, our son finds coins in the house and asks if he can put in his piggy bank.  Love it when he does that!

2.      Periodically we take a trip to the bank with the piggy bank money.  We take the coins into the coin chamber and have him count the sum. Then deposit the money in his account.

3.       When shopping, we check the price tags and compare prices.  Once, I took him shopping for a gift in a very little shop and he looked at a price tag and yelled “this costs $45 Mom”.  People around gave us a funny smile.  I wasn’t quite sure to be proud or embarrassed.  At the end, I decided to be proud and praised him for figuring out the price. 

4.      Give choices.  Periodically, we give him choices on how he can use his money.  For example, when my son lost his first tooth, the tooth fairy left him $20 under his pillow (tooth fairy was very generous that day because that’s all she had in her wallet!).  Anyways, he was given the choice of using $5 and putting $15 in the piggy bank. Our son decided to put the $20 in the piggy bank and save it for when he’s older.  I was very happy with his decision and praised him for being so responsible with his money.  Few days later, he lost another tooth, and this time the tooth fairy left $5 and my son looked at the bill and said “oh man, that’s all.”  I could only laugh!

5.      We take periodic trips to the Dollar Store or Five Below (love that store!) and he gets $5 to spend his money any way he wants to.  This becomes a fun adventure when he contemplates whether to spend all of the $5 on one thing, or buy 5 things that’s $1 each, etc.  It’s lot of fun watching him run around the store and calculating to maximize his benefits.  This shopping experience can go on the whole day, so I have to impose a time limit.       

Great Resources on Money Management:

1.      Financial Expert Suze Ormon (we love her)! She used to say we should try to live within our means, but given our current economic crises, she now says that we should live below our means.           

2.      The Canadian show: Til Debt Do Us Part (Financial Wizard: Gail Vaz-Oxlade)

3.      Kiplinger’s Magazine

4.      Money Magazine

Happy money management with your kids!

What It Means to Have a Child with Special Needs

            I wanted to share this beautiful piece written by Emily Perl Kingsley on what it means to have and raise a child with special needs. After this writing was shared at my daughter’s School for the Deaf, I periodically refer back to it for inspiration. I hope this inspires you as well!

Welcome to Holland (by Emily Perl Kingsley)

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this…

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?" I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy.

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

Raising Teenagers

Here are some great websites that address issues that come up when parenting teenagers. Happy reading to those with teenagers! I would love to know if you find these helpful.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/10-parenting-tips-for-raising-teenagers

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/parenting/teens.shtml

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/11-rules-for-raising-teenagers-2362400

Discussion Question

 What are some discipline strategies you use with your child?