Helping your child to succeed Part.II

         

       You can remove sources of frustration and help your child act independently by creating a physical environment that meets his needs. A small step stool makes it possible for him to get to the sink to wash his hands. Dressing is made easier if you choose simple clothing, such as trousers with elastic waists. Each time that he successfully does something new, his self confidence increases.

           Let him make harmless mistakes. If he puts his T-shirt on backward, resist the temptation to correct it. By allowing the shirt to remain reversed, you avert a possible fight and, more importantly, provide him with a sense of accomplishment.

           

               With all this insistence on independence, you may be surprised when your stubborn child suddenly changes his tune and insists, “You do it”. Whether young children have managed a new challenge or met with failure, they often then want to retreat for a while until they feel more comfortable. Because the wish for dependency remains strong, even the four year old who has mastered dressing himself may occasionally ask you for help.

Helping your child to succeed Part.I

          

             


The struggle for independence begins with your toddler’s insisting,” Me do it myself.” She will demand to feed herself and put on her own coat. You should welcome these requests, since they show that she feels secure enough to attempt to manage things by herself.

             Children learn by doing, so it is important that they try to do what their parents have been doing for them. Yet the projects they are determined to take on are often beyond their physical dexterity. A toddler will labor with mighty concentration to pour a glass of juice, and then dissolve into tears after spilling the whole carton on the floor. When you insist on pushing her in the stroller instead of letting her walk, she feels bullied. So many of her efforts at independence are frustrated- by you, by objects she cannot manage, by her own body.

            Your child’s emotional growth requires him to assert his independence from you, but he can accomplish this only with your help. The trick comes in encouraging his efforts while being attuned to what he can handle. When your two year old insists on zipping up his coat, you give him a head start by connecting the bottom of the zipper. He is successful because you have adapted the situation to his capabilities.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.XII

The child’s first ideas about emotions were undistilled collections of everything she knew about a particular feeling. Her own experiences with feeling sad were mixed with everything that she could observe when she sensed that her mother was feeling unhappy. It is only with time and experience that the child learns to distinguish between its own feelings and those of someone else. The same sense of “me” and “you” that helps the child accept limits enables her for the first time, at the age of three or four, to feel empathy or compassionate love. Now, when the child sees her mother sad, she may try to help with a special hug or a handful of flowers.

The preschooler’s awareness of other people’s feelings is part of a growing ability to categorize her experiences. Increasingly she can perceive grown up distinctions between self and other animate and inanimate, right and wrong real and make believe yesterday and today. Once she has grasped the distinction between yesterday and today her first understanding of the concept of time patience will follow, for she now can appreciate the promise of future rewards.

The result of these developments is a set of skills that will be central to the child’s social and emotional adjustment throughout the coming years. These are the skills that will enable her to focus her attention and follow rules in school to distinguish between reality and fantasy in play, to plan a course of action and work toward a future goal in a job, and to consider the feelings and needs of those who share her life. Although her emotional abilities will continue to grow and change well into adulthood, the foundations are firmly laid by kinder garden age.

As you observe your child’s progress, remember that the path will not be entirely linear. There are bound to be some slips, some fits and start. Particularly when your child is learning something new, he may regress in other areas that he has long since mastered. By the age of five, your child will be standing on his own emotionally equipped to march off to school and take his place in world of other people. Like many accomplishments in life, the end of this journey is only a good beginning.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.X

To recognize the other stages of this learning process, it helps to focus on your child’s pretend play. A second stage commences at about two years. In play, your child may have her teddy bear ask for a hug, then let a doll embrace the bear in response. In this simple exchange, the child moves beyond using ideas merely to state a demand. Now there is the idea of the teddy bear’s demand plus the idea that the doll fulfills a role in responding to that need. At this stage the child might say ‘daddy, apple juice’ rather than just blurting our “juice, juice.’

At two and half, the child’s play is characterized by a random stream of ideas without concern for the kinds of constraints that adults take for granted. Logic, sequential time, cause and effect- all of these are missing. In the course of 10 minutes, the teddy bear might get in a fight, fall asleep on a lumpy bed of building blocks, fly on a plane one tenth his sixe and try to play a harmonica. Whatever occurs to the child is what happens next. Whatever props are nearby becomes part of the game. In this third level, the child is using a lot of ideas, but the ideas have little apparent connection.

In the fourth level, around the age of three, the child starts to fill in the first of those missing connections. Now the teddy bear may be seated in company at a rather elaborate tea party. The child’s play begins to follow a somewhat more organized theme. Moment to moment details are still decided spontaneously, but there is an underlying plan and a unifying emotional thread that keeps the part on track. The child’s feelings about taking care of her imaginary guest keep the game organized.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.IX

      Some children communicate ideas quite well with gestures before their language skills bloom. At two and half, a child night tug at Mothers blouse and point to the baby, thereby telling her that it is time for baby brother to nurse. Working only with gestures, the child shows concern for the baby.

Another way that your child might first use ideas is through the spatial patterns that he devises when playing with his toys. A child who organizes a long, straight line of toy cars clearly has a preconceived mental picture that gives structure to his game. When the child opens a gate in a wall of blocks and drives car through, she is demonstrating yet another idea.

      As a parent, it is important for you to recognize your child’s ability to deal with abstract concepts, no matter what form of expression that ability takes. Whether he first uses language, gestures, spatial relationships or pretend play to express his ideas, you will want to encourage this development: using ideas to manage feelings is an important milestone on the road to emotional maturity. It is a skill your child must master in order to bring the raw, self centered impulses of his early childhood under control and to learn to live harmoniously with other.

      The capacity to use ideas does not emerge full blown overnight. It develops in stages that you can observe.  In the first stage which typically begins at about 18 months the child will employ ideas simply to communicate something she wants. She may use words to ask for apple juice, gesture for her favorite blanket or tug at your leg for a hug.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.VIII

      Using the new words she is learning, she labels her ideas with names. This allows her to plan more complex actions, combining two or more related ideas. At two and a half, for example, the child spies a favorite toy that is up too high to reach. She Calles out to mother, then points and says” want it” when mother arrives. The child has identifies a need, formed an idea of the solution to that need, combined the idea with her concept of mother, then put her ideas into words. She was, in short, used her mind to solve a problem. When the child tells you she is scared, happy or mad, she is summarizing all that she has felt and observed about those emotion. With experience, her understanding will be greatly refined, but by the simple act of applying the correct label to her feelings, she has acquired a powerful tool for organizing her emotional life.

      The use of language is the most obvious way that a child reveals newfound conceptual abilities. But different children arrive at this stage with different tools as their disposal. Some children first show their use of ideas through fantasies and pretend play. Earlier, the child learned that you draw with a crayon and drink from the cup. Not she makes these objects part of her make believe games. Her toy bear sits with her in front of the coloring book and is allotted a share of the crayons. Later the child offers the bear a sip from her empty cup. She is showing the ability to use ideas. When the child lavishes care or affection on the toy animal, she has evidently abstracted her own need for care and formed an idea about love.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.VII

 This new found ability to create abstract ideas has its roots in the child’s earlier discovery that objects have specific functions and perform certain tasks. The child saw that this lesson held true for people as well. Mother gives her food, puts on her clothes and can be counted on to hand her a toy; father reads books and drives her in the car. Mother and father also play a major role within the child’s world of feelings. They laugh with her, and respond to her love, and comfort her when she is upset and by now the child is thoroughly familiar with the physical characteristics of her parents; after all, she first began to study their faces when she was about a month old.

 Gradually the child brings all these separate impressions together. She links observations about the way her parents look and behave to the feelings and expectations they stir in her. In doing so, she creates a single mental image of her mother and of her father. The toddler has formed an idea that she can use.

 This valuable emotional tool increases her self sufficiency. Until this point, the child responded to emotions strictly on a behavioral level. As a very young infant she calmed herself by focusing on familiar sensations; later, when she was upset, she flailed out at what disturbed her, or she started to cry. But at this toddler stage, the child is starting to approach the world conceptually as well. She can comfort herself conjuring a mental picture of a person she trusts and loves, or of pleasurable objects and experiences. Her feelings are translated into a mental image that tempers and guides her emotional expression. The child is beginning to understand how feelings and actions should mix and work together.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.VI

As your child approaches a year and a half, you will notice him behaving in patterns that make emotional sense and are socially acceptable. If he gets caught in the middle when you scold his older brother, he may try to defend the older child with a hug or try to restore your good humor by laughing and flashing an unusually bright face. More and more, in this age of growing independence, he is striking out on his own, emerging as a unique individual with his own quirks and personality traits. You begin to get a reliable sense of the kind of person your youngster will be.

In the midst of all these changes, your child has started to speak a few words and seems to understand when Mommy has to say “no”.  His capacity for social and emotional growth seems to unfold a little faster with each new day.

At some point shortly after the child reaches 18 months of age, she makes a revolutionary mental leap: $he begins to form ideas in the abstract. This ability, coupled with a growth in language, makes possible a leap to the next higher emotional level. Now she can use her mind, rather than raw behavioral patterns, to satisfy her physical and psychological needs.

The child who has reached this conceptual milestone can search for toy or stuffed animal that has been hidden from her sight in playful game, because she is able to form a mental image of the hidden object. On a social or emotional level, the child can envision a person not present in the room or can recall an interaction with that person.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.V

When your child is somewhere between ten to eighteen months, you may notice the following: A one year old may race on all fours to greet his father at the door. He may pull himself to his feet by clutching at daddy pant legs and chortle when he is lifted for a hug. He is acting upon his understanding of cause and effect, learning to form patterns of behavior and to inter mix actions with bits and pieces of emotion these are the first signs of ability to organize.

In the previous age when your child got angry it was fleeting reaction that leads nowhere. Now he may crawl over and bite the playmate- who inspired his anger. He also shows his love more demonstrably, making a big show of bestowing hugs and kisses. When the toddler learns to pout, he has found a way to act out his disappointment and uses it to play for his parent’s sympathy. A little later on, he shows the beginnings of pride. He wants you to notice when he stacks three blocks or pulls off his socks all by himself. All these developments are tokens of your child’s first real sense of who he is.

This emerging sense of self is shaped as the child experiments with patterns of behavior. She is constantly watching, always trying to learn how things work. She is constantly watching always trying to learn how things work. She leafs a dozen times through a magazine, empties the cupboard of all the pots and pans. She discovers that everything has a specific function: A rake scrapes up leaves, the telephone carries voices, and the high chair holds her up where she can see her parent’s eyes. All the while, the child is studying her parent’s actions and finds that they have their functions as well. She begins to imitate adult behavior as a way of trying out the actions and emotions she observes, and in some cases, what starts as imitation becomes the real thing. With this new tool at her disposal, the child can initiate actions to get her needs met- tugging on the refrigerator door for example, to show that she is thirst and wants a drink of juice or milk.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.IV

The importance of this first deep emotions relationship cannot be overstated, for it is from this primary human attachment that all subsequent social relationships flow. The infant has sampled the benefits of having an emotional partner and at some point between two and ten months, he will be ready for the next step of his journey; He will take the initiative in communicating with others.

 During the middle months of her first year, the baby begins physically reaching out a hand or flagging her arms to show that there is something she wants. In company, she smiles, makes inexpert gestures and utters small sounds in an effort to elicit a response from those around here. When these overtures are answered when someone smiles back or mimics her movements and haphazard noises- the child learns that she has the power to make something happen.

She discovered a reason to communicate – a major leap forward on the path to emotional maturity. Exploring this exciting new reflex cause and effect, the child sees that by stretching out her arm, she can sometimes get a toy in her hand. In the same manner, the child learns that by smiling and making a show of her joy, she has the ability to create happiness in her parents. The child discovers that her actions and her feelings can make a difference.

In her first nine months, a child developed a taste for the world: almost immediately, she sensed her need for people and formed a deep emotional bond with the person central to her care; the child’s affection for her mother then broadened into a will to communicate, and –even though her tools of self expression were minimal- she found she could provoke an emotional response. Now the child wants to communicate in many different ways. She is poised for an explosive burst of growth, both in her motor skills, which so far have been limited and in her emotional repertoire.

Child’s Journey to Emotional Maturity Part.III

Each of these seemingly tiny steps forward is fundamental to future emotional growth. Certainly the child’s capacity to control her feelings and her readiness to regard the world with interest will be essential will be essential to any meaningful social or social or emotional exchange. In the short term, this mastery of the senses is a stepping stone to the child’s next important stage- forming a first strong emotional bond. Any random discovery can attract attention during the first weeks of life. But soon the indiscriminate interest in the world beings to become more focused. During the second third and fourth months, the child zeroes in on Mother. There is a growing sense that human contact is the most essential experience the part of the landscape that can be counted upon to provide food and other comforts. Sometime between the fourth and eight weeks of his life, your child finds a way to indicate his budding fascination.

One day while he ponders your face, your child quiet unexpectedly lights up in a smile. This first real sing recognition can be mightily affection; many parents remember these enraptured first smiles as vividly as their child’s first steps. And in terms of the baby’s emotions development, fascination with the unman face and voice is truly a giant step forward.

 The seeds of a new emotion shave been planted and it is up to you to help your child bring it to fruition. By responding to his smiles and showing him quiet love and affection, by talking to him and being his steady companion, you show your child that there is rewarding side to life beyond the mere satisfaction of physical needs. You are, essentially wooing your baby into human society. Over time, his fascination turns to love.