A long with the blossoming love affair with the first child comes the question,”Must I have another child?” After the initial adjustment to the first baby,and when the first few months of colic are over,new parents begin to experience the euphoria of being in love. Every time they look at their 4-month-old, she smiles back at them adoringly. A vocalization from the parent produces a sigh or an “ooh” in response. The baby wriggles all over as she attempts to communicate with the hovering parent. Few moments in life are as delicious as these minutes of reciprocal communication and in control of the world.
Have you seen a little child attack each other when they are playing? One will attack the other; the one who gets attacked will look absolutely shocked and show that she is suddenly realizing that it hurts to be bitten or to have one’s hair pulled. This can be the first vivid lesson in what it means to act upon another person. if she feel hurt so she will never do it again later.
Learning to share can be painful but rewarding. Learning to share may be the most difficult aspect of growing up in a family. But it is also the most important thing one can learn in childhood, for learning to share means learning to understand the other person’s feelings. Parents have their own problem with sharing. In thinking about a new baby, few parents feel really competent to care for more than one child. And this sense of inadequacy may well convey itself to the first child as a fear of not being available to her. Having more than one child does demand that parents plan to divide their attention. Saving a special time for the older child becomes as important as being available to the baby.
When you are expecting a new baby, prepare the older child for the separation and then for the changes in your relationship. Let her learn to participate with you and identify with you as a caregiver for the new baby. After the new baby is at home, and many things are demanding your time and energy be sure you save a special time for them especially for your older child. Each older child deserves a small segment of protected time for each parent. The amount of time doesn’t matter, but the quality of it does. One hour a week for each child with each parent can be like pure gold in maintaining your relationships. Spacing of children should be a selfish decision, with as much consideration for one’s own available energies and needs as possible.
The Guidelines Learning to Share with Your Child
• Do not allow your own problems with separation from the older child to keep you from sensing the child’s loneliness.
• Prepare the older child for the separation of your going away to have a new baby. Bring a special “love” home for the older child to play with and to imitate you as you care for your baby.
• Set up special occasions for the older child to hold and care for the new baby.
• Have special times to be with the older child and plan them without the new baby.
• Talk about these special times at all other times to make them symbolize how much you miss the earlier one-to-one relationship.
• When parents are not too stressed by sibling rivalry, it is easier for the child to express her feelings.
• Be prepared for the developmental regressions that are likely to occur in the older child, for example, increased negativism and temper tantrums, a recurrence of wetting the bed, baby talk, wanting to be treated like a baby, etc. The older child usually will regress in the areas she has just mastered, but the regression may be less obvious and less specific. A parent’s role is to support, not to punish or to show disappointment. Special attention to the older child’s needs for other outlets will certainly pay off. The natural negativism of the second year can find outlets in imitative play with other negative 2-year-old.
• All of these point to the importance of deciding when to have a second child on the basis of the parents’ ability to have emotional and physical energy left over for the other child. If they are happy in the spacing, the older child will adjust to any configuration
Maybe you interested with my article about How to Understand Child Behavior
Understanding Child Behavior
before understanding your child, it is important for parents to realize that their ability to shape a child”s behavior is limited by individual differences, present at birth. At birth, we see infants who overreact to every noise or stimulus-starting visibly, crying out, changing color, spitting up, and having a bowel movement- all as part of reaction to a single stimulus. Other infants will react to the same stimulus by lying quietly in their cribs, eyes widening, faces alerting, color paling, and bodily activity reducing to a minimum, seeming to conserve all energy in order to pay attention to the stimulus. These are both normal reactions, at different ends of a spectrum. The involvement of the infant’s whole body is apparent; attention and psychological mechanisms are intimately tied to physiological reactions. As babies get older, their physiological reactions may appear less connected to their personalities.
The parents cannot change the individual differences, they have some control over their own reaction to their child” s behavior. Often an eager or anxious parent will focus attention on and over emphasize a routine event, such as thumb sucking which is in itself of no importance, and reinforce it until it is a problem.
Parents are likely to focus on a common developmental aberration and reinforce it as a pattern at any age. They are likely to do so for unconscious reason and may not be aware of their role in reinforcing the behavior until it is already a habit. Even at this point it is not too late to relieve tension for the child and to break the vicious circle.
The parents may have to try and ignore child behavior, try not to give in, remove certain privileges, look and sound as if you mean it when asking you child to do something. Most importantly concentrate on encouraging and rewarding good behavior all the time
How To Cope Positively With Difficult Child Behavior.
- Establish House Rules
- Prevention Is Better Than Cure
- Understand Your Child's Behavior
- Discipline With Short Time-Outs
- Take Five
- Never Strike In Anger
- Don't Yell or shout at children
- Get Away
Being sad is very different for a child from crying. Crying is an active, protesting state, whereas being sad is a passive, low-keyed one. Crying can serve many purposes-anger, protest, a call for help, or just letting off steam at the end of the day. After the crying period is over, the emergency will have been met, someone is likely to have responded, and everyone feels better. Life can be resumed. Not so with sadness. Sadness is a more prolonged state for the child. She is likely to respond to this feeling with little physical activity and few bodily changes. The depressed feelings do not express themselves or get alleviated easily. Since these feelings cannot be changed right away, they are likely to be frightening to parents. Parents may easily overreact, trying to push the child out of her “mood”, or they may try to ignore it in her. Neither approach is likely to work for more than temporary periods. Sadness in a child is likely to represent a real cry for help.
How does a parent evaluate periods of sadness, and help the child pull out of them? First of all, timing should be considered. Do these periods come at a time when there are real and understandable which the child might find difficult to understand or to handle? If so, there is already a better chance of helping the child recognize the reasons behind her sadness.
“How entrenched are these periods?” Is the child unreachable or can she cheers up when interesting events occur? If the former is true, it is a measure of how deeply affected she may be. But the fact that she can be cheered up or it may well be an indication of things that deserve attention.
Finally, how much does this sadness invade other areas of the child’s life, especially her relationships with others? Does it keep her from wanting to play with her friends, or do her friends shun her because she is sad? Do you feel sad when you are around her? All of these would be indications of the extent to which her sadness was affecting her, and could be used as guidelines in deciding how much should be done about it.
Please also read my article about The Guidelines when a Child is Having Fear
When a child is having fears, I recommend the following:
1. First, see the fears as part of a normal spurt in development. In an older child the fears may accompany adjustment to a stress at school or at home. Or they may occur at time when the child is trying to deal with aggressive or competitive feelings. If parents look on fears this way, they can be less frightened of the symptoms in the child and lessen the anxiety around this symptom.
2. Offer the child reassurance about himself as well as (more directly) about the feared objects. Try to face them honestly and directly, but don’t expect reassurance to allay them. A deeper understanding of way he may be fearful is the ultimate goal, but it may be hard to put into words. Often it is better expressed indirectly in ways that give the child permission to act out aggression or to verbalize anxieties and competitive feelings. Giving him acceptable ways to be aggressive and reassuring him about them may help a lot.
3. Do not let up on discipline and limits, but let the child know all over again the reason for the limits and how they help control the very feelings he may fearful of. Congratulate him openly when he can conform to these limits and be patiently understanding when he can’t. Let him know from you that it is learning process which takes time. No one really likes to learn these limits.
4. Make the child aware of acceptable outlets for the negative or aggressive feelings. Talk openly of how other members of the family or of how friends he cares about handle their aggressive feelings. Introduce sports and other acceptable ways for expressing these normally developing emotions.
5. Help the child begin to express himself and to understand why he feels these negative, angry, and aggressive feelings. In doing so, you will be establishing invaluable patterns for sharing the inevitable turmoil’s of later periods, of adolescence, etc. Fears can be seen as a window into the inevitable periods of adjustment which all small children must go through.
Maybe you interested with my other article about Understanding The Aggression in a Child
By 3-1/2 or 4 years of age, fears accompany the beginning of normal aggression. Most children begin to have feelings of aggression at this age as part of growing up and of trying themselves out. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has described how aggressive feelings surface at 4 or 5 years. But, before they can be acknowledge or acted upon, they are boiling around inside. A child begins to experience complicated feelings when he sees a toy gun or when he imagines himself using one. When he wants to last out at someone but dares not, there aren’t too many ways to handle the feelings that keep coming to the surface. Fears help to keep them in check. Selma Fraiberg’s wonderful book, The Magic Years
An example illustrates this type of fear: “your child 3-1/2-old is suddenly afraid of everything
“. He’s fearful of fire engines and loud noises. He’s especially afraid of the dark and of going to bed alone. When his parents leave the house, he has to know where they are going, why, and who we will be with-and he like to hear them tell him over and over.
The children fears represented a period of rapidly learning about himself. He was learning what it was like to feel aggressive. This period in children’s lives always demand an extra adjustment. How will he learn to control his aggression? Learning about himself at such a time carries with it a price. As they become aware of new feelings, children fall into a kind of him balance in which they may become temporarily oversensitive to things and events around them. This increased sensitivity is likely to show up in the form of fearfulness or of expressed fears. These are an expression of the normal anxiety that goes with the reshuffling of one’s ideas and awareness of aggressive feelings. A child with fears can be seen as asking for help from those around him-help to see the limits of the new feelings as well as the limits of his own capacity to deal with the situation.
Acknowledgment of guilty feelings and feelings of turmoil seems too risky, so the children express himself in his fears. His fear allowed him to regress to a more helpless state, through which he could gather in longed-for attention from his parents. As he did this, he projected all of these frightening aggressive feelings on something’s outside of himself. He then could be afraid of aggression in others around him.
Fears and aggressive dreams are an expression of healthy development in the 4-6-year-old child. If parents respect them and are reassuring and protective, they can help the child learn about this phase of development in himself.
Watch a Video and Learn About the Anxiety Child Program
Please also read my article about How to Understand Fears in a Small Children
Expressing fears can be one way for a child to cry for help. They strike a sensitive note in parents and generally produce a comforting reaction. If they occur often enough, they may call attention to a more deep-seated insecurity in the child, and parents then may be forced to eliminate unnecessary pressures and stresses on the child. In this way fears in children serve a double purpose.
Fears and being fearful are a normal part of childhood. They express the child’s need for dependency and occur especially at certain times in a child’s development. Nearly always they accompany a rapid spurt in one or more areas of development-in the intellectual, emotional, or motor spheres.
Tamar E. Chansky's wonderful book, Freeing Your Child from Anxiety: Powerful, Practical Solutions to Overcome Your Child's Fears, Worries, and Phobias
This book has outlined for parents some of the sources and the evolution of these fears in 0-10 years old. All parent of children in this age group should read it.
A child’s first fears may be expressed as a heightened sensitivity to strangers, which crops up at several expect able points in the first year. Peaks of stranger awareness and the fear of strangers are the first evidence in babies of their increasing ability to distinguish the important people in their lives. Learning to tell mother from father and from “others” is a major job of infants, and it starts early. By the age of 4-6 weeks, babies recognize fathers and behave differently with them than with mothers or with strangers. By 4 months they become increasingly wary of whoever is not mother or father and try to avoid close contact with that outside person. Even a familiar “other” may create anxiety. All sights and sounds suddenly seem more important. This awareness accompanies a well-recognized cognitive spurt at 4 months.
In 4-month-old babies will look over a mother’s sister or a father’s brother very carefully. After such a lengthy assessment, the baby will begin to cry relentlessly if he is picked up by this familiar “stranger”. Not until his mother or father takes him back will he stop crying. Is this “fear” on the baby’s differences? If a familiar grandmother or grandfather looks him in the face at this age, he will break down into loud, protesting wailing.
At I year of age these same imbalances create new turmoil. For a few months the baby may have been tranquil about strangers and strange situations, But when he stands, is learning to walk, and is cruising around the house, he become sensitive to and fearful of change all over again. A sense of control allows the baby to make choices: Will I walk away? Losing control seems to threaten all his newly found motor skills and the sensitivity that goes with them.
The baby may wake up screaming two or three times a night at this age. The child’s new activities lead to all sorts of unresolved experiences. The frustration left over from the day expresses it self at night, and the fears are a cry for help. Night time fears at the first year are an expect able reaction to the excitement of learning so many new things.
Watch a Video and Learn About the Anxiety Child Program
Please also read my article about Understanding When The Baby Learn About Loving and being Love
The infant always learns about her universe. She learns s who can respond with intimacy; she learns what behaviors from her will elicit a response; and she learns that when she sets the tone will be engulfed in this wonderfully rewarding exchange. In this way, she learns about herself as a social human being very early. In this system she first learns that she is what we call “being loved”. The father and mother sometimes asking the question like, “How will she know when she’s loved?” the answer is, “Watch her and she’ll tell you.”
This reciprocal system is at the heart of parenting. Being there when she needs you and showing her that you care is the parents’ side of this communication system, the baby’s chance to learn that she’s loved. The reward for you as you enter into this intimate communication is that you will “know” when you are in touch with your baby. The underlying rhythm of attention-inattention is so compelling that it carries you along. The baby’s response to each bid is so heightened that you will feel a glow as she smiles, vocalizes, or wriggles all over. At the end of it, as if she were saying to you, “it’s your turn now,” she will turn off her response to wait for yours. In such a period of play, the chances to learn about each other are endless.
These reactions are strengths in a baby of 4-8 weeks of age. When the mother does brighten up to play with her in the usual manner, the baby redoubles her responses with obvious joy. In other words, a small infant who is loved expects a kind of responsiveness from each of her parents, and when she does not get this she has marvelous, strong ways of defending herself from the disappointment-at least temporarily. In these defensive periods, she well may be learning important coping mechanisms for future disappointments.
Another but important part of this intense signaling system is the capacity of the parents or the baby to put an end to it or limitation. If she spent all the time bathed in this reciprocal system without interruption, her day certainly would become too heightened or too flat and even boring. So, the limits on it are as important as the fact that it exists. The baby learns that she can participate in such a period of intense interaction, but that a necessary separation will follow. From this experience of separation, she will learn that she is a separate individual and can manage for herself, too. This system feeds her development, as does the frustration of terminating it and the experience of being left to herself. The part of a parent’s responsibility is to allow baby opportunities for autonomy-to learn that when she reaches for and gets an object handed to her.
There is time, in other words, when setting limits, saying “no,” or even leaving the baby to find her own answer may also tell a baby that you love her. In this way, the small infant learns early about loving and being loved.
Watch a Video and Learn About the Anxiety Child Program
Please also read the article Knowing Behavioral Communication Between Father and The Baby
The father sets up a different but predictable behavioral system with the baby. By the age of 3-4 weeks his rhythm with the baby is clear and differentiated from the one mother and infant have developed together.
Drs. Suzanne Dixon and Michael Yogman in the Child Development Unit at Boston Children’s Hospital have found that fathers are more likely to use a playful approach, and to “jazz a baby up” by heightening the rhythm the baby sets. They tap different parts of her body in rhythmic games, they speak in more heightened rhythms, and they exaggerate facial expressions in ways that seem to say to the baby, “Now, let’s play!” A small baby first watches quietly as she stars such a period with her father. Then she will hunch up her shoulders, look eager, and finally laugh out loud, bouncing up and down in her chair. So predictable is that a baby of 3-months will take on an expectant look, hunched shoulders, and will lean forward in her chair when she hears her father’s voice. It is as if she knew that her father’s presence would result in this special playful kind of communication.
Fathers, in turn, learn to expect very early to see this playful attitude on the face and in the body of the baby, and they respond to it with an expected, playful attitude. Even when the father is the primary caregiver, the baby seems to save a special “play” track for her father and a softer, smoother, less heightened set of rhythmic responses for her mother.
These predictable patterns indicate the importance to each of the participants of having a known set of behavioral signals which say to each, ”You’re here and I’m with you!”
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Please also read How to Understand Emotional Communication in a Baby
There is a predictable pattern of behavior as the mother and father interacts with the infant. There are remarkable things in all cases in which the parents are having a “good” time with their babies.
The baby is placed in a reclining infant chair, on a table. The mother is instructed to sit in front of her and to talk or play without picking her up. When the mother first come in, she usually stars to talk gently to the baby, to hold onto her legs or her buttocks as she first greets her, and then begins to talk to her. When the baby sees her, she greets her mother with a bright smile and pays an increased attention to her. When they play each other it will make a rhythmic dance as they signal back and forth. The baby usually sets the rhythm as she looks at her mother, her face brightening, her hands and legs reaching out toward her gently, then smoothly curling back into herself. When we looks her baby eyes it’s intensely interested in her mother’s attempts to engage her, and a dulled-down look in her eyes as she tunes herself down. Often she looks to one side to “recover” from the intense looks her mother gives her. She is attending intensely then recovering in a gentle but definite rhythm, as if to protect her rather fragile, immature heart and lung systems from becoming overloaded.
The mother looks at the baby most of the time, but she plays with her in rhythms-touching her, then pulling her hand back only to return to touch her again, often patting or rubbing rhythmically and in time with her. She smiles and vocalizes in a timing very much synchronized with the baby’s. Her head bobs gently forward when she looks at her, and withdraws when she tunes her down. All of her rhythms and her advances are timed to the baby’s attention cycles.
Underlying all of this communication system called a “feedback” system. As mother and baby are locked into each other’s signals and rhythms, they are feeding each other more than simple message. They are saying to each other that they are really in touch, and the feeling of synchrony say to both of them, “We are really locked into each other.”
We can see it as the base for the baby’s earliest emotional communication. In this way she learns by “feedback” about the world around her, as well as about herself. If the baby changes it by a smile, the chances are that her mother will smile back-and thus she learns about the effect of smiling-on those around her as well as on herself. The same goes for vocalizing, for making a reaching-out gesture to which the mother will respond in her way. In this reciprocal system, no one leads the other all the time. At one point, the baby may be setting the tone; at another it will be the mother. Each leads the other in an alternating system. At any moment, either one can turn the other off. This part of it is important to the baby, whose immature nervous system makes it necessary to be able to turn her mother off before she, the baby, gets overloaded with the excitement of too many messages from mother.
Both mother and baby have some control over this dialogue. The baby is learning about herself and her influence on an important “other” by her behavior. The mother is learning how to tune in to her baby’s responses and subtle needs.
Watch a Video and Learn About the Anxiety Child Program
Please also read the article How babies Learn about Love
The most common questions with which young parents asking: “Am I doing the right things for my baby?” and “How will she know that she is loved?” The questions are generated by a desire to take all the right steps in childbearing at a time when our culture is no longer very sure of its goals-and at a time when there are no sure ways for parents to find out what these goals should be.
Perhaps the fact that there are so many different points of view is good in some ways. At least young parents needn’t be burdened by the feeling that there is just one answer and that they can’t find it. The wealth of conflicting sources of advice may press them of find their own solution, an individual one rather than a prepackaged one. I worry about joining the fray and offering one more bit of advice to already overloaded parents.
However, what I would offer would not be specific advice. All I can recommend is: “Do what makes you and your baby feel the best and gives you the nice time together.”When confronted with that answer at a party, anyone who is searching for a simple answer immediately turns away from me and finds a new, more rewarding conversationalist. When a parent who is seriously searching for the answer ask me, I can work toward fuller advice. I urge parents to follow their own “best instincts”-made up of a combination of intuition, their own past experience, and what they can learn about the issues with which they and their child are coping. Such a solution, of course, is not a file-safe; along with good periods there will be periods of conflict. The difficult times can be used for reevaluation and change. I don’t think that what you do as a parent is nearly as important to the child as how do you it-and what feelings of caring go into it. In other words, the very fact that you care and are concerned about your baby is the most important message that she will receive.
But-how will she know that you care about her? Don’t all parents care about their children? Don’t all of them mean well, and still make serious mistakes in rearing their children? Probably they do, but the degree to which they are freed of their own problems and able to listen to the child’s own needs may differ considerably. Caring enough to be able to look beyond one’s own needs in order to be there when your child needs you is no small order. And to be really available may be a lot harder than it appears to be on the surface.
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Maybe you interested with article How to understand Natural Stresses in a Child
Knowing Hypersensitive Infant
Nevertheless, there are infants who are difficult to nurture. As one attempts to rock them gently, they stiffen and arch away. As they are rocked, they have a series of body startles which result in inconsolable crying. If one looks in the face of such a baby or talks to her, she arches, looks frightened, and turns away. Every attempt to reach out for this kind of infant seems to result in negative responses. She cries for long inconsolable periods in the day. Social stimuli seems to turn her off but not on. What can a parent do to reach such a baby?
Any caring parent will automatically blame herself for failure with such a baby. In turn, the efforts overload the baby even more, and she turns off even more dramatically. The stage can be step for feelings of failure on both their parts-in the mother, a feeling of having failed as a parent, and in the baby, an expectation to fail in reaching others.
How to Understand Hypersensitive Infant
For many of hypersensitive babies there is no available explanation. A mother who is handed such a baby will automatically feel this behavior is her fault.
In order to try to understand hypersensitive babies and this failing process, I have studied a group of babies who demonstrated what I saw as hypersensitivity to social stimuli even in the newborn nursery. In the noisy, overlit nursery, they lay with staring eyes, looking off into the distance and frowning. As I watched them, although they appeared to be awake, they seemed almost mesmerized and unavailable. If you talked gently to them or rocked them, they looked more worried. Their frowns would deepen, their eyes become more glazed as they stared doggedly away. As one tried to get a positive response, their respiration's would increase to become deep and regular. If one persisted, they often would turn actively away, their color would worsen and they might even have a bowel movement or spit up. Normal social stimuli seemed to be too much for these babies from the start. The kind of things from these babies brought stiffening, turning away, and withdrawal.
When I realized that these babies were demonstrating a kind of hypersensitivity as newborns, it began to explain other behaviors I saw in these babies. Their ability to control their state of consciousness was not as effective as it was in most full-term babies. Most such babies would come for sleep slowly and be reachable for interaction for a while; even in crying they could be reached temporarily by a voice or by holding and rocking them. If you tried to play with them at feeding times, they overreacted with their gastrointestinal tracts.
The baby could accept one stimulus at a time, but not more than one. And even that stimulus had to be turned down to her limits. The baby could settle down slowly to take in and respond to an auditory or visual or tactile stimulus, or the kinethetic stimulus of being picked up or rocked.
Most such babies would come from sleep slowly and be reachable for interaction for a while, even in crying they could be reached temporarily by a voice or by holding and rocking them. They would give one the feedback of having done the right thing for them
Since I have begun to understand these infants, I have been able to demonstrate this hypersensitive, over reactive behavior to their parents. Instead of feeling helpless and ineffectual with their babies, they can change their approach, slow down, cut down on stimuli around such a baby, and deal with her in low-keyed way.
Swaddling them helps at times. Using a pacifier or teaching them to suck on their own thumbs may help them gain a kind of control system of their own.
Feeding them in quiet, darkened room with as little stimuli around them as possible can also be a help. Keeping their days and night on a regular, predictable schedule and cutting down on too much activity is a help to both these babies and their parents.
These hypersensitive babies are at one extreme end of a spectrum of difficult to understand infants. Parent must exercise great sensitivity to be able to nurture them successfully. Parents who had expected a lovely, calm, easy to reach baby must adapt their rhythms, their level of stimuli, their whole day and night cycle to meet these babies needs. It is great challenge. to teach these babies to take in and respond to stimuli without losing control over themselves can be an enormous task
Instead of feeling helpless and ineffectual with your babies, you can change your approach, slow down, cut down on stimulate around such a baby, and deal with her in a low-keyed way. Swaddling them helps at times. Parents must exercise great sensitivity to be able to nurture them successfully. Parents who had expected a lovely, calm, easy-to-reach baby must adapt their rhythms, their level of stimuli, and their whole day-and-night cycle to meet these babies’ needs. To teach these babies to take in and respond to stimuli without losing control over themselves can be an enormous task. But when such a baby is reached and can learn over time how to manage her environment for herself, she is on her way to a successful future.
In order to understand more about this condition please refer to my colleague Dr blaise ryan - Chief Medical Advisor, Child Brain Health Research Institute because he has a 'communication "secrets" that help your child behave and listen better'
