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The Baby Child Website A Website For The Important Little People In Our Lives |
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A Parent's Guide To Medicine Safety Home Schooling Your Child Guide
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Parenting Tips - Just a few to get you warmed up Safety in the Home When we bring a new baby home, most families prepare their house for the new arrival. As the child grows, safety measures are put into place, like locking cabinets and installing outlet covers. However, many families don’t think about household safety as their kids get older. Here are some things to think about. Do you have an emergency plan in place for your children? Do they know where to go if you have to get out of the house quickly? Plan a location that is away from your house that can be a meeting place for all family members. Make sure your children understand the circumstances in which they would leave the house and wait at your meeting place. Do your children know what to do if there is a fire in your house? Most parents figure that their children know to get out, but is it something that you have ever practiced? You only have a few minutes when the fire breaks out before all the oxygen is gone from the air and you need to have everyone out before then. Practice escape routes with your children. If there is an emergency in the home, do your kids know who to call? Do they know how to dial 9-1-1? Can they tell their address to the operator on the phone? It is a good idea to have emergency information posted above the phone in your house. Write down the emergency numbers, and your address. Even adults have forgotten their address in a crisis. When you have an emergency, it is too late to plan. Make sure that you and your children have a plan in place to protect your family in an emergency. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Getting along with Siblings If you have more than one child, chances are they fight with one another. Sibling rivalry is a part of growing up and being in a family. I have a great way of dealing with this, and it could be termed as Passive Parenting. This is how Passive Parenting works. First, set some ground rules for tattletaling. For our kids, you can come tell a parent if someone is hurting you, if they are hurt themselves, or if someone is being destructive, like coloring on the walls. If they tattletale for something else, they get into trouble themselves. Now, when your child comes and complains about something a sibling is doing, listen to them, and then say something like, “I’ll bet you hate that.” “That isn’t very fun.” “That really bites.” Make it a statement that you can use for any situation. Don’t offer suggestions to fix it, just offer your statement. If they repeat the problem, repeat your answer. It will likely frustrate them at first, but they will learn to solve their own problems. This doesn’t work for every situation, but it works for many of them. For other problems, have your children set some rules that will help them deal with other problems that come up. For my kids, they like the privacy of their bedrooms, and hate when brothers or sisters get into their things. So, my kids have set a rule that you have to ask permission to go into a sibling’s bedroom. Sibling rivalry is something that never goes away, but if you teach your children to handle their own battles, you are creating a more confident child and one that will get along better with others. Learn how to talk to your kids Every parent dreads being asked questions by their children that they aren’t ready to answer. Learn how to talk to your kids and develop the relationship that you will need when they get older. There are some basic guidelines that parents can follow to talk better to their children. Here are a few. When your child asks a question, find out why they are asking before you go into a long winded explanation. Sometimes we misunderstand what they are asking. I had a daughter ask me what a certain word meant. I went on and tried to tactfully explain this word. After I finished, she mentioned that she saw the word in the name of a lotion I had, and just wondered what it meant. I could have come up with a much simpler answer if I would have understood the question. Allow your kids to have an opinion and express it. Try not to make them feel like their opinion is less valuable because you know more than they do. Take the time to listen to them and understand where they are coming from. Always talk to them at their age appropriate level. Don’t talk down to them just because they are a child. I had a nurse at the doctor’s office that talked baby talk to my two year old daughter, who just looked at the women with confusion. Children are smarter than we give them credit for. A big part of learning to talk to our children is learning how to listen. Following these suggestions and paying attention to your kids will help you develop the relationship that you want. When they are older, that open communication becomes essential. Develop that relationship now. Healthy Eating for Kids Chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese seem to be the mainstream diet for many children. Parents often struggle to get their children to eat healthy foods. Our family started on a new diet. We switched our white bread for wheat and started stocking the fridge with fruits and vegetables. The kids rebelled for a while, but now they are used to it. They fight for the last strawberry. Here are some suggestions to help you make the transition to healthy eating in your home. Monitor how many snacks your children eat in a day. The rule at our house is a snack at 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. I don’t have whiny kids wanting treats all day, because they know when they can have them. However, if they want something healthy like an apple, a bagel, or some fruit, they can have it without asking. Add more vegetables to the dinner table. Try a variety of vegetables, and keep trying them even when your kids say they don’t like them. Taste buds change over time. Have them try one bite each time you serve something they don’t like. Make food more fun. Serving dinner that your kids can adapt to their own tastes makes dinner more fun, and gets them to eat better. Try taco soup with a base to include tomatoes and pinto beans and let them add their own ingredients: cheese, sour cream, chips, olives, corn, etc. They probably won’t notice that there were tomatoes in there. Healthy eating takes time but is worth it in the end. Your kids will adjust and eventually won’t miss the candy and chips that they used to munch on. And everyone will benefit from the change. Baby Weaning Potty Training Guide 75 Parenting Tips A Parent's Guide To Medicine Safety Home Schooling Your Child Guide |
