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My child behavior is more like a Monkey or a Caveman. December 28, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Good Books, Human Development/Mental Health.
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I begin this post with some quotes from Meredith F. Small’s book “Our Babies, Ourselves – How biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent”
“…about 98 percent of our genetic material is identical to that of chimpanzees. We are, in fact, more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. I state this fact to underscore a point: Human babies, and human adults for that matter, are animals. We are primates, a kind of mammal, and our babies are animal babies. Although humans like to think of themselves as unique, we share much of our physiology and behavior with others of our kind, with other primates. For example, the shape of our head follows a continuum with other primates that shows a reduced snout and an enlarged brain case with a full forehead and forward-facing eyes. Our teeth are primate teeth, rather than dog teeth or alligator teeth. Our eyes see the way monkeys’ eyes see, with color vision and good depth perception to facilitate swinging through the trees. And our flexible hands-the hands that can pick ripe fruit off a tree, type these words or tie a shoe, hold a flower or build a model plane-distinguish us, and all primates, from other mammals that have paws. Our whole upper skeleton reflects an even closer relationship to other primates, apes in particular. Using a human anatomy book, one can dissect a chimpanzee or a gorilla and find everything in the right place. We have the upper bodies of long-armed apes. The only difference, in a broad anatomical sense, is the fact that the human pelvis, legs, and feet have been adapted to upright walking. So much of our physiology is simply that of an upright-walking primate….”

“…I begin the tale of human infants at the beginning of our species and look at the human infant as an evolutionary organism that evolved over generations into its modern form. We are born naked, with only a fraction of our brain complete. We cannot stand up, defend ourselves, or find food. And we grow very slowly; the human infant is the most dependent infant on earth. Why is that?
For some reason, millions of years ago, our species evolved away from an ape-like ancestor and stood up. The anatomical change in the pelvic region necessary for bipedalism placed architectural constraints on the shape of the human pelvis. As brain size increased during our evolutionary history, the dictates of the bipedal pelvis required that human infants finish their neural growth outside the womb. Because human infants are so dependent, their parents must invest heavily in raising each infant; and they must form an intimate relationship with an infant who has few ways to communicate his or her needs. Nature has set up an entwined, symbiotic relationship between parents and offspring, and from this grows the infant-parent bond, a necessary feature of human biology and growth. Chapter One describes this evolutionary path of the human infant and explains the special characteristics of the youngest members of our species and their necessary relationship with adults….”

Many people do not like the idea that we have developed from something to become humans and many people don’t like or even understand how we developed from cave dwelling or grass huts to our current nuclear family which live in many roomed buildings aka houses.
Some of us also forget how short a time it was since ‘we’ were more primitive in our ways compared to how long ‘we’ have actually been human.

I started writing a post on “Who has time to parent today?” and then really began to think about this in more depth and begun to think about how humans have developed over time/history.

Surrogate mother experiment December 13, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Bond: Behaviour/Discipline, History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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This post is directly from Wiki on Harry Frederick Harlow an American psychologist …and is leading up to another post which I am still writing.

“In a well-known series of experiments conducted between 1957 and 1963, Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them a choice between two surrogate mothers, one made of terrycloth, the other of wire.
The studies were motivated by John Bowlby’s World Health Organization-sponsored study and report, “Maternal Care and Mental Health” in 1950, in which Bowlby reviewed previous studies on the effects of institutionalization on child development such as René Spitz’s[2] and his own surveys on children raised in a variety of settings. In 1953, his colleague, James Robertson, produced a short and controversial documentary film titled A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital demonstrating the almost immediate effects of maternal separation. Bowlby’s report, coupled with Robertson’s film, demonstrated the importance of the primary caregiver in human and non-human primate development. Bowlby emphasized the mother’s role in feeding as a basis for the development of a strong mother-child relationship. However, his conclusions, based on psychoanalytic theory, generated much debate. It was this debate about the reasons behind the demonstrated and acknowledged need for maternal care, that was addressed by Harlow in his studies with the cloth and wire surrogates.
In Harlow’s classic experiment, two groups of baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers. In the first group, a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.
Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.
When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they occasionally returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They froze in fear and cried, crouched down, or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.
Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.
The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow’s interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that lack of contact comfort was psychologically stressful to the monkeys.
The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother-child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time.
Critics of Harlow’s research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing. [3]…”

 

For another intresting look at Harry see this blog as well New found land news it also shows the wire monkey ‘mothers’

History, genetics and treatment of children August 23, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Belief in Baby’s Crys: Cry It Out/Controlled Cry, Beware the Baby Trainers, History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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There have been some great atrocities against human beings at many stages through our history – anyone’s history be it English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and on and on back to cave man times. There is no perfect culture there is no clan with out faults…there is always someone who wants more and will try to get more and in doing so could shape another persons life with their endeavors.

But this does not give us (the modern adult human) the right to treat others with disrespect and it also does not mean that we can ignore history and its teachings.

“…In every child born there are a multitude of seeds all waiting to be nurtured and watered eventually sprouting roots and emerging from their fertile soil. If we nurture the seeds of love, faith, non-violence, compassion and honesty, these attributes will grow strong and in abundance however, if the seeds of hate, jealously, intolerance, violence, fear and envy are watered they too will bear fruit.

As parents we are responsible for developing a child’s view of the world around them. The view we create for them, will likely follow them through the course of their lifetime. We can help them to develop a view of a world of possibilities, abundance and magnificent and we can also create a view of an antagonistic world where fear, unhappiness and anger predominate….“

After world war II there was some thought into the idea that their could be a cultural tendency to cruelty. But if we look at what might of taken place to that country of peoples in the years or even decades running up to these wars we can piece together possibly an understanding.

See this post for a look in to history

“…take a historical look at the role of pre-war German pedagogy, ethics, and religion in training people to distrust messages from their bodily feelings and emotions*(see note), thereby training them to distrust their internal sense of authority. People who can’t trust their own body knowledge feel out of touch, have less tolerance for ambiguity, seek clear-cut simple rules to determine their actions, tend to consider complex situations in simplistic terms, and are thus more likely to be swayed by pronouncements made by “experts” and by naive either/or arguments. The slogan “You’re either with us or against us,” for example, could seem reasonable only to a populace for which reason has become severed from an intact empathic system–to people who had thus been primed to see Jews, communists, and homosexuals as “the enemy.” In short, to the extent that a society venerates the ultimate authority of disembodied rationality, it fosters a citizenry that is out of touch with its psychosomatic knowledge base and is therefore vulnerable to political manipulation…. For more of this article (I may not agree with everything someone else says)

History also plays a great part in our own gene’s we can plot back through time a predisposition to certain medical aliments like cancer, diabetes so on and so forth which might be in our own family line.

As we can see by the post on the Hippocampus and the stress which happens during times of neglect, abuse and fear there may be a correlation between our gene’s and our treatment as a child to weather or not we have the – for arguments sake – the cancer gene switched on.

If we have the gene and we have the stress then it could be more likely to occur.

So if we can understand where the “poisonous parenting ideals” (as some are calling it the post from above history link) come from and if we can learn as a species that this parenting style is not the best for our developing brain as a human let alone as a whole society or even to the extent as a planet of people….can we not stop?

Stop from following an idea that really does not work.

Who is to say that a child who has been bullied by its parents, manipulated and controlled through various different forms of baby training – be it Babywise or Save our sleep or any of the many manuals we seem to of come to need to make us feel better at what we are doing  ….who is to say that they will not be the next Hitler, the next Columbine the next Bundy the next person on the top of the most wanted list.

But we as parents can shape the future…so lets do it!

*notes I we can also see in the use of baby training manuals that we are “training people to distrust messages from their bodily feelings and emotions” which is what happens when we numb our hearts to our children’s cry’s, questions and “pesterings”. 

My baby is a Monster and the Terrible Two’s August 19, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Bond: Behaviour/Discipline.
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From a personal view:
I’ve been sitting back a few weeks now looking at myself (well my whole blog is really me looking at myself) but I’ve been doing even more as of late.
I keep waiting for the terrible two’s and the horrible toddler tantrums.
I think the only thing which has stepped up a lot is the whole “Ara do” or “self” as she is saying a lot.
I’m not saying that I don’t get frustrated sometimes with Ara’s little hands trying to help out while I’m cooking but its really my problem.
I’ve started to ask Ara to chop up the garlic for me as this is one thing she can get from the pantry by herself, peal by her self and using the herb knife chop by her self.
I think for me its all about finding things that my two year old can do which is a step up from what she was doing before and she feels like she is contributing.
 
From a society view:
There are so many people who are at logger heads with their two year olds. Many feel that they have to resort to hitting their children to get them to behave, listen or stop what they are doing.
 
This quote says a lot for our society and the way that we are treating our children
“…Children are like mirrors to us, reflecting back the very things we hate about ourselves. Imagine if you felt proud, strong and in control. So would your children.
They will do what you do, not necessarily what you say. They learn through imitation, so if you don’t like the way your children are behaving, look at yourself, for that is where the answers often lie….” to see the rest of this article
 
Parents hearing the above will often feel angry as they feel that they have done everything “right” teaching a child to self soothe to sleep, telling them “No!” when it is dangerous, making them self amuse, giving them good toys.
So what are they missing?
If we have a look at aTCL we can see that many children of today do not have the benefit of:
* Being wanted (pregnancy might have been an accident)
* May have had some birth trauma (circumcisions, elective c-section or any of the new fan-dangled gizmo’s used during birth.)
* May not of been breastfeed for any more than six months let alone the 2 years suggested by World Health Organization as we can also see from the Sears information on Breastfeeding is also the beginning of good behavior.
* May be suffering from violence (smacking, family violence or verbal abuse)
* May not have a secure loving bond with at least one caregiver (many children are put into daycare and may not “see” their parents for any more than half an hour before bed…and that could be filled with T.V or being alone)
 
There are many other things which impact on a child’s behavior and it is up to parents to understand and really look at the issues they are dealing with.
There may be a need for some family counseling or seeing a psychologist. There may be a need to look at how the family is run the need to spend more time together and creating that bond which is so important.

Waiting for your children August 14, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Bond: Behaviour/Discipline.
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Babies, Children and the elderly should be respected just like “other” adults.

I have expectations of my daughter and she of me.

This is something that I’m discovering at the moment. Many times I have asked my daughter to wait….just wait while I wipe the bench or wait until I go to the loo. For some reason she does wait…I know many other children I’ve meet would just roll their eyes and go about whatever they wanted to do or just keep on asking and asking.

But I now have to realize that because I’ve asked her to wait that I should respect her request that I wait for her….and she does ask.

In my upbringing being told to hurry up was one of my main…umm stresses? Yes I’d have to say stresses. I still panic even today and find myself trying to rush when really there is no point in rushing let alone getting angry at another about them running late.

So now I force myself to take a deep breath and wait….”Waiting… meditation” (Thanks to Bilingual Baby for this tip which I’ve taken to anything which is causing me a bit of stress as Waiting, Bathing, Meal times oh and don’t forget DRIVING just add meditation after it).

It’s just like asking something of someone…they do have a right to say no…just like you do.

I often look at my conversations and look at how many times I’ve not done what my daughter has asked…why? Well I was busy.

So when I ask for my daughter to do something for me and she says no I feel now – what right have I got to “make” her do it…she has no idea between different situations…hey they are all new to her….yes she tipped the building blocks out on the floor but Dadda left his cup on the coffee table along with his plate and leftovers…it’s all in perspective and it is hard to juggle but it is something which I feel I’m starting to understand. My daughter has no idea that it is her mess she’s too little to understand. I ask her to help me clean up the mess…any mess and she does…even in books if she sees a mess she wants to help clean it up.

I’ve been learning give and take.

I want to go shopping she sits in the car for an hour then I drag her round the shops…I may not like doing the shopping but all she can see is it was something that I wanted to do…so now it’s her turn and she gets some time out to do what she wants which is normally swings.

Do I seem like a push over?

Well hey I don’t often have a screaming child which does not listen to me (we are not perfect and sometimes we do just have to do adult stuff but I try to make it up).

What I am trying to say is that children have a different view on things and we cannot force them to see our view as we will only be forcing them into something they may not want to do. In time they will learn through following our example (yes it’s hard for a while but it does get better ;-)

How much is a Parent supposed to give? July 25, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles.
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I’m sure some of us (I think we’d be fibbing if it were not most of us) are totally staggered with how much our children need us. Maybe this is the drive we need to force independence a pone another and stroke our own doubtful feelings by saying its for their own good.

I have been thinking that parenting is a lot like exercise. We know how important exercise is for us. It keeps our body healthy and our minds sharp, it lets out tension and stress.

I feel that parenting is also important for us too. It’s a chance to learn, to love, to understand and to gain the ability to give far past what we ever thought was possible.

Just like exercise there are people who take to it well and there are people who do not…everyone is created different.

Parenting just like exercise is not something that comes easy (for most…hey there are thoughts who really are just good at it…natural athletes). Most of us have to work at it and it takes time to get your technique right…and like exercise there are many different forms of parenting….and some will get you fitter than others and some will create more damage to your body than others. But if we are smart then we learn to listen to our bodies and change our exercise to really work for us.

But with all exercise if your lax you will not get the benefits from it….What happens if you decide not to go for that morning walk that you have been doing and give it up and sit on the couch and eat chocolate and chips instead?

We get sluggish and a Megan term “just get yucky” inside as well as our brains going a bit dull too.

So what happens if we decide not to parent out children…we give them to someone else for a day or two or more? Do we get a little slack? Do we keep up with the play, are we in the know, are we really in touch with our kids?

What happens if we go out for the day and farm the kids out to our parents…and it was good so we do it again and again. Do we ever learn to go out with our children?

I totally agree that too much exercise will make you tired and wear you out….so you need BALANCE

One question I would like to ask is how much can you give.

I have often found myself looking back on the months that have past in wonder that I could of gone through what I went through and I’m still going through just in different areas.

I felt like I went through the maddening lack of sleep, the insane feeding and now it’s the “Please just let Mumma go to the toilet by herself just once” I know this is not just and Attachment Parenting thing as I listen to other parents who practice “cry it out” who have not slept through the night for 3 years (and still going) and I KNOW that we all have our little shadows that some days we just wish would stop asking you what your doing.

BUT we learn to give a little more and a little more.

 

BUT WE DO NEED A LITTLE BREAK…just to recharge….but don’t give up all together other wise you’ll miss out on the benefits  ;-)  

Courage to look at yourself as a parent July 13, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles.
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There are many parenting books out there with so much information about childhood development, the why’s and how too’s…but how many of us really look at ourselves once we have read this information?

 Do we nod and agree with the information about empathy development, child trust leading to adult interdependence, about the childhood needs that are so demanding but we know that its only for a short time…do we agree, understand, look within ourselves and see that we are not perfect and that we ourselves come up short in many areas possibly from our own upbringing lack….do we strive to change ourselves knowing it’s for the best of our children or do we repeat the same lack with our own children?

Be true to yourself and be true to your family’s needs.

Grow and be strong.

Gather the courage not just for your own development but for your child’s future.

How confident you are as a parent June 16, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Human Development/Mental Health.
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The statement of how confident you are with your parenting style is a big one when swaying new parents – but is it done with thought and in the right context?
When new parents here this statement they will often feel guilt for not being strong as “its about how confident you are” in relation to letting your child “cry it out” in their cot alone.
If we look at human behavior studies then the answer is “yes” to this statement, but in following through on how it is to be used we can look at studies done on brain development, human behavior and emotional intelligence development which tell us “no” to the use it with the “cry it out” method.
So ….
Yes babies and children can pick up on how confident you are and how they will react to you
But…
No to using it with “cry it out” or other methods of ignoring children’s needs. (The word ignoring might make some people feel angry but please read on and with hope I’ll also get my next post out soon on “Forced into Independence” to make my point)

Looking at the development of a “Secure Attachment” as in these excepts from Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell’s book “Parenting from the Inside Out” we can see the different “types” of some personality development. Some of these personality traits we don’t particularly like within our culture even though we are developing them within our children through misleading “expert” information from yesteryear.
Please click to read this post about the different types of attachment.

As new parents we often have as some would call it “preprogrammed” responses to how situations affect us when we are dealing with our children. If as a young child you are told to shhh when crying you could quite possibly feel anxious when your own child cries and will often try many different ways to calm or stop it from crying.

If we have a quick look at this article here by Dr. Aletha Solter
“…Our culture tends to block and suppress the healthy expression of deep emotions. Some adults remember being punished, threatened, or even abused when they cried as children. Others remember their parents using kinder methods to stop them from crying, perhaps through food or other distractions. This early repression of crying could be one factor leading to the use of chemical agents later in life to repress painful emotions. The goal of deep-feeling therapy is to help adults overcome the inhibition against crying, thereby allowing them to cry as much as needed in a supportive environment with an attentive, empathic listener….”
We can see that having a confident responding parent will help create a Secure Attachment.

In rounding up this statement…
Yes babies and children can pick up on how confident you are and how they will react and we should treat them with respect and listen to there needs to develop happy healthy personalities with healthy brains.

The book “Parenting from the Inside Out” along with “Connection Parenting” and “Raising our children raising our selves” all have exercises to do to look at how we as parents react to our children and why in most cases you will probably change your view point and become more relaxed and happy within yourself.

Baby brain development May 21, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Human Development/Mental Health.
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I’ve just been reading through a new book we’ve brought written by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell. This is very in line with a Brainwave trust talk I went to a while ago. (Click here to view the post where I talk about Self Soothing) It was very hard to take any notes let alone listen with Ara off for a walk every 5 minutes. So I’ve been hunting for some information which was very similar…and I feel that Daniel and Mary have got it in their book

“…These linkages are made, according to the half-century-old axiom of the Canadian physician-psychologist Donald Hebb, because “neurons which fire together, wire together.” …”

The previous paragraph was talking about if you’d been bitten by a dog while fireworks had been going off you’d probably have a fear of both things.

“…More recently, the psychiatrist-neuroscientist Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that when neurons fire (are activated) repeatedly, the genetic material inside those neurons’ nuclei becomes “turned on” so that new proteins are synthesized which enable the creation of new neuronal synaptic connections. Neural firing (experience) turns on the genetic machinery that allows the brain to change its internal connections (memory).

The brain’s development also comes about when the neurons grow and create new connections with each other, so you can see why science tells us that memory and development are overlapping processes: experience shapes the developing structure of the brain. Genes determine much of how neurons link up with each other, but equally important is that experience activates genes to influence this linkage process. It is unhelpful to pit these interdependent processes against each other in simplistic debates such as experience versus biology, or nature versus nurture. In fact, experience shapes brain structure. Experience is biology. How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement.

Nature needs nurture….”

This information is just a scratch but I feel that many parents (myself included) do not know this before we become parents and most will not even look for it once they are parents. The ideas that we are creating our children in more ways than just the “roll in the hay”…would be preposterous to most parents. Also what most of western culture feel is the way to get good behaviour is in fact the opposite in the ways that we treat children. More often than not forcing an infant/baby/toddler to become independent before they are ready creates more difficult problems for that child to possibly sort out later in life or live with in ‘pain’ of not knowing what the problems are.

 

Let Your Feeling Be Your Guide May 7, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles.
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The name of this post is also the subtitle of a book which I have just started to think about reading
This is part of the forward by Jerry Hicks

“…That which you call your conscience is your imbued belief (fostered upon you by those who came before you) in that which is right versus that which is wrong for you to be, do, or have. And because this belief system has been imposed upon you from the outside, it can also be modified by the decree of whoever is currently influencing your thoughts

In other words, our diverse and flexible consciences have been molded by the fears, praise, admonitions, and promised rewards or threatened punishments to be administered (either now or later) by those generations who have come before us. And so, in order to attempt to soothe the consciences of those who, in their fear, seek to control others, each new generation is instructed (even by the famous cartoon character Jiminy Cricket) to “let your conscience be your guide.”

Because millions of previous cultures, societies, religions, rulers, leaders, and teachers (and parents, too) have been attempting to pass most of their belief systems on to each newest generation, we find ourselves sharing a world in which there is a wide range of conflicting opinions—as well as violent warfare—relative to whose conscience we should allow ourselves to be guided by. In other words, which thoughts, beliefs, or conscience should be your guide as to that which is right or wrong for you?

So, would this not be an appropriate question to ask yourself: Whose thoughts, beliefs, or ingrained conscience should be my guide as to what is right for me? …”

The Book is called “The Astonishing Power of Emotions: Let Your Feeling Be Your Guide”

This small snippet really summed up a lot for me in our lives that we are living to day. It of course summed up a lot of ideas, feelings, theory’s, books, saying…that we have in our parenting styles of today too.
To quote a song title “everybody is rushing around trying to find something to believe in” when we should really looking to ourselves. Another quote from Ester Hicks “If you feel bad about something then you are heading down the wrong path” its is not a case of having to knuckle down and just live with it…or just having to harden our hearts…if your emotions are telling you you are sad. Then stop! Think about it and really let the discovery of what you feel that you should be doing come through…try a different angle…think love and get behind that other persons(baby/child’s) eyes to really understand why they are acting the way they are.

PS I know not everyone is into ideas like Ester but as everyone says just take the words that sound right, feel right and work for you and leave the rest.