Let’s say you’re a kid. You’re at the playground. Your grown-up brought you there to, presumably, have fun. There’s a structure for climbing. You climb on it. Your grown-up is standing down below you. And he or she is saying this: No. No–wait. Don’t put your foot there. Come back around this way. I don’t– You’re […]
The brain is wired to resist coercion. That’s why being told what to do triggers defiance. Unless we feel very connected, in that moment, to the person telling us what to do. This is an intriguing piece of the parenting puzzle that I wrote about in “The secret to stopping power struggles.” Here are some ideas for creating a little connection in the moment: 1. […]
Q. My daughter (age 2 1/2) is very ‘full on’ for want of a better term. I’m a stay-at-home mum, and from the moment we get up till the moment she goes to bed, she demands constant attention all day. She doesn’t play by herself and always asks me to play with her … which of course […]
“Should I hold my son back from kindergarten?” a mom asked me. Her child was at a play-based preschool, and she was worried that he wasn’t ready for kindergarten because he didn’t know his letters and numbers. Play-based preschools, I assured her, are the big trend for an important reason: Play is how children learn. […]
“Why does Daddy have a stomachache?” Our toddler began to cry. “Daddy, I will help you,” she said. We were playing Chutes and Ladders, a gift from her 3rd birthday party earlier that week. Her daddy landed on square 49, in which a boy eats an armful of green apples. He had to slide all the way back down to […]
The stick lying on the sidewalk was, at first, a stick — just a twig blown down from its tree in last night’s windstorm. Then the toddler picked it up. She pointed it to the ground and it became a walking stick. She poked it into the side of the car seat my husband was […]
Outlet covers. Cabinet locks. Furniture straps. We did all the usual baby-proofing. But something still wasn’t quite right. Our curious, newly mobile baby found plenty of other things to touch. At times, laptop power cords draped from our dining-room table to an outlet in the corner, an invitation to play a game of plug & […]
A playground near my house has a zipline-style swing. You (um, I mean, the kids) sit or stand on a little disc-shaped seat dangling from a rope, grab ahold of the rope, and have someone swing you down the zipline. One day, a boy, maybe 3 years old, perched on the swing at one end of the line. His dad gripped the […]
My toddler got some pink and purple Lego Duplo blocks as a gift. Around that time, GoldiBlox came out with pink construction toys designed to interest girls in engineering. I thought it was all a bit silly, the idea that girls needed their own girly color of blocks to pique their interest in the toy. […]
A friend and I were sitting on the floor with our 18-month-olds as they played with a kids’ construction set, and you can guess what happened next. My kid tried to bogart the hammer from her playmate, and her playmate declined to hand it over. My friend said, “No, no, we need to share.” She tried to take […]