Behaving - what does it mean?

We all want our children to "behave." The eternal question is what does it mean to behave? Each family, each culture, each society has it's own "rules" for it's citizens. What I want my child to do may not be what you want your child to do so maybe it's better to talk in developmental generalities?

Behaving is means following the rules of your own society - but in order to do that, people need not only to know what the "rules" are but to have the ability to distinguish right from wrong. they also need to want to act in a correct way, and they need the ability to control themselves.

That's a lot to ask of most people, let alone young children. Here's an example of "behaving." Long ago, a friend came into her living room to find her 5-year-old carefully smearing toothpaste on a wooden tabletop. After counting to at least 20, she asked him "What are you doing?" "Mommy," the child said, "the toothpaste cleaned my teeth so good, I wanted to clean your table for you." She thanked him for helping her and proceeded to explain that just as there was a special cleaner for teeth, there was one for tables and showed him where the table cleaner was.

[Before going on I do have to add that we now know that toothpaste is a good cleaner for tables and this kid was way ahead of the curve on this : -)]

Many parents might have said " Don't do that" or punished the child in some way....But what did this child learn about "rules?" He learned there are other ways to be helpful [wood polish] , that he was a good kid for helping mommy, and that we can discuss behaviors. The child may not have been aware at the time that all this was being learned, but it was a step on the path to making decisions about himself and his behavior.

Back to school?

I took off from blogging a lot this summer and enjoyed doing things with my son who spent the summer here...

Children are back to school and back to eating those lunches you make...please make them healthy!

We are entering a new generation of obesity and now it's not just adults who are obese - it is expected that the number of children who are obese will hit 20% by the year 2010 - that's only FOUR years from now.

I heard or read somewhere that we are reaching that stage in obesity where this or the next generation of children will NOT have a longer life span than the parents...

Not only is obesity bad in and of itself, it makes all other medical problems worse....

I've been blogging about healthier children for a while now and hope the readers of this blog are among those who will not have obese children...It is something parents have control over during the child's early years...and good nutrition early on can never be a bad choice...

Please watch what your children eat and make sure they get exercise....

Sifting and shifting

How do you think about "things?" For starters , your brain probably starts an internal search for a likely category [or folder] in which there are already files similar to the "thing" you are thinking about. For example, since it's baseball season, and I'm a Red Sox fan, if you ask me a question about baseball, my mind goes to my sports folder, leafs through to the baseball section, then filters your question through what it finds there. If your question raises some new issues for the baseball file in my brain, then I work to fit the new information into the existing file - or I can start a new one. This is what I call sifting and shifting. And all of this happens without my being fully aware of the process.

How does the child do this? Children are not born with their parent's folders and files : ) they have to start their own filing systems : ). They do this first by licking, tasting, smelling and touching [there was a reason Freud called his first stage "oral." This very tactual process allows the child to start developing a folder for the object being so tastily "thought" about. As the child continues to interact with that same object, the files in that folder grow. The next time there is an interaction the child already has some information about that object and now can compare and contrast the new information to that which is there. And each interaction builds the files and folders in that child's brain.