I am a commentator for BamRadio Network, the largest education radio network in the world. I recently participated in an interesting discussion on children and conflict.

Conflict occurs because we are all different. It’s true for both children and adults. Think about it. I think we should leave on our road trip at 8:00am, and my husband Karl says we should leave at 6:00am. My experience tells me the kids will be cranky (me, too!) if we have to wake them up to go. Karl’s point of view says that not getting caught in rush hour traffic is vital. We have different perspectives, and that creates conflict.

The same thing is true for children. Their outlook on the world is even smaller, and more ego-centric than grownups, which make them more likely to outright fight.

It is NOT your job to keep everything peaceful, and everybody happy. You can’t. However, it is your job to allow those episodes of conflict to become skill-building moments in the area of problem solving.

Here’s how:
There are phrases we all use (they often come from our own childhood) that are ineffective with children, and don’t help them solve the problem. Be nice. You need to say you are sorry. Let’s all share. You should play with Kimmy. (Sound familiar?) As much as you want to make your child say they are sorry (and yes, apologizing is important), you can’t force them to do so, anymore than you can compel them to play with a particular child. So, recognize your phrases and where they came from!

Children are concrete and specific, so we need to be, too. Don’t ask the why questions like “Why did you hit him?” That is abstract, and not how children think. You aren’t going to get an answer. Instead, ask what questions: “What is the problem?” Mark will tell you, “I want the boat”. Mark doesn’t know how to get the boat, so he uses what he knows will work – he’ll just reach over and grab it.

Now that you know what the problem is, you’ll need to validate and help them name feelings. Sometimes the very little ones (toddlers) don’t have the words, so you can help. But only if they need it! “Maddy, are you mad at Mark for taking your boat?” “I see that you are sad.” Sometimes your children’s feelings may not seem logical to you, but they are very real and logical to them! Allow them space to be mad, frustrated or to cry.

Once the children are calm (And this is important, because problem solving cannot happen when emotions are running wild. Think about it – do you find good solutions when you are hopping mad? I don’t.), then you can ask more “what” questions. What are your ideas to solve this problem? Children are remarkably brilliant at coming up with solutions. It may take a few minutes, so give them the space and time they need to figure it out.

Don’t solve the problem for them. Encourage them to devise their own solutions. Don’t offer suggestions to preschoolers. Their solution may not be the same as one you would have come up with, but that’s okay.

Toddlers may need some more questions to help them explain their behavior. Did you want the boat because it is red? (Remember not to ask why!) What if Maddy and you and I went and looked for another red boat you can play with? The toddlers Mark and Maddy may not like your first idea, but you are modeling the process of conflict resolution. So try again.

Once they’ve come up with an idea, they are much more likely to own it and stick to the solution.

On a side note, I will tell you that as my children get older, I don’t step into the middle of their conflicts very often. Many times they will resolve the problem better without my help. And I don’t have to be stuck in the middle.

In the end, conflict resolution is a foundational skill that enables our children to become confident, successful at school and work, and competent at negotiation and cooperation.

You can listen to this podcast in its entirety here.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who reports that we ended up leaving on our road trip somewhere around 9:30am, and encountered neither traffic nor cranky children.

Whenever there was something momentous coming up in our family life our boys would harass us with the questions of when it was coming… When will Christmas be here?  When are Grandma and Bop coming to visit?  When do we leave for Denver? When is my birthday? 

It’s difficult to explain time to a young child.  I can remember answering their questions with a specific amount of time- “Grandma is coming in three months” only to have them ask “when is three months?”  Finally, I stumbled across a way to describe time to them in a way that they could comprehend.  “Before Grandma comes we will have Easter, then the leaves will come out on the trees.  The rhodies will bloom in the front yard, and the leaves on the trees will get really big.  Nathaniel will have his birthday and then Grandma will be here”. (That translates to Grandma is coming in late June.)

I call this a time map.  I would actually draw these events out on a piece of paper and cross them off as a way to track time for my boys.   If I choose to list events that would actually occur on specific days on the calendar I could place stickers on the correct squares and cross those off when they occurred.  It didn’t necessarily eliminate the questions about when something was going to happen, but it did at least give me a way to talk to them about a concept that was so beyond their understanding.

I found this worked well for the day-to-day “when” questions, too.  “When will Daddy be home?”  First we have to have lunch, and then we’ll play outside in the rain.  We’ll have a story and a nap.  When you wake up we’ll have a snack and play inside.  Then Daddy will be home.” 

I found that when I described time for my children in this way, they were less stressed and anxious about the future.  Not only did they know when Grandma was coming, but they knew when a whole bunch of other things were going to happen too, and in what order those events would happen.  They could understand time based on the order those events would happen.  And not only that, they were learning to sequence.          

When they took Kindergarten readiness tests one of the activities was a series of cards that told a story- like making a garden.  Each card showed one step in the sequence.  The child was required to put the cards in the proper order – turn the soil, plant the seeds, water the seeds, weed the patch and pick the blooms.  

My boys totally aced this test.  They understood sequencing. Their whole lives had been sequenced by events they could see and understand in order to alleviate the endless questions that made me nuts.  Who knew my solution to the fact that children can’t tell time or read a calendar would give them a leg up in the task of understanding how things work in our world?  

-posted by Miss Allison, who reminds you that after all… There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1

My mother is visiting from out-of-town. Her visit, which came in conjunction with Mother’s Day, has stirred up memories of the creative influence she and my dad had on my childhood.  For the most part, kids think up imaginary games using everyday places and things. My parents enhanced that process by providing lots of raw materials which helped our imagination to take flight. 

The Trapeze

Here I am on the Trapeze my dad built!

In our playroom, my dad made a trapeze from a wooden dowel rod and nylon rope. He hung the trapeze from the rafters of our playroom ceiling using steel eye hooks screwed into a strong beam. Underneath the trapeze they placed a thick bed mattress.  As a result of that trapeze, I spend much of my early childhood upside down.  Many circus acts were performed, often accompanied by make believe clowns, marching bands and animal acts.

The Dress Up Barrel
Many of our imaginative games were enhanced by the contents of the magical “dress-up barrel.”  In the cavern of this barrel (4 ft. high x 3 ft. in diameter) was a collection of musty smelling, beloved treasures; old dresses, shoes, purses, petticoats, hats, wigs, glasses, necklaces, leis, old New Year’s Eve hats, overalls, vampire teeth. We dug into the barrel to become doctors, nurses, fashion models, clowns, cowboys, Indians, witches etc.  It seemed as though fabulous stuff just grew in the bottom of that thing and showed up.  Whatever we needed we knew we would find if we just dug far enough down in there.  And yes, you could fall in or hide there, which probably contributed to its unique smell that I remember to this day!

The Puppet Stage
This versatile play prop was made of 3 lightweight boards about 4 ft. x 2 ½ ft. hinged together. Picture a box with one out of 4 sides missing; two side panels stood perpendicular to the center “stage” panel, which allowed it to stand on its own.  A curtained opening was cut out of the top half and a 4 in. hinged platform attached for the   puppets to rest on.  The sides and bottom were chalk boards, on which pertinent information was written: 
Puppet Show at 1:30 pm
Tickets $2.00
or
Snow White
3 pm sharp!
$1.00 admission

The puppet stage also made a nifty hamburger stand. Customers ordered at the window after consulting the menu written on the front of the stand:
Hamburgers: 50 cents
Pop:  25 cents
Chips:  25 cents

On other days, the stand became a convenience grocery store counter:
Milk–  $1.00
Gum–  50 cents
Popsikels– 75 cents

The puppet stage could be folded up flat and transported easily by a parent or older kid to the driveway, garage, backyard, or where our flights of fancy took us.

Lastly, my father’s love of his daughters crossed with his engineering background to produce a play place that was most beloved.  He designed a roofless Barbie house on a pulley system such that it was stored flush against the ceiling of the playroom held firm by several ropes. Picture a 3 ft. x 2 ft. bookcase on its back, reconfigured to have rooms instead of shelves.

It could be lowered down to rest on a low card table for play, and then raised up again, often days later when we had tired of it.  It was like new to us when we took it down again months later. We decorated and redecorated the walls and rooms multiple times over during the years of our Barbie phase as we played for hours with this unique, easy access Barbie house.

Not only did my parents bless us by their willingness to invest time and energy into creative play stuff, but not surprisingly, our house was a sought after destination in the neighborhood. Many kids spent happy hours playing in that magical basement space with the trapeze, dress up barrel, puppet stage and Barbie house. None of those items were purchased, expensive to make, or shiny and perfect, yet all were harbingers of vivid, treasured childhood memories decades later.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who would like to hear ways that you or your parents have enhanced imaginative play inexpensively with creativity.

Did you know there was a link between your child’s Kindermusik experience and his potential ability to read a map? It’s true….Though spatial awareness is a skill that usually comes naturally for most children, it is certainly a skill that parents can do much to promote. Using Kindermusik to encourage the development of spatial awareness is a natural choice.

Spatial awareness can be defined as: an awareness of the body in space, and the child’s relationship to the objects in the space. This can include spatial orientation, which is the skill that allows them to understand and comply with simple requests such as: “line up at the door” or “sit in a circle.”

Doing the Hokey Pokey in Kenya!

Spatial awareness is also linguistic. The understanding of the positional words people use to define themselves in space is essential to spatial awareness. “I am underneath the bridge….I am behind the tree.” You get the picture.

Next time you are in your Kindermusik class, check out the movement chart on the wall and notice how many of the words are directional or relational. Hoop play is one of the many activities in Kindermusik designed to promote spatial awareness…I am in the hoop, outside the hoop, beside the hoop, in front of the hoop. Another well-loved favorite is the “Hokey-Pokey” …“you put your right arm in, you take your right arm out, you put your right arm in, and you shake it all about…”

Our Time’s “Zoom-E-Oh” which demonstrates up/down, high/low, in/out, away/together, etc. Songs like these and activities like hoop play are allowing your child to learn to organize the available space in relation to themselves and in relationship to objects and other individuals.

In addition to spatial awareness, they are learning things like body parts, rhythm patterns, and a sense of direction. Spatial concepts learned through movement and exploration simultaneously develop muscle strength, coordination, self-confidence, and thinking skills. Spatial awareness helps you distinguish between words on this page and see the letters in correct relation to each other.

Which brings us to the initial question: what is the link between your child’s Kindermusik experience and his ability to read a map? Studies show that the development of spatial orientation leads to increased understanding of location and direction and even eventually the ability to understand and read a map – the point being that spatial awareness or a lack thereof has a direct impact on everyday skills that make a practical difference in our ability to navigate through life.

This same ability applies to reading and writing music on the staff, swinging a golf club, lobbing a tennis ball over the net, heading a soccer ball into the goal, or sending a baseball over the fence.

So…what if the Hokey-Pokey is what it’s all about? Well….in some respects, it is!

­-posted by Studio3Music, with thanks to contributor Theresa Case, our friend and Kindermusik Educator from Greenville, SC.

I was listening to an interesting podcast a couple of nights ago. It was so thought-provoking that I couldn’t fall asleep afterwards. The question discussed was: “Are we raising a nation of wimps?”

By this, the commentators proposed that children are not learning the coping skills which lead to independence.  Their childhood is nice and clean and safe, but they are psychologically fragile later on when they leave for college.

Does a sanitized childhood turn a kid into a wimp?
It’s a scientific fact that if you are not exposed to enough “adversity” in the form of germs, your body doesn’t develop immunities. Is this a metaphor for what happens psychologically? The commentators proposed the idea that adversity enables our children able to meet the normal challenges of life as they grow up.

For instance, the crime rate is actually lower than when we were young, but parents these days are hyper-aware of all the potential “bad” things that can happen to their children. And that perhaps we unnecessarily “over-protect” our children because if something “bad” does happen to a child, parents are blamed for it. (If you hadn’t let her go rock climbing, she wouldn’t have broken her arm. Or worse, if you hadn’t allowed him to walk alone to school, he wouldn’t have been abducted.)

Are my own fears holding me back from doing what is best for my child’s development into independence?
Like every parent, I worry. (Will it hurt them, scare them, be too hard, cause them to fail?) Especially so when I became a parent for the first time. I think my oldest Nathan is now far less self-sufficient than his siblings because I was there most every moment, doing it for him, solving the problems, finding the solutions, mediating the play dates.

But my job as a parent is to teach my children to take smart risks. How to decide what is a good risk. What makes a poor risk. Train them about what should be avoided altogether. Risk management – yes. Risk elimination – no.

Of course, the level of risk is dependent on your child’s maturity, temperament, personality, strengths and weaknesses. Risks should be different for every child. You need to know your child in order to train them well.

The nitty-gritty practical.
So how does this idea of allowing adversity in the form of good risks play out? Here are some ideas:

Let your children make mistakes. Have them to fix the mistakes themselves. Even if it takes several attempts to do so. They’ll learn far more than if you do it for them. Even a toddler can clean up something they’ve spilled. Even if it is NOT the way you’d do it. (Are you gritting your teeth yet? I know I am!)

For school-aged children, allow them organize their own time. Do they really need you to decide if they should empty the dishwasher, have a snack or do their homework first? (Of course, you’ve already taught them what the consequences are for not doing chores or homework. Children need to learn to manage their tasks and time, and this is a good way to help them become more independent. Cause seriously, eventually someone who didn’t birth them and love them unconditionally will be their boss!)

Allow your children to play freely unmonitored with other children without the grownups intervening. The kids will work out the problems! (I don’t mean never check on them. But we adults often step into the middle of conflict far too soon.)

Encourage them to try new things. For one child, that may be finally raising her hand in class. For another, learning to dress himself, even if it is a struggle to work those little hands and legs. (And yes, it’s faster and easier if you put the clothes on, and they’ll match and not be on backwards. But don’t lose sight of the goal – independence. Help them get there one step at a time. Just don’t do the steps for them!)

Doing these things actually fosters brain development in the part of the brain where “executive functioning” occurs. This is the portion of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex for you brain anatomy lovers out there) where planning and decision making occur.

Recently, I was on the phone for nearly an hour with the HP customer service department located in some third world country (very annoying, but another blog!) when my 11 year old Nathan kept interrupting and wanting me to cut him some watermelon. I kept shooing him away. Funnily enough, when I got off the phone, I discovered that he had cut his own watermelon. It was a hack job, but that really didn’t matter. He had faced adversity, and solved his own problem. I never have to slice watermelon for him again. But I had trained him to use a knife previously – risk management. Risk elimination – no. He could have cut himself. But he used a steak knife. He knows better than to use a butcher knife.

If you’d like to listen to the podcast, you can find it on BamRadio Network.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who loves this quote from Andre Malraux: “Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.”

As promised, here’s the start of our story of our sensory-child, Rob. But we have to begin with my oldest, Nathan.  Nathan was just-turned-three when Rob was born. Nathan was a high-needs baby (though I didn’t realize it until years later), who wanted to be carried all the time, napped for only 20 minutes at a time until he was 9 months old, and never got the hang of independent play.

Nathan didn’t really talk until he was 26 months old. Then he began to speak in paragraphs. I’m not kidding. At 2 ½ he was discussing the purpose of umbilical cords with full medical terminology with my OB. Seriously. By the time he was three we were told he had a 10,000 word vocabulary. A typical 3 year old has 200 to 300 words.

There were days (many of them!) where being Nathan’s mommy left me totally exhausted. Lawrence Kutner, a well-known child psychologist said, “The fundamental job of a toddler is to rule the universe.” I swear that if we had let Nathan onto the internet, he would have located at least a small country to run.

Rob at just turned three.

Everything was different about Rob. It was a relatively easy, 5 hour delivery (no drugs!), his Apgar scores were 9 and 10, he was absolutely gorgeous, he slept well, ate well (though he did have a clear preference for all foods crunchy – though more about that later), and was so content and easy-going.

He said his first words, “Jack cat”, at 9 months, exactly as Nathan did. His first sentence at 11 months was “I love you”. To the cat. Exactly as Nathan did. And then we had some more words, but that was about it.

Rob was my happy go-lucky little boy who played well on his own, didn’t fuss a lot, and was pleasantly quiet to drive with in the car. He charmed and flirted his way into many people’s hearts. But by the time he was 2 ½, I realized that although I could understand him, other people couldn’t. But I figured that was “normal” 2 ½, not “Nathan-normal” 2 ½. Rob and Nathan were already like oil and water (they still are!), so I thought that maybe Nathan was just an “advanced” orator, and Rob was simply a typical child.

You know how when you are at the grocery store or bookstore, people start asking your young children questions like, “What is your name?” “How old are you?” Well, by the time he was three, people were asking Rob those questions. And although I knew he knew the answers, he couldn’t tell them. Rob NEVER liked to perform on cue. So was this just “normal Rob”?

There were times when he spoke long complicated, entirely understandable sentences. And many other times we could just understand the first and last words. And other times he simply pointed to what he wanted.  I began to look around for a well-recommended speech and language pathologist to have him evaluated.

Shortly after that, I was confronted by several people who said that they were going to hold an “intervention”. Because Rob had “every sign of autism”. These were people who had not spent a lot of time with Rob. I was angry. I was furious. My heart was deeply hurt. How dare someone label my child? I knew they meant well, but I was still mad. And I just knew Rob wasn’t autistic. (And dragging up all those emotions 5 years later is really, really hard. Which is why I’ve been writing this post for the last week…)

But what was going on? Was there something really wrong? Deep down inside my Mommy heart, I knew the answer.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who says that if you miss a blog installment of this story, she’s got them tagged as “sensory children”.