It might be the relatively low ebb I've been operating on the last two weeks, the fact that – after a relatively snow-free (yes, I am in Canada) winter – I came to work in slushy armageddon this morning, that the last few pounds have turned into the last several pounds, the planning now for activities in August when I can hardly even imagine what we'll look like by then…I don't know. But I need a break! Levity please, enter stage right. 

I was truly heartened to hear readers owning up to a mix of parenting styles and, better yet, to how comfortable many of you sound with the parenting you are STRIVING for. That's key isn't it?  Take the self-judgement and blame out of it. Do your best, adjust as needed and then just accept the kind of parent you are (are still becoming). 

I am a working Mom. Do I do my best? I try to. My style – strong authoratative flavour with a pinch of permissiveness, garnished with authoritarianism. Hey, we have places to get to on a schedule. I cannot use every "putting on coat" opportunity as a teaching point. It just isn't going to happen.

I yell. Oh how I yell. Not often, but when I have to. I don't say anything demeaning or humiliating, I don't shame. It's not about my child's character. It's about his behaviour. Period. We get past it. I am sensitive enough to notice that I am not crossing his emotional boundaries – you know how you can sometimes see someone's face fall when they've just heard something hurtful? I think I've have managed to avoid that. 

I'd say we generally get along really well. He's pretty reasonable, I try to accomodate with an eye toward safety, good health, progress in education and long-term social and emotional well-being. The rest is me – flawed, human. I sincerely hope he is learning something from that too. I certainly wouldn't trade being a parent for anything – anything.

What I am really trying to say with this ramble…is thanks for making me feel so much better today. Seriously. When readers write comments that shows "hey, I'm doing my best, I've taken some lessons from my own childhood, I make mistakes, but I am giving it my best effort and I'm okay with it" (all far better expressed than I've just summarized here), it actually makes me feel relieved. There is a connection in that I find very reassuring. It's the reason you should get out of the house when you have a new baby and go join that play group. The other moms may or may not become your friends, even best friends, but they are like you. It isn't all rosy all the time but you can make peace with that and still enjoy the whole thing.

Some may let the house (or their hair) go when things get overwhelming. Be of no doubt that those things happen to me to. But when I feel overwhelmed, I need levity. I need to see the lighter side of the whole parenting/homemaking process. Call it a salve for my winter-beleaguered soul. This somehow allows me to tolerate leaving the upside down house with what my mother would call "a rats nest" for hair (I've got a lot of wavy/curly stuff) in the knowledge that it will eventually not always be this way.

So with warning that it could just be my mood that's causing me to see the humour in this stuff, here's a bit of levity to get you through…

Scroll down and read "Patience of a Saint".

On baby names…

See also this clip…

And this one…hope he isn't getting a stomach ache, oh and this!

Have a great weekend.

–Tracy

Approximately half of the readers of this blog continue to be parents struggling with sleep-deprivation due to young children's whacky sleep habits. Although we haven't been focusing so much on sleep issues in the last couple of months, I wanted to reassure those readers that I WILL keep posting questions and research on the subject over the course of the next few weeks/months. I also wanted to urge readers who are most concerned about sleep (or "obsessed" or "consumed by" or "frantic about") that there's about 6 months worth of archived information about all sorts of sleep-related issues (the first 6 months are entirely focused on sleep). Please check them out: there are readers' questions, my answers to those questions and comments in response, and there's TONS of research that's reviewed in those early posts. 

Also, since the US edition of Bedtiming has come out in the last month, I've had a few emails requesting more information about our approach: What's different about this book? What's our parenting philosophy? What method of sleep-training do I most strongly advocate? (People have a VERY hard time with my answer: It depends). So, in a nutshell, here are the 10 main points that we discuss in the book (this was one of my first blog posts, so a few of you might have read them already). 

1. Timing is everything: No matter what method of sleep training you use, it is more likely to succeed at particular developmental stages, and more likely to fail at others. The vast majority of children follow a predictable developmental schedule of emotional and cognitive changes in the first 5 years of life.

2. The best times for sleep training are neither early nor late. Many people assume that getting sleep training over with before the child gets too clever or too entrenched in nighttime habits is the best approach. Others assume that waiting until the attachment bond is strong and/or kids are more independent is important. Both are wrong. The best stages to sleep-train follow a pendulum swing from one age to the next, with difficult periods interspersed between periods of relative ease.

3. Stages that make it harder to sleep-train are those of heightened emotional vulnerability. In these predictable periods, your child will be more dependent, vulnerable, or prone to separation distress, jealousy or shame.

4. Stages that make it easier to sleep-train are when your child is less emotionally sensitive. For an infant, these are periods she is more interested in the nonsocial world of objects, actions, and locomotion, and less concerned with other people. Resilient periods in toddlerhood are when children are not feeling compelled to assess parents' availability, attention, and affection, when they don't need to define their own territories or intentions through defiance, when they are less prone to jealousy and shame and when they are more concerned with winning approval than testing limits.

5. Most sleep-training methods are equally effective. There are at least half a dozen popular sleep-training methods, ranging from "cry it out" to "gentle no-cry solutions." None have been proven more effective than another so pick something that feels right for you. That means go with a method that seems to match your parenting philosophy or approach in general. Ultimately, you have to live with your parenting choices and you know your child best.

6. There are some ages at which particular methods are likely to work better than others. If you understand the emotional vulnerabilities and strengths that characterize each developmental stage, you will be better equipped to match a sleep-training method with your child’s age.

7. Pick a method you know you can stick with. That means apply the method consistently, and do so for at least a week.

8. Things often get worse before they get better. Children already have sleep habits when we decide to sleep train them. Breaking those habits may involve some disruption, disorganization, or outright rebellion on the part of your baby or toddler. As a result your child may sleep less or wake more frequently before she settles into a new routine.

9. Sleep training is often not a one-shot deal. Even after your child learns to sleep through the night, sleep setbacks can occur at (predictably) difficult ages, requiring parents to think about what's different and how to re-implement effective sleep training.

10. A family that is getting enough sleep, is a happy, healthy family. Mothers in particular often feel guilty about sleep training because of messages from the media, friends and family (including fellow mothers, unfortunately) that their first and only priority should be their child’s happiness. Parents who are considering sleep training for reasons beyond just the well-being of their child (gasp!) are not only perfectly normal, but are doing the right thing. A sleep-deprived child is a cranky, inattentive one who will have a tougher time learning and socializing. A sleep-deprived parent is often irritable, angry, depressed and ineffective. A well-rested mother and a well-rested child will both be happier, healthier, more alert and more affectionate.

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Tune in Monday for a new Parenting Challenge. And if you're joining us (or still want to join us) for the first challenge, by all means come by last Monday's comments section and share your ups and downs with us. It's been a GREAT week of generating new ideas and problem-solving together and the weekend is bound to be full of new "opportunities" (ahem…) to pretend-play our kids into complying with all our wishes (Bwahahahahaha!).

So, if you're following along with the Parenting Challenge, you'll remember that I wanted to also share my own experiences of applying some of the techniques that I'm reviewing on the blog. I've been thinking a lot about why it's so hard for me sometimes to take the playful route to gaining compliance from my kids. Beyond the situational factors in the moment, which are VERY much at play (feeling stressed, grumpy, overtired, etc.), there are also larger, "historical" factors at play. In particular, I think that the way we ourselves were parented when we were children will make a big difference in how we think about discipline and parenting. This is kind of obvious on a general level but the way it plays out may not be as obvious. Many of us may have not had the experience of "playing" with our parents very much. But even those of us who did play a lot with our parents, we probably didn't do so during a discipline-related situation. Part of the reason I so often "forget" to take a playful approach to parenting my kids during a conflict is that I myself had parents that took the more "conventional" approach (terrible term for it, but I can't think of another one right now) to discipline. They would put their "foot down", yell, bribe, cajole, insist with threats of punishment and finally resort to punishing in the end. Nothing horrific, just your fairly run-of-the-mill strategies for dealing with power struggles. That's the model I am most influence by, even when I'm not explicitly aware of it.

As a result of how we were disciplined ourselves, we may be more likely to advocate spanking, harsh punishments, threats, and so on. These approaches worked on us, after all… and we turned out "fine." Why wouldn't they "work" for our own kids? And so when I try to implement some of these more gentle, playful and, ultimately (IMO), more effective strategies (at least for my kids), I kinda feel like a wimp sometimes. When I'm frustrated and getting increasingly angry, my reflex is to yell and insist on the kind of compliance my own parents insisted on. I think "Screw this playing around stuff, forget all the psychobabble I've read, I need you to listen to me NOW without all the hoopla of some elaborate game of pretend!"or, just more simply, "I AM THE BOSS OF YOU!!!"

What keeps me coming back to these more playful approaches, however, is watching how magnificently the more power-heavy approaches fail with my boys. We all end up in a heap of tears, or frustrated grumbling, and no one actually feels like they've "won." Here's a passage from Playful Parenting that really resonated with me. Does it ring any bells for you?

"I think parents avoid playfulness in difficult parenting situations because they are afraid of rewarding bad behavior. I have to remain stern and angry and cold so he'll know he did wrong. But being playful isn't about rewards or punishments, it is about restoring the missing ingredient — connection — that caused the problems in the first place. Take the risk of being playful. You will do a much better job of teaching your values and getting cooperation with your rules by being playful than by being stern."

– Laurence J. Cohen, Playful Parenting