Minnow’s Five Things
Parents need a lot of help. Anyone who has had a child for at least a day knows that. This week I found a few useful resources that caught my attention.
One of my favourite parenting experts, Beverley Cathcart-Ross has published a book called Raising Great Parents: How to Become the Parent Your Child Needs You to Be. It’s full of lots of good advice, but what I like the most about it is the title. Beverley has been dishing out advice to parents for long enough to know that it’s the parents who need to learn before we teach our children anything. If you want to be a great parent you should pick up a copy.
If you’re more worried about getting the baby to sleep at this stage, you might be interested to know that smallnest, the app that tracks everything your baby does, just introduced an update called Stop Crying. Apparently you just tap the ‘Stop Crying’ button, and your iPhone will emit an inaudible sound wave pattern that clinical trials have shown calms babies enough for them to immediately stop crying.
You’ve heard of the Tiger Mom and perhaps even the Jellyfish Parent, but you might not have heard about the Dolphin Mom. A new book called The Dolphin Way by Dr. Shimi K. Kang promises to provide parents with a guide to inspire children to develop their own internal drive by drawing on the latest neuroscience and behavioural research to show why pushy ‘tiger parents’ and permissive ‘jellyfish parents’ actually hinder self-motivation. Dolphin parents focus on gently yet authoritatively guiding their kids to maintain balanced lives and dolphin traits like adaptability, community mindedness, creativity and critical thinking…and maybe good swimming skills? Breathing under water for a long time?
Sometimes I yearn to be like my parents who unapologetically said no to pretty much everything (and we just obeyed and accepted it). Like when they said no to watching TV during the week—except once weekly when we were allowed to watch the squeaky clean and full-of-positive-family-messaging Little House on the Prairie. Imagine your kids only having one hour of screen time a week. If you want your kid to turn out as well as I did, the re-release of this series is now available on DVD.
For parents concerned with their child’s literacy, The Hanen Centre’s newest guidebook, I’m Ready!™How to Prepare Your Child for Reading Success, teaches parents the most effective ways to nurture their child’s early literacy during everyday routines and activities. Speech-language pathologists Janice Greenberg and Elaine Weitzman have taken the most current research in emergent literacy and broken it down into fun, easy-to-use tips and strategies for promoting early literacy throughout the day. Taking a walk, reading a book, shopping for groceries…I’m Ready! transforms all of these daily routines into enjoyable opportunities for parents to prepare their child for reading success. Incidentally, we’re giving away five copies. Here’s the link to the contest.
Have a great week.
