Tag Archives: parenting advice

Building Independence in Children

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There are three areas for thinking about building independence: chances, chores, and choices.
Give them as many chances as you can to try doing things for themselves. Think about chores they can do – taking on responsibilities builds their sense of being competent, capable and important contributors to the family. Then let’s practice independent decision making by allowing them to make more of their own choices.

Chances to “Do it Myself”

Increase Accessibility

To build independence, think about how to make tasks more accessible for them. If you want them to get themselves dressed, choose clothes and shoes that are easy to get on and off. If you want them to help with cleaning, keep some cleaning supplies in their reach and store toys in containers they can open and close. If you’re nursing a baby, have a water bottle and snacks where your older child can reach them so they can help themselves if needed.

Teach Skills

Take the time to intentionally teach and practice skills, like putting on a coat or gloves or opening a cheese stick. For the first ten times, it takes a long time and is frustrating, but then your child will know how to do it themselves. Think how much time you save in the long run! (For lots of these things, search online for “hacks” for how to teach.)

Create Systems

Create systems that they can understand. Like having one container for all the toy animals and one for all the toy cars, with picture labels on them to help them remember. Or having a library basket so if they find a library book anywhere else in the house, they always know where to return it to – and when they want a book, they always know where to find one! Or writing a visual schedule of the bedtime routine with four pictures showing the four steps.

Accept the Mess

When your children “help out,” it takes longer, and it’s messy and it’s inconvenient. It’s hard to be patient, and easier to do it yourself. But, if we want to raise independent children, we have to give them chances at independence, and accept the imperfections of the learning process.

Chores – Responsibility and Teamwork

If you have a very young child, you may have never even considered chores. You may not have viewed them as being capable of contributing. But even a one year old can help with household tasks: “can you put this sock in the laundry bin?”, “can you carry this for me?”, “put the toys in the basket.” Children love to help out – doing tasks helps them feel competent and important.

Search online for “age appropriate chores” and you’ll find several charts with suggestions. Or ask other parents for ideas of tasks that you could try having your child help out with. For example, a 2 year old could help wipe up messes, a 5 year old could match socks, and a 7 year old could water plants – though you’ll need to have a system to help them remember.

Your child will not be as good at doing things as you are…. If your three year old makes the bed, it’s not going to have perfect corners! If they feed the dog, they may spill kibbles on the floor. Your 5 year old won’t load the dishwasher perfectly – but they can at least put a cup and spoon in there that you can finesse later. Experiment with options, trying several out to see where they can be successful and which chores make sense to assign on a long term basis.

You can ask your child for input on what jobs they would LIKE to do or what would help motivate them. A kid who hates folding laundry might be more willing to do it if you watch movies together as you fold. A kid who likes feeling strong might like the heavy work – carrying baskets of laundry, putting out the trash, shoveling snow, bringing the groceries in from the car…  Some teenagers might prefer doing the grocery shopping to cleaning the house.

Chores: The Teamwork Approach

Often chores are approached in an if/then punitive way where the parent is in control: “If you don’t put your laundry away then you can’t play your game.” This often leads to battles of wills.

The teamwork approach is: “What do WE need to do so that our home life functions well for all of us? Here are things I can help with – what can you help with?” And then on chore days you can use the when/then approach “we as a family all have chores today – but when we get all our work done, then we get to celebrate a job well done by having fun together!”

Choices

As they do more things independently, they’ll make more choices. If they’re getting themselves dressed, they choose their clothes. If they’re packing lunches, they choose what food to pack. If they’re responsible for homework, they decide whether to do math or English first.

It’s important to note that the parent still defines what are acceptable options to choose from! For example: you could tell a two year old: “it’s cold today, so you need to wear a warm shirt – do you want this blue one or the red one?” Or tell a three year old: “There are three things you need to do to get ready for preschool – which one do you want to do first?” A rule of thumb is for a two year old offer two options. A three year old gets three options. An eight year old has a lot of options, with clear criteria set by you. For example, an eight year old packing their lunch might be told they have to have at least one protein, at least one fruit, and one starch. (And you’ve taught them what this means and set up systems that make it easy for them to do this.)

We can also offer choices in other areas to practice decision making. For example, they can have some “free choice” time in their daily schedule where they get to decide what they do and you’ll play along. Older children can decide what extracurriculars or camps they do.

Some parents give a young child allowance that they can choose what to spend it on. As the child gets older, they get more allowance, but it’s split into three pools: spending, saving and sharing. They can use spending money on anything anytime. They have to declare in advance something that they are saving toward and can purchase it when they have enough. And sharing money can be for gifts or for charitable donations they choose.

Sometimes children will make poor choices. If they choose not to wear a coat on a cold/wet day, it’s a learning experience! (Now, I won’t do this on a day my child is going to preschool and the teachers would have to deal with the unhappy child that results… but I would do it on a day I was just taking my child for a short trip to the park.)

It’s important to let them do so and to experience the consequences in a low stakes environment so they can learn from their mistakes and make better choices in the future.

Image credit: http://wesandrachel.blogspot.com/2010/08/tot-school-catching-up.html, marked as Creative Commons

Evaluating Parent Advice

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As a parent of a young child, you may be actively seeking parenting advice – looking at books and blogs, listening to podcasts or searching on YouTube at midnight or taking parenting classes. Or even if you didn’t seek out advice, it comes to you in the form of unsolicited comments from people at the grocery store, your friends, or your own parents.

It can be overwhelming, especially when the advice is conflicting. When one person say “you always have to do X” and someone else says “you should never do X because…”

I’ve always said that if you get ten pieces of parenting advice, you’ll eliminate one or two right off because you think “whoo, that sounds like a ton of work! I just don’t have the time / energy / money for that.” You might hear one that you think “oh, that just doesn’t seem smart / safe…” But that still leaves a bunch of ideas that seem do-able but you’re not sure which to try first.

Here are some questions to get you thinking critically about the advice you hear, and figuring out whether the advice is a good fit for your family at this time:

What is the source of the information:

  • What is their training? Professional experience?
  • Have they had their own children? Have they worked directly with lots of babies in day-to-day life (i.e. not just in a clinic setting)?
  • Is the advice based on research? (Do they cite their sources?) Or is it based on real-world experience? Or a combination of the two?
  • What is their motivation for sharing this advice – will they profit or benefit in some way if you take that advice? (For example, do they say the only way to solve a problem is to buy their product?)
  • Do they share some of your social identities (e.g. race, religion, sexuality, class) or are they speaking from a very different life history?

Is it relevant?

  • Does the advice apply to your child’s current age / developmental stage?
  • Does the information fit (or can it be adapted) to your lifestyle, economic means, work patterns and other practical considerations?
  • Does the advice align with your cultural values or religious practices?

    • How does the advice make you feel?

    • Is it it respectful – do you feel that the author / speaker respects that you have your own wisdom or do you feel that they’re talking down to / patronizing you?
    • Is it fear-based? Lots of people trying to sell parents something (whether that’s a product, a service, or just their ideas) use fear as the motivator – “if you don’t do X, then your child will never _____.” (FYI, children are remarkably resilient, and there are few things which are actually this critical.)
    • Or does it over promise? “If you do this, we guarantee your child will sleep through the night and will never throw a tantrum again.” (Nothing is that magical!)
    • Does it feel do-able – you can imagine actually doing it and being successful at it?

Is it flexible?

In my experience as a parent and as a parent educator, we are always needing to adapt and accommodate. We may be traveling or have visitors or our child might be in the middle of a growth spurt or we’ve got a stomach bug or what worked for our child last week doesn’t work this week or… 

Any advice that is very rigid and implies that there is only one right way to do something and you can never vary it in any way just doesn’t seem realistic to me, and I never quite trust that the speaker has much experience with children if they don’t know everything has to be adapted to the unique needs of the moment.

Does it fit?

Really, the final question is: does the advice feel like a good fit for you? Does it seem like something you can imagine doing and doing consistently? If so, give the idea a try. If not, continue to seek ideas from other reputable sources till you find the answers that feel right for your family’s unique needs.

Unsolicited Advice

I just want to end with a comment on unsolicited advice. Someone told me that in their mind anytime someone gives them advice, it’s really meant as criticism that they’re not doing a good job. Someone else says that all unsolicited advice feels like “mansplaining” or like the speaker is condescending, assuming that they know everything and you know nothing.

I will grant that some people do these things.

However, I think that most people giving parenting advice mean well. In many cases, they have lived through their own parenting challenges, just like you – they often felt incompetent and overwhelmed, and then they found something that worked for them!! They were so excited and relieved by that experience that they now ‘spread the gospel’ about the idea to random parents they see on the street. 

My approach is I listen to all advice I’m given and I evaluate it. Some is sheer nonsense that I shrug off. Some may not be useful to me at that time but I imagine someday it could be, so I store it away for future reference. And sometimes… that unsolicited advice is exactly what I need to solve a challenge I am currently facing, and I’m so glad the person decided to share it. It’s always worth having new ideas.

For more on this topic, read my post Parenting Advice is Not One Size Fits All.

Parenting Advice is not one-size-fits-all

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I remember very early in my parenting career (in the mid-90’s) looking at a parenting book and feeling uncomfortable about the advice I found there – perhaps it was advocating for cry it out as a response to sleep problems or perhaps it was saying to not immediately respond to your child’s cries because it might spoil them. Those types of advice did not feel right to me as a parent at a gut level. Then I found other books that did feel right – (the Baby Book, Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, and Our Babies, Ourselves) and I found parent education classes as well. Those resources offered me the opportunity to learn that there are lots of different ways to parent children and no one-right-way-that-fits-all.

All parenting book authors are sharing ideas that worked for them as parents, and worked for their children or maybe that worked for their clients. If their methods work for you and your child, that’s great. But if not, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent or you have bad kids, it just means you need to find different advice. And you especially need to find advice and support that is strengths-based and responsive – instead of things that say / imply “if you do it this way it will always work, and if it doesn’t work then you’re a failure”, seek out things that say “here are some ideas that work well for many families. If they don’t work for you, here are other resources you could try.”

After 27 years of parenting and 23 years as a parent educator, I believe that even more strongly. And, as the parent of children who are “thrice exceptional” – gifted and autistic and ADD/ ADHD, I especially know it’s true. Different children need different parenting styles, and neurodiverse children may need different parenting approaches than neurotypical children.

For example, let’s talk about “picky eaters.” First, I’m going to say that 30 – 50% of parents say their preschool-aged children are picky eaters! So, if you’re in the 50% that doesn’t have this experience, count yourself lucky! (And don’t pat yourself on the back too much… it might be more about the kids’ temperament than about what you did as a parent.) I work with parents to re-frame some of their assumptions about picky eaters, and see things from their child’s perspective, and I give them lots of great tips I’ve gleaned over years in this work. But then someone says “but my kid is really picky – I’ve tried all those tips, and they still won’t eat!” And I say “I know… I’m right there with you.” Because my first child was a flexible, easy kid with food. My second was picky – turns out she has lots of allergies and intolerances and she knew that some foods made her feel sick or in pain – she couldn’t articulate that as a young child – she just was “picky.” And my third child is a whole other realm of picky eater – he has a VERY limited set of food he’ll eat. He is autistic with sensory issues, and has a hard time trusting food – if he has one bad blueberry, then it takes weeks or months to coax him back into trying blueberries again. So, I have another collection of tips for those super picky eaters, and I have a lot of empathy (and no judgment!) for the parents who are managing that.

And toilet learning… well, based both on all the reading I’ve done and classes I’ve taken, plus my own experiences with my 3 kids, I’ve got one set of standard issue recommendations on potty training, and then advanced tips for children who resist toileting. 20% of children go through a phase of refusing to poop in the potty. And 10% of children (usually boys) will have challenges with bed wetting up to age 8. For the parents who are already struggling with challenges, getting well-meaning advice from others who say “it’s easy – just do this and it will work” just makes them feel worse about themselves as parents. It is so much more helpful when someone says “wow, I’m sure you’ve already tried all the usual fixes – I’m sorry they haven’t worked for you. Can I help you find other resources or do you just need someone to tell you – ‘it’s OK, you’re doing your best’?”

Sometimes these challenges and delays will work themselves out if we just wait for it. Sometimes it may be helpful to seek professional support or testing to figure out if our child has particular challenges that need extra intervention. And as you’re working on challenges, it helps to find books, websites, educators, and/or other parents who offer advice that is helpful and relevant to you and to your unique child.

Today, I was reading advice on a parenting site, and I found something that troubled me. (I am not going to share the source, because otherwise the advice on the site was excellent, and I do not wish to criticize their whole approach – only this particular content which I will be contacting them about.) Here’s what it says:

These signs – things they say show you it’s time to set a limit – almost perfectly duplicate any list you can find of common symptoms of autism.

This troubled me, so I wanted to double-check myself on this. I showed this to my 23 year old, who is autistic, and just said “I was reading this blog post on parenting advice, and wanted to know what you think of it.” She immediately said “These aren’t signs that you need to set limits… it’s like they cut and pasted in the wrong list… these are all things that are normal for an autistic kid. They aren’t signs that ‘truly difficult behavior’ is coming… unless you try to force this kid to act neurotypical, and then yeah, you’re going to see some misbehavior!”

I told her that was exactly my impression. And I worry about parents of neurodiverse kids who would see this site and think… “oh, every day my kid shows all these signs! Either I’m a bad parent who is failing to connect with them, or they’re a bad kid with too many behavior problems.”

I do agree with the overall message of the parenting site that image is taken from – the idea that connection is important for discipline. When our children feel connected to us and valued by us, they want to behave well, and are responsive to our guidance.

I think it’s so important for parents and teachers to understand that connection and disconnection can look different for different kids. For example, for some children, it is absolutely true that eye contact shows they’re feeling connected and avoiding eye contact says they know they’re in trouble. However, many (not all) autistic people are uncomfortable with eye contact, and in many cultures, direct eye contact is a sign of disrespect. Demanding eye contact could set off behavioral problems rather than serving as a path to resolve them. For some children, placing your hand on theirs and having a conversation about what is happening will calm them and resolve problems. For other children, when they’re already on the verge of a meltdown, uninvited touch might set them off, or being asked to talk it through may overwhelm them.

If you do have a neurodiverse child (autism, ADHD, ODD, etc.) or if you have any child that seems particularly challenging to manage following typical advice, you may find that some resources are much more helpful to you than others, because they are either specialized for the neurodiverse population or are at least sensitive to it. Things I find particularly helpful are the Incredible Years program and challengingbehavior.org, the work of Ross Greene (“kids do well if they can“), the Zones of Regulation, and webinars from Bright and Quirky. Also read my post on “the race car brain“.

Another issue with parenting advice is that the vast majority of it is written by white, middle class folks, raised in the United States. (And yes, that description includes me, and I know it creates unintentional biases in my work, so feel free to call me on them!) And the research it is based on was primarily done with white, middle class folks in the United States. (Read this article on why that matters – as they say “the research, and the parenting advice based on it, might not apply to everyone who receives it.”) Thus, advice might be unintentionally racist, or classist, or may simply not be relevant to your life circumstances.

Based on their cultural backgrounds, parents may have different goals for their children, in areas such as independence, individualism vs. collectivism, self-esteem, and behavior, and thus may have different approaches to achieving those goals, such as differences in warmth / affection, responsiveness, and discipline. For example, physical punishment may be more common in some cultures than others, but to understand its function in a family, it helps to understand it in a broader cultural context. While co-sleeping with an infant may be viewed as unusual to some, bed-sharing is common in many cultures around the world, and education related to safer sleep practices should inform parents of how to minimize the risks, rather than condemning the practice. The best advice is responsive to cultural and socioeconomic differences, and acknowledges challenges, and build on strengths. If you feel like what you’re hearing and reading doesn’t suit your cultural values, seek out materials from those who share your cultural background. It is easier to find diverse view in the days of the internet than it was when all publishing was managed by white, middle class folks.

When you seek out parenting advice, I do encourage parents to check out a wide variety of sources to stimulate your thinking – I get really good ideas even from reading things I fundamentally disagree with. They broaden my perspective and cause me to further examine my own parenting choices to be sure they reflect my values and goals, and are helping my child reach their potential. They help me to notice differences between my parenting style and those of others in my community which helps me better explain and interpret what my child and I might see in their classmates’ experiences. And they help me double-check myself to be sure I’m not making any big mistakes. So, do read things outside your comfort zone for the sake of mind expansion.

But, when you’re struggling with a parenting challenge, and feeling discouraged about your parenting skills or your worthiness as a parent, or when you’re feeling really frustrated at your child, seek out the parenting advice that speaks to your soul. Advice that includes methods you can see yourself doing and doing consistently. Advice that seems like it could work for your unique child with their unique personality, strengths and challenges. And seek out the people whose advice acknowledges your strengths at the same time it supports you as you work to overcome your challenges.