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Parenting Press®Welcome to the May 2009
“News for Parents”
This electronic newsletter has dozens of ideas that we at Parenting Press hope you’ll find helpful and interesting. To suggest a story topic or to comment on article content or format, please use the link after each article; we welcome your feedback.
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IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Make Cussin’ Count
- So Sexy So Soon
- Learning Disorders Demystified
- Transform Trash into Summer Crafts
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Making Memories with Fashion
With Mother’s Day and Father’s Day coming, the Legacy Project has several ideas for connecting with the older people in our lives: grandparents, great aunts and uncles, elderly neighbors and others in our community. You and your children may want to do some of the projects with people you know well—or people you want to know better. Some will make charming alternatives to store-bought Mother’s and Father’s Day cards.
One project: “Then & Now Fashion Fill-In,” which compares fashion across time. The “Fashion Then & Now” sheet offers a series of prompts to help compare today’s styles to those of the past. Write a few descriptive words in each column for each item.
“The important goals of this activity are the memories that are evoked, the stories that are shared, and that young and old get to know each other just a little bit better,” says the Legacy Project web site, which also suggests the following other general questions to ask an older person:
Were you fashion conscious? Why?
What type of clothes did you like to wear?
Did you wear new clothes most often or hand-me-downs?
How often did you buy new clothes? How much did clothes cost? How much would you spend on clothes in a month or a year?
What was your favorite fashion?
Use these answers as the captions or a more detailed text for a handmade or computer-generated card that shows old photos of the person your child has interviewed. If you don’t have photos of the person at different ages, use sketches and photos of styles that he or she wore or wanted. Optional: if you have a full-length picture of the person you’ve interviewed when young, let the family artist create a paper doll with a few fashions from each era!
Older students may also enjoy a look at old newspapers and magazines, which are often available on microfilm at university libraries. Newspaper ads, for example, often show styles like those worn by family members, and how much the clothes cost. Another good source: vintage magazines. You’ll find many magazine covers at MagazineArt.Org.
For more information, kids who can read can look for some of the books recommended by the New York Public Library’s Costume and Fashion History resources web site. If your library doesn’t have these books, ask if they can be obtained through an inter-library loan. Yet another possibility: take a field trip to a thrift store with a vintage rack or a costume rental shop.
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Opening Windows on Your Family
The Legacy Project has another Mother’s, Father’s or Grandparents’ Day card to suggest: an outline of a house with cut-outs for the windows. You can attach a photo or drawing of every family member in a different window. Better yet, use a photocopy or scan of your real house or apartment building—or the home the card recipient remembers best. Make it large enough that you can slit around three sides of each window, so that the recipient can truly “open a window” on each family member pictured. (Don’t have an image of your current home showing enough windows? Then borrow a sketch from a book or the Internet. We found some images that would work well at Authentic Historical Designs.)
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How Much Sleep Does Baby Need?
How much sleep babies and toddlers need—and many other questions about getting babies to bed and to sleep—are answered in 52 Sleep Secrets for Babies by Kim West, an Annapolis family therapist. This little book, with quick comments on each of its 75 pages, is easy to read no matter how tired you are!
Secret #2 tells us that a newborn needs 16½ hours of sleep in a 24-hour period, a 3-month-old, 15 hours, and an 18-month-old, 13½ hours.
Secret #3: Babies who seem “ahead of the curve” in reaching developmental milestones need more sleep, not less, than children who are developing more typically. Because these children are so alert and so engaged with their surroundings, they can have difficulty “shutting down.” West warns us that this may continue for years.
Other hints:
Get outdoors when the weather’s nice: exposure to sunlight helps babies sleep better at night.
Snoozing-on-the-go—in a car, stroller or swing—keeps babies in a light, fragmented sleep, not a restorative deep sleep.
Keep the feedings in the middle of the night boring, to decrease stimulation.
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Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family
Most of us have been told that taking care of ourselves makes us better able to care for our children. But, as Amy Tiemann points out in “Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family” (Gotham Books, 2009), we seldom hear any specifics other than “get enough sleep.”**
Providing such specifics is one of Tiemann’s goals in this new book, and her advice to new parents includes, “Your eventual goal is to become a master at setting your priorities and sticking to them by protecting and spending your time wisely.”
She continues, “When your children get older, the demands on your time from school, the community or your kids’ activities will become even more numerous. There may always be 36 hours of demands on your 24-hour days, and you will have to learn to say no to many of those demands to get the essentials done—and to stay sane.”
This is especially hard for women, Tiemann reminds us, because we have been socialized to be people pleasers and do everything asked of us. This caretaking tendancy often intensifies after having children, she says, and we must learn to set boundaries that exclude nonessential activities.
For any activity to go on her to-do list, this author goes on, it must be (a) fun; (b) meaningful; or (c) absolutely necessary. If it is none of these, she suggests declining the request without guilt or any explanation other than “I won’t be able to take that on right now.”
As a Mother’s Day gift to yourself, you might follow Tiemann’s tips for addressing a task that is “absolutely necessary” but not fun or meaningful. You can, she says:
Choose to do it yourself anyway (not recommended but sometimes inevitable)
Get someone else to do it: delegate to a family member, share the task with a friend or hire help
Change the task to make it at least a little enjoyable or meaningful
Reevaluate the task and determine that it is not, after all, absolutely necessary
Tiemann strongly recommends delegating, or at least getting family members involved. She points out—as does Elizabeth Crary in Parenting Press’s Pick Up Your Socks . . . and Other Skills Growing Children Need!—that even small children can learn to dust. Tiemann also reminds us that delegating, whether to children or partners, involves giving up at least some control.
“We mothers have to learn to give up control to get equity at home.”
**One of Tiemann’s recommendations for handling the sleep issue is to use a Parenting Press classic, The Sleep Book for Tired Parents, by Rebecca Huntley.
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Twitter!
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II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive. The topics planned for May are:
May 2 — Parenting Decisions that Spring from Values
May 9 — Potty Training Your Special Needs Child
May 16 — Whole Brain® Thinking Styles
May 23 — When Compromise is a Good Thing
May 30 — Healthy Families Respect Differences
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Family Fun Ideas — Sup in the Sun!
What better way to celebrate a holiday or the hint of summer than with a picnic? You can bundle up and sip hot soup at a picnic table or on logs at the beach if it’s still cool where you live. If your temperatures are much higher, stretch out a blanket on the grass for a traditional warm weather lunch or supper. It’ll be even more fun if you let your children help select and prepare the meal! When you ask the kids whether they want carrot or celery sticks, let them scrub their choice; older kids can handle the slicing. If you’ve decided on baked chicken, they can roll the cut-up pieces in egg and bread crumbs and gently sprinkle on the herbs. And if dessert will be cookies, big kids can measure and stir, and little kids can drop the dough onto baking sheets.
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Community Service — Gather Memories for Oral Histories
Thinking again of Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, encourage children to visit a senior center, senior day care, or assisted living program and ask residents for stories about their youth and young adulthood. You may be surprised at their experiences! While visiting a former teacher, the “News for Parents” editor was astounded to learn this longtime home economics teacher had once worked as a caretaker at Mount Rainier National Park.
If you visit as a family, young children can listen while older children take notes, or run audio or video recording equipment. You can photograph the kids and the person they are visiting. Older kids can create an oral history, ideally both electronic and written, with the photos you’ve taken and any photos the interviewee allows you to scan. Add a map of where your subject lived, and use city and county archives to seek photos of the person’s early home, school, work place, church, and local businesses of the era. Most local museums, libraries and university archives will be delighted to consider well-written oral histories for their collections.
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Raise funds with a Parenting Press Book Fair
Would your school or group like a new fund-raiser?
For years Parenting Press has been offering its carefully written books on child guidance, problem-solving and dealing with feelings through preschool Book Fairs. Now our Book Fairs are being expanded to schools, churches, child-care programs, parenting groups—any organization that can use parenting and children’s books.
More information about our Book Fairs is posted online. You’ll find a copy of the brochure, an explanation of how much you can earn with a Book Fair, a step-by-step guide to make Book Fairs easy and fun to organize, and downloadable promotional materials.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Our Founder’s Birthday!
This special has expired.
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