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Parenting Press®Welcome to the November 2011
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
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If you teach parenting education, conduct home visits or counsel parents and caregivers, click on through to our Parent Educator Corner and register for a complimentary information sheet. There’s one every month! Popular topics include how to get kids into bed, how to keep them there, and how to get them to sleep.
If you write for a newspaper or school, extension, or child care newsletter, you’re welcome to excerpt or reprint our information, as long as you credit us and send us a copy. Advance copies of selected stories from the next issue (see “Coming Attractions”) are available the last week of this month for excerpts in print publications. E-mail our media contact.
Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Books for Gifting
- How Big Business Targets Children
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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What’s Named for You?
If you’ve run out of ideas for rainy afternoons, or want to introduce your kids to maps, open up an atlas and see how many places you each can find named for your family and friends. Fred Crary, webmaster extraordinaire for Parenting Press, has compiled a list of mountains, villages and other geographic features with his family’s surname, including Crary ND, Crary Mills NY, and Crary Road in Century FL. Across the country, there are many towns and cities named Elizabeth (as in Elizabeth Crary): Elizabeth City, NC, Elizabethtown PA, and of course Elizabeth NJ. While updating databases, we ran into communities named for the company operations manager Homer Henderson, including Homer AK, Homerville GA and Henderson NV. Alas, no towns named for publisher Carolyn Threadgill or “News for Parents” editor Linda Carlson!
For more map fun, click through to the Internet Accuracy Project and then see how long it takes your family to locate in the atlas such communities as Bridal Veil, Humptulips, Hurricane, Lame Deer, Buttermilk, Coke, Tea and Coffee City.
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Head Start on Homemade for the Holidays
Committed to going green for holiday gifts? Or simply conserving cash? Whatever your goal, here are suggestions for gifts you and your children can create together.
Plastic into Presents
The Instructables web site is one of many that offers how-to’s for ironing layers of plastic shopping bags into “fabric” for a messenger or tote bag. And here’s another way to use your plastic “fabric,” perfect for the gardeners in your family: a tarp that can be laid flat when someone is deadheading or pruning. Add handles that make it easy to gather everything into a bundle for carrying to the compost pile or yard waste bin. (Of course, this is a project that requires careful adult attention to the instructions, to ensure you don’t get gooey plastic on your iron, and supervision to protect everyone’s fingers from burns.)
Print Cards with Petals
Kids can create a collection of note cards for a grandma or teacher gift with little more than a rolling pin, paper and petals or leaves from your house plants or yard. In Nature’s Art Box (written by Laura C. Martin and published by Storey Publishing), we found tips on transferring the color and pattern of leaves and flower blossoms onto water color or heavy white construction paper. Position soft foliage (carrot tops or a fern, for example) on paper, perhaps using bits of removable tape to keep it in place, cover everything with parchment or another thin paper, and then press hard as you go over the leaves with a rolling pin or brayer. If the flowers you want to use are not flat enough, carefully pull petals off and arrange them on the paper. Be prepared for surprises: a yellow flower may create brown, a pink posy blue!
Cut-Out Cards
Another card concept: when the kids have woven narrow strips of paper from gift wrap scraps or magazine pages into squares or rectangles, showcase this artwork in “windowed” cards. Fold card stock into thirds and use cooky cutters or stencils as patterns for the cut-out in the middle panel. Once the weaving is glued down over the back side of the cut-out, use one of the other panels to conceal the artwork’s back.
[insert throwaways image—comics as gift wrap]
Throwaways into Gift Wrap
You probably know about substituting the Sunday funnies for gift wrap for kids, but did you know that strips of newsprint can be curled into “comical” bows? Large comic images can be cut into gift tags. Samples of wallpaper cover small boxes with elegance, especially when you gather fabric scraps into flowers for package decorations. If you’re cleaning out maps and tourist flyers, try them as gift wrap, too!
P.S. For whatever celebrations you anticipate, whether holidays, birthdays or someone’s return from deployment or college, create your own “lift-the-flap” countdown calendar. Our library branch had a copy of Alter This: Radical Ideas for Transforming Books into Art (by Alena Hennessy, published by Lark Books), and it provides the tips on creating niches in old books. For example, you could glue together two pages of a garage-sale board book and then cut away a portion of the top page. Insert a surprise message or a tiny envelope to hold a ticket or note, and then conceal everything with a heavy paper door. Add a bead for a handle (and a second one on the surface of the page if you’d like to wind string from one bead to the other for a closure).
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Temperament’s Physical Cause
A mindful therapist, says Daniel Siegel in his book of the same title, is conscientious, open, creative and nonjudgmental. Being mindful requires that therapists know their own limitations, and that they accept that not all aspects of their patients can be changed. “The sky is, in fact, not the limit. . .,” he writes, continuing, “People do have neural propensities—called temperament—that may be somewhat but not fully changeable.”
Although Parenting Press authors write about temperament and how it can affect the pace of children’s development and their responses to situations, Siegel spells out that temperament is a result of nervous system proclivities that we are born with in the chapter entitled “Traits.”
“Let go of the idea that all of us are blank slates,” he says. Instead, be aware that there is a nervous system variable called temperament that shapes our personalities. It does this when we are very young by interacting with our attachment experiences (with parents and caregivers) and with peer relationships later in life. Siegel points out that a nurturing adult, especially a parent, can help a child cope with a trait such as shyness, and although the child may grow up to not act so shy, the “inner reaction to withdraw” will persist.
He refers to early research that documented how temperament does not determine a child’s success in later life. Rather, it is “the match between the child’s features and the parents’ or school’s expectations.” Parents, he notes, have the flexibility to accept a child regardless of temperament rather than be “imprisoned” by what we had expected the child to be.
In describing what happens when an infant leaves the womb and has to work at breathing, at eating, and at making needs known, the author refers to three important “aversive states” which become dominant in our lives: fear, distress and anger. “It is striking how quickly most people can recognize which one of these three is most readily experienced in their reactions to various events—disappointments, frustrations, irritations. . .” He then asks us to think of what we first feel in response to emotional slights or misunderstandings.
“Do you generally first feel fear (anticipatory anxiety or vigilance for danger, distress (especially sadness over loss of connection), or anger (especially in response to limitations to feeling in control)?”
Why people typically feel one of these three more often than the others is unknown. “It may be that neuronal development favors specialization—even of a basic emotional response,” writes Siegel, who is involved in research which may determine the cause. For more information, see his book, The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration, (W.W. Norton, 2010), as well as Helen F. Neville and Diane Clark Johnson’s Temperament Tools: Working with Your Child’s Inborn Traits and Lyndall Shick’s Understanding Temperament: Strategies for Creating Family Harmony, both available from Parenting Press.
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.
Sleet, snow, rain. In too many parts of the country the weather has turned cold this month, and children may be less enthused about playing outdoors. It’s also the time when parents may be getting ready for holiday entertaining, and have less time to play with kids. Here are some ideas you may find helpful:
November 5 — Working in the Kitchen with a Baby Underfoot
November 12 — Playing With a Toddler Sibling
November 19 — Fall Seasonal Fun
November 26 — Planning for a Group of Toddlers at Play
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Family Fun Ideas — Similarity Scavenger Hunt
Get conversation rolling between generations at parties and family events with a “similarity” scavenger hunt. In other words, ask everyone to find out what they have in common with other guests! You can give each person a list of topics to start with, or simply post suggestions on a chalkboard in the middle of the room (maybe by the refreshments table). For example:
- Where were you born? (If you’re all from the same community, get more specific: which hospital or which house.)
- You were born when: which month, which date, which day of the week?
- Where did you go to school? (More specifically, which teachers did you have?)
- Did you/do you play an instrument? Sing in a group?
- What radio or television programs do you remember from childhood?
- Your first part-time job?
- Eye color? Hair color? Left-handed?
- Favorite sport? Favorite books?
- Where you were when [select an event]. (In Seattle, where “News for Parents” is published, a local historian recently described the 1962 Columbus Day storm, prompting Homer Henderson’s memories of that hurricane-strength disaster, and most of us were here in the office during the Nisqually earthquake of 2001.)
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Community Service — White Elephant Swap and Sale
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
This month, as you look ahead to holiday gifting, encourage your kids to clean out drawers and closets. Outgrown clothes, unused toys and the offbeat items they’ve received as prizes and party favors may be perfect for a swap or sale in your cul de sac. Imagine what a fabulous dress-up kit you could create with one neighbor’s bridesmaid’s dress, someone else’s tiara, and a cowboy hat and Mardi Gras beads from yet another neighbor! Or combine a vintage blender, a stack of recyclable paper and a tired dried-flower wreath with a how-to book as a gift for someone who wants to incorporate petals in handmade paper. The “News for Parents” editor and her neighbor inherited rolls of brown vinyl leftover from an interior designer’s upholstery project and they’re using it to cut out western-style vests for little boys’ costumes.
You all can swap items for a cash-less sale; those who have nothing to swap can bring canned goods for your local food bank or contribute cash for whatever charity you designate.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Buy 2 and Save; Buy 3 and Save More!
This special has expired.
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Reprinted with permission from Parenting Press News for Parents, copyright © 2011. For a complimentary subscription, see www.ParentingPress.com/signup.html.And please mail or email a copy of your newsletter to Publicity Department, P.O. Box 75267, Seattle WA 98175-0267.
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