Turben Developmental Services Foundation

Are you having a hard time getting your toddler to obey you at bed time? Many children between 2 and 6 give their parents nightmares, and the parents are not even sleeping! Do you know why they’re not sleeping? Their toddlers refuse to go to bed!

I’ll share some basics with you. Try them and let me know if they work!

Basic #1 – Tell your child that he or she sleeps in their room because it is “their” property and they have to protect and take care of “their” things. Animals and books need to be protected. They need to be sleeping in their room, in their bed, surrounded by their stuff. Kids sleep with their stuff! That is your story and you are sticking to it! Rewards are nice when good behavior happens, so one reward might be to let them stay up later than brothers or sisters on a night when they could watch a movie/TV after a little sibling goes to bed. They will appreciate it as a “big deal!”

Basic #2 – Admire them for taking care of their own property. Give them compliments about taking care of their property. Give them a few pennies (no food) each day for being the keeper of their room. Make a mystery guessing game about what objects/toys they have selected to protect each night. They need a cape, a sword and a flashlight to show you that they are the master of their space, the controller of their universe!

“Basics” also include ignoring tantrums by singing or talking to yourself and remembering that the consequence of a tantrum means less freedom and total attachment to you. Do not allow any child having a tantrum to occupy big spaces, run away or roam. The worse the behavior, the closer they STAY attached to you, like Velcro! Hold hands with their hands, holding them closer when they rage, BUT BE PREPARED to jump right in and thank them for stopping their fit when they pause to breathe! Compliment them for breathing instead of screaming.

Children need to feel important so give lots of compliments when they are doing all the right things, like playing peacefully or telling you which room they are going into or where they are going to be going. The greatest parental trick in the world is to teach toddlers to tell you when they leave a room…even if you clearly see them do it. The next best trick is to give them opportunities to be rewarded by you by letting them help you with anything.

The act of helping is the biggest reward there is to 2-6 year-olds! Allowing them to help cook or clean the garage teaches kids to recognize at an early age that each person is an important family member whose voice is listened to!!!! All family members have responsibilities. Make each one feel special.

I assume blog readers are child-minders, child-providers and parental child-raisers. This blog topic is also on the minds of researchers who study parenting trends! Contemporary families are cruising so fast with so much pace and busy-ness that the norm is negatively affecting children and youth from infants in child care to teenagers in action! Here’s what I learned from Jim Garbarino, Mel Levine, Robert Brooks, Dr. James Comer, to name prestigious researchers!

Fast–paced adaptable, high stress family life is in style. Families wake up to school, jobs, and car rides, buses and snacks as if each day is an instantaneous “fresh start.” Families live according to a daily schedule those changes every day that are somewhat the same but often different and “new.” Children react physically and emotionally to routine inconsistency and stress, shifting from high energy to sleepy states, compliance to defiance and kindness to meanness and adopting the same merry-go-round lifestyle for themselves…..

Researchers find there is an upside and some hope in this decade of a fast-paced life! If families take five minutes a day to start a quick, but attentive conversation about each day’s activities and follow up with contact by cell phone or notes, problems loom small less often. Kids quickly feel included, are more helpful at home, and have higher expectations about cooperation day to day!

Researcher, Dr. Robert Brooks, concerned with a “hot” topic”: resiliency in children,” recently told an audience in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, that mothers and dads need to modify their own behavior to model resiliency as a skill for their young children on a daily basis. As he describes it, young children, even 18 month-olds are more that ready to learn adaptation and cooperation as well as compliance with adult requests and commands.

On the negative side, Dr. Brooks insists, if parents do not help children consistently, they do not naturally “use” their resilient and resourceful abilities and can become “behavior problems” in school and at home, ignoring parents or teachers and refusing to follow directions and family rules! What is ultimately most dangerous for children who do not have consistent parents and general family rules is that they is that they acquire social behaviors such as empathy, kindness or compassion toward others much later in life when it can become a problem forming relationships.

According to my research (Turben, 1998) studying kindergarten age children who were observed initially at 18-36 months of age, personality traits were consistent after five years. This supports the notion that toddlers who were more resilient and cooperative maintained those skills and behaviors five years later.

T.Berry Brazelton, pediatrician and advocate of the capacity of infants, also notes that at the moment of birth, parents literally fall in love with their infants, adding that the immediacy of the sensation of love becomes the basis of social and intellectual abilities in infancy. Falling in love extends to loving care, allowing parents to teach their babies social skills and values and ways of living.

Many are surprised by the competency of infants and the resiliency they possess. If you are one of those, let us know how smart your child is, and how he or she got that way! Dr. Susan

Fire setting is like lying, hitting, stealing, and other behaviors, unacceptable and not to be put into the same category as attention-getting actions that children make to get adults to attend to them. Fire setting is a life and death matter.

Children as young as 4 years old fixate and obsess over things that light up, make noise, can be twirled or manipulated repeatedly. . These become habits and dangerous ones at that. You want to stop the action before it becomes a habit. Contact your mental health center, and be sure they have child development specialists who can conduct play-based assessment, and give practical advice and counsel to you. There is nothing stigmatizing or detrimental to your family about getting some good advice.

My knowledge of your household or your husband’s smoking and other interactions isn’t sufficient to give you a method or an action plan for stopping the experimentation with fire. If you will give me more information, I will propose a general action plan, but you must also get linked up with an agency, which offers infant-childhood mental health services. Be sure they include ideas that take into account your personality, home life, etc not just the dangerous behavior of your son.

Be sure you and your husband agree to do this. It is very important to stop this pattern from becoming a habit. No child needs to be a “Dennis the Menace”, or out of control person. Please give me more information and I will try to help you long distance.

On the web, through home visits and workshops, any way you want information, help is always just a blog or email away! My motto is “yes, I can!” I can deliver practical help and solutions for family concerns and issues. Every parent, child or professional who visits my site deserves rapid response information and resources delivered at little or no cost. Why? So you can take care of yourselves, so you can take care of your children!

Think of blogging and sharing as house calls on the internet! I love my site even more now that I am a weekly blogger and eager to have visitors reply! Here are some of the topics I will cover in the next few months.

* Why you are the way you are: personality, culture, race and family background
* Impact of tutoring and coaching kids to do better in school
* Developmental changes in children as they develop
* Teaching kids values and cooperative behaviors
* Family meetings and other ways to have conversations with kids

• Family abuse, neglect and violence in communities

• Vulnerable children, impairments and disabilities

• Childhood trauma as children experience war

• Identifying talents in very young children

• Parental response systems while parents work

• Lonely children left alone, computers, video games, television

• Community advocates for children without daytime care

• Sensory-motor impairments in childhood and adolescence

• Social friendships and why parents need to monitor their kids friends

• The brain-body connection and neurobiology

• School curriculum: preschool through 8th grade

• Early Start, prevention of tragedy through strategy

Why is so difficult for mommies, nannies and dads to teach children very early in life (like by age eight months when they can handle finger food!) to cooperate by allowing even little ones to take part and help? Little children love to look at adults for approval, to do anything to get it! They think this is cool play! They absolutely thrive on helping adults and older kids around the house; they feel so important. They will do anything for attention and when the attention is positive and full of compliments, it is a powerful reward for kids and such an easy thing for parents to do. Just allow them help. Most parents completely overlook this easy habit to establish…

If moms and dads don’t involve the littlest kids, those same precious toddlers become monsters-with-mouths, throwing fits and temper tantrums….demanding, kicking, screaming at 14 months! Monkey see monkey do! Okay… parents if you refuse to let them be part of the scene, the littlest ones will make a scene you won’t forget, which then gives those diapered tyrants power to get attention anyway they can, thus controlling the household, later it is the neighborhood, then it is the school and even at church and definitely at the playground. And, folks in parent-land, controlling the household is a grown up job and no children need apply!

What do you think out there in blog land?

Do you teach your kids to help or hinder?