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lightreadsNo Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame by Janet Lansbury
3/5. Pretty sure this is just a republish of a bunch of articles from her website with some extra organization. Useful if you know what you are getting into with respectful parenting types and can take or leave things. E.g., no, Janet Lansbury, I will not stop wearing my toddler because he loves it and it helps him refill his connectedness buckets at the end of the day, even though you think it unduly restrains his body or whatever. I don't even know what her real objection to babywearing is, I just, for pity's sake.
But the thing is her general philosophy – set boundaries clearly and calmly, be consistent, explain, connect, slow down, lean into big feelings – is basically our style instinctively, so there are some useful parts here for helping us think through things. And she's annoyingly dead right on occasion. I bookmarked the bit where she's talking about handling toddler resistance to things like nail cutting and her suggestion is to get your toddler to participate by asking which nail to clip first. I recounted this to my wife and we laughed because LOL, for real, we have been low-level fighting him on this for months. He's a pretty chill little guy, but he brings out the big "no!" for that, and her suggestion is just so ridiculous.
…Then we tried it. And it worked? Damn it.
3/5. Pretty sure this is just a republish of a bunch of articles from her website with some extra organization. Useful if you know what you are getting into with respectful parenting types and can take or leave things. E.g., no, Janet Lansbury, I will not stop wearing my toddler because he loves it and it helps him refill his connectedness buckets at the end of the day, even though you think it unduly restrains his body or whatever. I don't even know what her real objection to babywearing is, I just, for pity's sake.
But the thing is her general philosophy – set boundaries clearly and calmly, be consistent, explain, connect, slow down, lean into big feelings – is basically our style instinctively, so there are some useful parts here for helping us think through things. And she's annoyingly dead right on occasion. I bookmarked the bit where she's talking about handling toddler resistance to things like nail cutting and her suggestion is to get your toddler to participate by asking which nail to clip first. I recounted this to my wife and we laughed because LOL, for real, we have been low-level fighting him on this for months. He's a pretty chill little guy, but he brings out the big "no!" for that, and her suggestion is just so ridiculous.
…Then we tried it. And it worked? Damn it.
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Date: 2021-01-18 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-18 10:34 am (UTC)…Then we tried it. And it worked? Damn it.
Hee. Reading this made me smile, because that nail clipping toddler strategy is my biggest secret to getting my high school students enthusiastic to do assignments. Instead of getting the usual groans across the classroom, I give them a choice of assignments, make them vote on it, and suddenly they're cheering to have "won" an assignment when the majority gets their way. LOL. I always stack the deck, by putting in something truly tedious into the mix, so everything else looks better by comparison. Been teaching reluctant teenagers for 15 years now, and this trick works EVERY time. *g*
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Date: 2021-01-18 02:12 pm (UTC)Yeah, I kinda do this to myself when trying to get through a big to do list. I wasn't put off by the principle so much as by the idea that a 16-month-old with a handful of words would go for it. But apparently this is just humans being human.