There is No Such Thing as a Parenting Expert!

I don't like the term, "parenting expert." To me, there is no such thing.

It seems to me that there are numerous different approaches to parenting, and we're all pretty much flying blind. None of us knows for definite that what we're doing is the 100% right choice, that we're not inadvertently damaging our children, that our children won't grow up and wish we'd done something different.

When I was studying developmental psychology, I had naively chosen the course thinking it would tell me something along the lines of "and then, aged 12 months, the child can understand this, and is physically able to do this..." What it actually teaches you is a history of theory: this guy did a study where this happened, so he said children develop like this, then this guy came along and said actually, I think it's like this and did a study to prove it. Even the genuine experts aren't experts.

I have already written about how I don't trust the advice of people who've made their name out of being a nanny - their job is to resolve behaviour issues quickly and without drama. This includes Supernanny and Gina Ford; to me, neither can be classed as any sort of an expert when they don't have children themselves and are busy making a substantive living out of telling us what to do.

I love Sarah Ockwell-Smith; her approach to parenting is much more gentle and close to my own ideas. She is more knowledgeable, as she has four children of her own so you know that what she's telling you to do, she's tried and tested on her own kids. She does her homework, and her advice is backed up by reference to studies as well as her own experience. Still though, for every study saying one thing, you can usually find two saying the exact opposite. I love what Ockwell-Smith has to say, but I would probably call her "well read" rather than a parenting expert.

I am a massive fan of attachment parenting; I bought a Dr Sears book and loved every word of it. I still don't think Dr Sears or his wife are experts. I think they have a lot of valuable experience, and a lot of great ideas, but they can't possibly be parenting experts when every child and every parent are different. Also, the whole point of attachment parenting is that you go by your instincts, not by a set of instructions!

It is also worth noting that health visitors are not experts. In order to become a health visitor in the UK, one must be either a registered nurse or a midwife - so someone who looks after sick people, or someone who deals with pregnancy, childcare and immediate post-natal care. Training to go on and become a health visitor then takes just one year (if training full time). How much do you think a person can learn about babies, child development, sleep issues, weaning etc, in one year? On top of learning the regulations and requirements, that is. The majority of advice a health visitor gives out is based on their opinion. Considered as it may be, it's still just one person's opinion. I'm the first person to say how utterly amazing our health visitor was - but over the last two years I have heard some horror stories that made me realise that sadly, she was in the minority. Health visitors are not parenting experts; they are people who have weighed a lot of babies.

I am not a parenting expert. You are not a parenting expert. Your mother is not a parenting expert. Your mother-in-law is not a parenting expert. The woman up the road who keeps telling you to put a hat on your baby's head? NOT A PARENTING EXPERT.

I know a lot of stuff. When S was born I was so worried about every single tiny aspect of parenting, I bought a shedload of books, and I borrowed even more from the library. Do you know what I learned? I learned that everyone has an opinion on how you should raise your child. And you probably shouldn't listen to any of them, unless they resonate particularly with you. Even if it's your mum. 

I do definitely consider myself to be an expert; I am the world authority on my child. I know that when she wakes crying in the night, I can usually get her back to sleep with a bit of Baa Baa Black Sheep. I know that she loves porridge and hates eggs. All children are different though, and I'm willing to bet there aren't many other toddlers out there for whom being handed a banana on the way into the supermarket guarantees their mother enough time to do the shopping before it gets boring.

I don't know anything worth knowing about your child, though. And neither does anyone else - except you. Do not listen to them.

So what do you do? How do you decide the best way to raise your child?

I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I've done thus far. I read a lot of books; I always have at least one parenting book on the go. But I only stick with the ones whose ideas seem reasonable to me after the first few pages. I've never reached the end of a Gina Ford book. I ask people whose children seem happy and well adjusted (not necessarily "well behaved"). I don't ask people who are always on Facebook complaining about their kids. And then, I put it all together and I make my own decision. What feels right to me? What can I not bear the thought of doing? What will get us through tonight, and not make me feel like the world's worst mother?

At first, it's terrifying. After a while, I found I began to trust my own judgement. I began to trust that actually, yes, this is my child and I do know best. Better even than a so-called expert.

There will always be someone who disagrees with your approach; there will always be someone who tells you in an authoritative tone that you are doing it wrong. To those people I generally  point out that S is my child, and it's my choice.

Of course, since I'm not an expert, you should feel under no pressure whatsoever to listen to a word I have to say!

Our Fabulous Summer Activity Bags

Shortly before S's nursery closed for Summer holidays, S's keyworker L asked me if I'd like a little book bag put together for us to borrow over the holidays. I jumped at the chance - S loves books so much she often cuddles one to sleep!

At the end of term, we were presented with two bags. I had been expecting a couple of books in a bag, but what we actually got was bags stuffed with resources. 

The Dear Zoo bag had the Dear Zoo book, a mask of each animal in the book, stick puppets, play dough mats ("can you make play dough tusks for the elephant?"), a pair-matching game featuring the animals from the book. There was a list of activities, and a list of questions to go with the masks ("can you roar and prowl like a lion?") Oh, and a Dear Zoo cuddly toy - a naughty monkey in a bag marked "Too Naughty!"

The Gruffalo bag had a copy of The Gruffalo, but also a copy of The Gruffalo Touch & Feel book, a Gruffalo peg puzzle, a Gruffalo word mat, a "Gruffalo describing words" sheet (with a picture of the Gruffalo surrounded by adjectives), a woodland background and characters from the Gruffalo to use on it.

Both bags came with a little note pad and pen so that you could write down how you got on.

S really enjoyed playing with the contents of these bags. She enjoyed the Dear Zoo one the most I think, and has asked to play with it several times. She loves to wear the masks and had proper giggles when she realised she could see me through the eye holes. They were mainly used to play Peekabo:

Here are some photos of her playing with the resources:

My favourite photo though, is this one: 

We also played with the Gruffalo bag, but S only seemed interested in the peg puzzle; she did this over and over and over again!

I was so pleased with these resources; S had a great time playing with them. Dear Zoo is her all time favourite book so she really loved all of the extras surrounding the book.

When I looked closely at the resources, the play dough mats and stick puppets etc, all came from Twinkl Resources. I had heard that name before, but I didn't recall when - so I Googled them, and found the sort of website one could get lost in for hours. They don't just do resources for playing with the Gruffalo and Dear Zoo; they have... pretty much anything you could ever want to print out. There are resources for teachers and parents, from S's age right up through the key stages. 

Twinkl say: 

Twinkl Resources is your first choice for easy to use, trusted and high quality teaching materials for educators and parents worldwide - professionally crafted materials with a personal touch.

The website is amazing; I have spent hours going through all the resources lately. One of my favourite parts is the Create page where you can essentially create your own worksheets and flash cards using the templates provided. There's also a great Primary Teaching Forum where you can chat to other users. The forum is split into sections for different subjects or different types of user, for example nursery nurses or childminders. It's a great place to swap ideas and get advice.

Most of the resources on Twinkl are free, however there are paid membership options where you can have access to even more! Gold membership is £24.95 a year, and Platinum membership is £39.59 per year. 

I love the fact most of the resources are free; it means that anyone with a printer can have access to fabulous worksheets, flash cards and games for their children. The paid option is an important one though; without subscribers to the site, they would not be able to continue offering such a wide range of resources. 

I was delighted to be offered a Platinum membership to Twinkl in exchange for writing about my experience and opinion of the site. All opinions are my own.

Child Development: Brain Development in Toddlers

When S was born, I remember a nursery nurse telling me that a newborn baby's brain is so undeveloped, it looks like a smooth, shiny marble. Unlike all other mammals, human babies are born with underdeveloped brains. 

It's in the first few years of life that our brains do the most developing. Here are some geeky facts...

• In a baby's first year, their brain doubles in size, becoming half the size it will eventually be as an adult. That's a lot of development in one year; no wonder they sleep so much!
• By the age of 2, a toddler's brain will be using the same amount of energy as yours.
• By the age of 3, a toddler's brain will be using twice as much energy as yours.
• This is the busiest time for a developing human brain. It stays this busy pretty much constantly, until the age of around 9 or 10, when it begins to slow down until around the age of 18, where it reaches an adult level.

So what is your child's brain actually doing with all this energy it's using up?

• It's building synapses, or connections between brain cells (neurons, like Nina's).
• Human babies are born with all the brain cells we need, but only around 2500 synapses per cell.
• Up to the age of 3, children are building synapses between neurons in the brain, until they end up with around 15,000 connections per neuron.
• 15,000 is a lot more synapses per neuron than adult brains have. After the age of 3, those synapses that aren't used are allowed to wither and die.
• Babies are very adaptable when they're born, because of this growth in synapses. A newborn baby from anywhere in the world can learn any language, thrive in extreme temperatures, develop tastes for whatever foods are the norm in that area. We develop according to the environment we are born into, and discard those parts that are not required.
• If one part of a baby's brain is damaged, because of these extra synapses, often a different part of the brain can take over the missing functions. This doesn't happen as we get older, because those synapses aren't there to allow the adaptation.
• Remember this post where I said we're all born with the ability to hear differences in language that we don't hear as adults? It's a similar sort of thing. I can hear that an accent is American, but I couldn't necessarily tell you what part of the States it's from; similarly an American can tell I'm English, but probably couldn't detect my (slight!) Wiltshire accent.
• You know people always say that without one sense, another compensates? With deaf children, the part of the brain that would usually be used for hearing is used to process information from the eyes instead.
• Synapses that are used grow, which pushes neurons apart and causes the brain to grow.
• Between early childhood and adolescence, humans lose around 20 billion synapses per day.
• This cutting back of synapses is what causes us to become less flexible and creative as we age. People generally become less suggestible but more efficient and self aware as they reach adolescence.

Bearing in mind what your toddler's brain is up to, what does this mean for you as a parent?

DISCLAIMER: This is information I've gleaned from the course I'm doing, and the hundreds of parenting books I buy and borrow from the library. I'm not trying to tell people what to do; after all, S is only just a toddler, so I really can't base this on my own shining example. Instead, this post is a mixture of the scientific facts about toddlers, and what the books tell me is the best way to parent a child. General consensus among the experts is that an authoritative model of parenting works best, and produces the most well-rounded children. (and no, I don't count Gina Ford as an expert) If you disagree, and wish to use a different model of parenting, that's your choice, and you are free to disregard the entire last section of this post.

• No pressure or anything, but right now you are literally creating your child in the way you interact with him/her.
• Toddlers need a lot of repetition, consistency and boundaries. We need to teach our children what we as parents, and the world in general, expects from them as people. This is something parents need to agree on, where there is more than one person responsible for raising a child. If one of you always watches TV through dinner, but the other doesn't allow it at all, this is not something a toddler will understand past the "I want to watch TV and yesterday I was allowed to" part of the argument.
• We need to take a lot of deep breaths and try to be as patient as possible. Toddlers typically want to stop and explore and examine every new thing they come across. They are learning about the world.
• We can all win daily battles with a toddler over where we walk, how far we walk, where we stop etc, but only because we're bigger than they are. Realistically, it's better that they understand why you've picked them up to cross the road, why we're stopping here, etc. That way, as they get bigger and you can't realistically (or metaphorically) wrestle them to the ground to win an argument, you have set that precedent for how things are.
• Babies and toddlers rarely use toys in the way they are "supposed" to. It might look like aimless mucking about, but actually they're learning valuable lessons about cause and effect, and how the world works. Being left to their own devices to play with toys and experiment with their surroundings is good for a developing brain.
• When a toddler does something they know they're not allowed to do, and keep looking back to check your reaction, they're testing boundaries, and exploring the idea that what they want is what's different to what we want. They want to see if they're allowed it today, if they weren't allowed it yesterday, checking for consistency and predictability in a parent's responses: is it always bad to do this, or only sometimes?
• Around the age of 18 months, children begin to grasp the concept that people prefer different things, and that their favourite food/drink/toy may not be another person's favourite. They are learning the basic idea that not everyone wants the same thing. Up to this point, they really have no concept of this, which is why it's so crazy to claim a crying baby is trying to manipulate its parents. A crying teen or adult may be attempting to manipulate you, but babies' thoughts are just not that sophisticated; they really do just want a cuddle.
• While they're still very young, children literally do not have the control over their responses to make punishments a reasonable option. The human brain is simply not developed enough for the first couple of years of life; if they are scared or hungry or tired or confused, they just go into standard clingy, crying baby mode, and no amount of punishing or rewarding will stop this from being their natural response. Our job as parents is to help our children to deal with their uncontrollable emotions, rather than trying to teach them not to be emotional. Note that Pavlov did his experiments on dogs, not humans.

Speech and Language Development in Children: Language Delay

This post is one in a series of posts about child development. You can see the earlier posts here.

• Language development and speech development are two very different things. Language delay is a delay in the cognitive functioning around learning to talk, whereas speech delay is a delay in the actual physical production of words.
• If a child has a speech delay, this cannot cause a language delay, but language delay may cause speech delay where a lack of understanding of the words causes a delay in learning to say them.
• Children can experience a language delay if they have insufficient opportunity to identify words and link them to something familiar.
• With typically developing children, there is a close link between what their mother is saying, and what is happening around them.
• Margaret Harris and colleagues performed a study in 1983 where they found that 78% of the things mothers said to their 16 month old children referred to whatever the child was currently focusing on. They also found that almost 50% of the things the mothers said contained at least one specific object name.
• Conversely, in a later study, they found that mothers of children with a language delay at 2 years referred to what the child was focusing on less than 50% of the time, and only 25% of their words contained specific object names.
• Mothers of children with language delay instead referred to objects in general terms - "that thing," "one of those" instead of "the ball" or "the cup."
• This sampling of the mothers' speech was done before a language delay was evident so it's not likely that the child's language delay caused these mothers to change the way they spoke to their child.
• That said, we still can't be sure exactly what causes a language delay.
• Margaret Harris has stated however, that there is definitely an interactive relationship between mothers' speech and their children's language development.

What can we learn from this then, as parents?

The key message is that what we say to our children makes a massive difference to their language abilities in the long term.

In every book, article and study I've read while doing this module on child development, the relationship with the mother (or father, or other caregiver) is stressed as the most important thing in the child's life. (most studies focus on the mother, that's why I've used "mother" throughout my posts)

I don't know about you, but I often look up and think "good grief, you talk a lot of crap to that child!" but what I'm actually doing is pointing out everything of interest, naming everything she is looking at or walking towards or touching or falling over.

"oh look, there's a doggie! Say hi doggie! Ah, what a lovely doggie; hi doggie! And here are some ducks! How many ducks are there? There's another duck! Here's a white duck! Shall we feed the ducks? This duck wants to eat all the bread doesn't he!" 

This gibbering is actually really important for your child to learn not only object names, but the connecting words between them, and words for their thoughts and feelings and colours and all the rest. All this gibbering is teaching your child language, and it's vitally important.

Speech and Language Development in Children: Understanding First Words

Following on from this post about recognition of first words, this post will look at how infants first understand words.

She can't say "Peekaboo," but she certainly knows what it means!

Early comprehension of words begins at around 7 months for most babies. Many of the words a child first understands will be context-bound, meaning they are only able to understand it in one specific situation. A typical example of this will be the child who happily waves bye-bye to a person at the front door of their house, but not if they're out and about in the buggy, not when leaving someone else's house, and not if the person leaving their house says goodbye at the living room door.

It's difficult to measure how much children actually understand at this age. Most of the studies available rely on parental reporting, and in this sort of situation, parents can often unwittingly over-report. It has been found that many children are responding to things like pointing, gaze, intonation or other cues rather than the actual word being said. Also, at this age babies only really experience language in reference to their immediate surroundings. So you talk to your child about what's in front of them, what they're looking at right now; but if you were in the bedroom talking about cows in the field, they wouldn't understand it.

When children are learning new words, "cue referencing" is really important. This is things like looking and pointing at the object in question when you say its name. Studies have shown that if a parent points to, and names an object, the child will pay it a lot more attention. 

At around 12 months, many children will have a vocabulary spurt, where they suddenly understand a lot more words very quickly. This often comes shortly before a spurt in the actual production of words, however many children do not experience either spurt. General consensus is that these spurts are caused by the simple fact that learning words becomes easier, once you've already understood some.

Speech and Language Development in Children: Recognition of Words

Have you ever stopped to think about how children learn to speak?

I mean, really stop and think. When a child is born, they're not even physically capable of speech, much less cognitively. A human baby's vocal tract has more in common with an adult chimpanzee than an adult human. Their tongues are positioned solely for the sucking of milk in the first few months. Then, as their brains develop, so do their vocal tracts.

Several studies have been done which showed that babies can hear, and even recognise, speech sounds before they are even born. I won't bore you with all the details here, but it has been shown that babies can recognise differences in speech, and tend to prefer rhyming words over music or rhythmic noises (eg drumming). By 4 weeks of age, a baby has learned to recognise, and prefers, its own mother's voice. Babies seem to enjoy what is known as the prosody of speech; the musical sound speech can have through use of stresses, intonation and rhythm. They can also use this prosody to distinguish between different languages at an early age.

Have you ever been on holiday to Spain, after perhaps having a couple of Spanish lessons, maybe bought a guide book? At home you can sit there and understand a "Teach Yourself Spanish" recording as it says "Por favor, muéstrame dónde están los baños" and the response comes back, "los baños están en ese camino a la derecha." You might repeat those phrases to yourself five or six times... then you walk up to an actual, real life, Spanish person and ask them where the toilets are. And their response is not "the toilets are down that road on the right;" Their response is a long stream of Spanish words, of which you understand maybe the first and the last, and one or two in the middle. Because in Spain, the toilets are never down that road on the right. 

This is how it is for a baby, who has never experienced language before. They understand that you are speaking, but it sounds a lot like a 6-month-old's babbling sounds to us. The first thing an infant needs to do is learn to spot where one word ends, and the next begins. They do this by looking for where syllable stresses are. In the English language, 90% of words have a stress on the first syllable. They also look at something called "transitional probability," which involves the probability of certain combinations of syllables being said side by side. For example, take the phrase: "chicken sandwiches." You hear the syllables chi and ken a lot together, and sand-wich-es too. But how often do you hear the syllables ken and sand side by side? Babies very cleverly use this probability to figure out where words end and begin in sentences. This is also why mothers often naturally find themselves speaking slowly, in simple sentences to their infants, and saying the same words over and over again. All of this helps a child to begin recognising words.

It's also worth noting here that babies' hearing also changes during their first year of life. As I mentioned in this post, babies are born with the ability to hear differences between all sounds. You know when a foreign-speaking person asks you to pronounce a word for them, and you do it, and they repeat it but still say it wrong? It's not because they're stupid. It's because in their native language, that particular sound doesn't exist - so while they were born able to hear it, over the course of their first year of life, their brains have adapted to hear only what they need to hear. This is why you can say "very very" to a Japanese-speaking person, and they will repeat back "vewy vewy" and not hear the difference. Similarly, you can go on your holiday to Spain and say what you think is a perfectly accented, well put together Spanish sentence, and the man behind the counter will say "you're English!" It's because he can hear something you can't hear in those words.

The next part in this series of posts is here

Geeky Things You May Not Know About Babies and Children

For today's blog post, I am going to write about some of the parts of my coursework I've found interesting so far. This is partly so that I can ensure I've actually learned the topic, since there's an exam at the end of the module.

• You know the game where you hide a coin in one of your hands, and have a child guess which hand it's in? You can play that with a child... but until the age of around 5 a child cannot play it with you. Until this point in their development, they think everyone knows the same things, so they don't understand that you don't just know where the coin is.
• If you show a five-year-old two identical balls of plasticine, you can agree they have the same amount of plasticine in both... but if you roll one out into a sausage shape, your five-year-old will most likely think the sausage has more plasticine than the ball. By the time they reach six or seven, children are able to see that there is the same amount of plasticine in each ball, even if one is moulded into a different shape.
• Similarly, if you show your five-year-old two beakers containing the same amounts of water, and agree they contain the same amount of water... if the contents of one is poured into a wider beaker the five-year-old will tell you one of the beakers now contains more water than the other.
• BUT if you have your two matching beakers, and say "oh dear, this one has a chip in it, we'd better swap it for that one" before you pour the water into a different-shaped container, your five-year-old can usually follow this and will agree both beakers still contain the same amount of water. The first one was an abstract concept and a bit pointless, but the second one contextualises the change of beaker; there's a reason for it so the child understands it better.
• Babies are born with arguably better hearing than adults. They are able to distinguish between sounds that adults hear as the same. You know how Japanese speakers sound funny speaking English, saying "velly" rather than "very?" It's because in Japanese they don't have a distinction between those sounds. Japanese babies are born perfectly capable of hearing the difference between the two sounds, but as they grow up and learn their native language, they lose the ability to hear differences they don't need to hear on a regular basis. This is why you can hear a friend speaking Spanish on holiday, and they sound fluent to you - you can hear no difference between what they're saying and the Spanish person they're speaking to replies - but the Spanish person can hear a bad English accent in the Spanish that sounds so... Spanish to you!
• Although their ears are in full working order when they are born, babies eyes are far from 100% at this stage. Or rather, their eyes themselves are fully developed but the part that picks up the image and then relays it to the brain is not so fantastic. Because of this babies can't see a lot - and we don't know how much, because a 2-day-old infant isn't fantastic at saying "yeah I can see it but it's a bit blurry..." We do know that they can't see fine details, and that they prefer to look at human faces. They are also able to distinguish between their parents' faces and those of strangers, from very early on.
• Babies also prefer to look at simple, symmetrical patterns with curved lines. Remember in this post where I said I'd made some simple pictures on postcards and stuck them on the wall for S? Turns out science agrees with me. That doesn't happen very often.

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