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Archives for May 2012
What I’m Reading: “Bringing Up Bebe,” Alone Time
There are so many commonalities between Ezzo parenting and French parenting. Bringing Up Bebe discusses the need for children to have alone time. The Ezzos suggest that we have a daily structured alone time in the form of room time. The benefits to the child are plentiful.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several benefits of alone time. The child:
- Learns to play independently and doesn’t rely on a parent or sibling to show him how to play. The intellectual and academic benefits of this are far-reaching.
- Gets some quiet time, well beyond the age when naps are outgrown.
- Learns to be happy being alone. I know of some adults who find it difficult to be alone. I can’t imagine not having my alone time!
- Sleeps and self-soothes better. The baby who is never alone will wake up and cry if he realizes he’s in his bed alone.
- Learns important focus and concentration skills, playing contentedly without distractions.
- Is secure in his own skin, comfortable in the quiet with nothing but his thoughts and a few toys to occupy himself.
French parents and psychologists agree with the benefits of alone time:
“A psychologist quoted in Maman! magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day–even in the first few months–are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night. De Leersnyder writes that even babies need some privacy. ‘The little baby learns in his cradle that he can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being calmly awake. At a very young age, he needs alone time, and he needs, to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by his mother,'” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 53-54).
Such alone time is reportedly very important to French parents. The author discusses one mom’s story:
“Martine also teaches her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. ‘The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,’ she says of her son Auguste…. It’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In another study, of college-educated mothers in the United States and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 65-66).
French parents and the Ezzos are alike in their description of “helicopter parents.”
“Walter Mischel says the worst-case scenario is for a kid from eighteen to twenty-four months of age is, ‘the child is busy and the child is happy, and the mother comes along with a fork full of spinach. The mothers who really foul it up are the ones who are coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 66).
So whether you leave a child alone during free play or schedule room time every day (or both!), make sure your child has enough time to simply play and to play by himself. Make alone time a priority!
What I’m Reading: “Bringing Up Bebe,” The Pause
Technically, I’m done reading Bringing Up Bebe, but there’s so much to discuss! Today, I’ll talk about “la pause” or “the pause.” Essentially, it’s the idea of allowing a baby to self-soothe, pausing before intervening. Now, this blog isn’t really intended for parents of babies, but this idea applies across the board. It’s all about giving children the freedom to gain independence.
For babies, this means not intervening the minute they cry. For starters, by rushing in and picking up the baby every time he makes a peep, the parent could unintentionally wake the baby. But there’s more:
“Another reason for pausing is that baies wake up between their sleep cycles, which last about two hours. [I’ve noticed sleep cycles can be as short as 35 minutes, particularly at nap time.] It’s normal for them to cry a bit when they’re first learning to connect these cycles. If a parent automatically interprets this cry as a demand for food or a sign of distress and rushes in to soothe the baby, the baby will have a hard time learning to connect the cycles on his own. That is, he’ll need an adult to come in and soothe him back to sleep at the end of each cycle,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 45).
By not pausing when a baby wakes up, we end up teaching them to wake up at every sleep cycle and depend on mom and dad for middle-of-the-night soothing.
“It’s suddenly clear to me that Alison, the marketing expert whose son fed every two hours for six months, wasn’t handed a baby with weird sleep needs. She unwittingly taught him to need a feed at the end of every two-hour sleep cycle. Alison wasn’t just catering to her son’s demands. Despite her best intentions, she was creating those demands,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 47).
Does this relate to older children? Absolutely! It’s all about using your power as a parent, through whatever technique, to teach our children to become independent. Whether you learn to pause when your little one is a baby or don’t learn to do so until he’s 5, it’s serves as an important philosophical parenting decision. Understand that coddling a child doesn’t do him any good. He will need to assert independence at some point in life, and the earlier he does so, the more capable he’ll be.
“Behind this is an important philosophical difference. French parents believe it’s their job to gently teach babies how to sleep well, the same way they’ll later teach them to have good hygiene, eat balanced meals, and ride a bike. They don’t view being up half the night with an eight-month-old as a sign of parental commitment. They view it as a sign that the child has a sleep problem and that his family is wildly out of balance. When I describe Alison’s case to Frenchwomen, they say it’s ‘impossible’–both for the child and his mother,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 48).
And don’t discount the importance of sleep in older children. Good sleep habits begin in infancy.
“There’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They are more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes. And sleep problems that begin in infancy can persist for many years,” (Bringing Up Bebe, p. 50).
So whether your ultimate goal is establishing good sleep habits or teaching independence, be sure to wait–to pause–before intervening.