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Parents

Helping Your Child When a Grandparent Is Ill

From surgeries to outpatient cancer treatments, there are many acute or ongoing health-related issues that our family members may encounter. For many children, a grandparent’s serious illness is their first experience with a loved one being sick. Even when these illnesses aren’t life-threatening, they can be upsetting and difficult for children to understand. Experts agree that the best way to help your children cope with a grandparent’s illness is to be honest about the situation. Even if you don’t say anything to your child about a grandparent’s illness, your child may notice changes in grandma or grandpa’s mood, activities, and/or energy level. They may notice that they haven’t been seeing their grandparent as regularly. If you don’t provide an explanation for a grandparent’s changes and/or absences, children are likely to make up stories to explain the situation to themselves. As social workers who specialize in caring for children have noted, the stories that children make up can be more scary than their actual family situations. The key in telling your child about a grandparent’s illness is being honest without over-sharing. Kids don’t need—or want—to know everything about a medical situation. Young children won’t be able to understand medical details, and for a child of any age, too much information at one time can result in a feeling of overwhelm. It’s important to respect your own feelings, too, about your parent’s illness and to find a way of talking to your child that seems right to you. When your parent is ill, you’re experiencing your own stress, anxiety, and so on. Be sure to take a quiet moment to gather your thoughts and carefully plan what you want to share with your child. Choose a time [...]

By |August 30th, 2016|Childhood Development, Parents|Comments Off on Helping Your Child When a Grandparent Is Ill
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The Importance of Setting Limits for Young Children

One of the surprises of parenting is learning that children actually like for their parents to set limits. Limits help children to know what to expect every day, and help them feel safe. Of course, this is hard to remember in the moment when a child is engaged in resisting even the mildest limit you’ve set, such as not going out into the rain without wearing a coat. Children aren’t going to say thank you for setting limits—quite the opposite! On a deeper level, limits help develop young children’s sense of security. Limits will also help you feel more secure as a parent, because when you know your child is used to hearing and following guidelines from you, you will feel more comfortable in a situation where safety is an issue (such as approaching a busy street when walking together), that your child will listen rather than ignore you. It’s important to be able to set limits and enforce consequences when limits aren’t followed. Fortunately, for young children, consequences can be simple. One technique is to give a child a “time-in” where he or she sits quietly in a chair in the same room with you for as many minutes as the child’s age—so, for example, a three-year-old would sit for just three minutes. Setting a timer to keep track of the time will work well as it helps the child connect the consequence to another cue besides the parent. Timers can be helpful in other ways when it comes to setting limits. For example, you might tell children that there’s just ten more minutes of playtime before dinner and that when the timer goes off, they’ll need to put their toys away. This type [...]

By |April 1st, 2016|Childhood Development, How To, Parents|Comments Off on The Importance of Setting Limits for Young Children
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Ideas to Increase a Child’s Attention Span

In 1950, psychologist Gertrude Hildreth described the attention spans of six-year-old children by saying, “Children of this age seem built for action rather than sitting still.” As parents and teachers know, toddlers and preschoolers often seem to be built for nonstop action. It’s common for adults to find themselves on the verge of losing their patience when young children resist even the most gentle encouragement to focus on a particular task. The good news is that we can help children slowly but surely increase their attention spans by modeling focused attention ourselves. A good place to start is to practice giving a child your undivided attention. Sometimes our attention is unavoidably scattered as dinner’s in the oven, the phone rings, a sibling needs a diaper change, or all of the above. When you can find stretches of time to focus one-on-one with a child, this provides a solid model for how to pay attention. It doesn’t have to be long: aim for 10 to 20 minutes, but even five minutes of undivided attention will model focused behavior. Another tip is to spend time in close physical proximity with your child. It’s easy to wander in and out of the room when your child is playing, but it can really help to make an effort to set aside chunks of time where you’re close together. This closeness makes it natural to pay attention to each other as you engage in a shared activity or even just talk to each other. When your child calls out a question or starts talking to you, be sure to come into the same room, sit or stand close to your child, and make eye contact as you respond. It’s tempting [...]

By |March 21st, 2016|Childhood Development, How To, Parents|Comments Off on Ideas to Increase a Child’s Attention Span
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Important Differences Between Adult and Child CPR

Important Differences Between Adult and Child CPR CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which involves assisting someone of any age when his or her heartbeat and breathing have stopped. There are two main steps to CPR: providing chest compressions to keep the blood moving when the heart isn’t pumping, and providing rescue breathing to give the lungs oxygen when someone can’t breathe on their own. You also check for a blocked airway. The process of CPR is similar for assisting adults, young children, or infants, but there are key differences. CPR training defines an infant as a child who is less than a year old, a child as someone older than a year but who hasn’t reached puberty, and an adult as anyone who is at the age of puberty or older. Along with differences between adult and child CPR, there are also differences between child and infant CPR. In contrast with adults, it isn’t usually cardiac arrest that causes a child to go unconscious. Typically, if the breathing and/or heartbeat in a baby or child stops, it’s the result of choking, suffocation, drowning, or another injury. In fact, infants and children are more likely than adults to survive following immediate CPR because kids’ bodies are more resilient than adults and because it’s usually an airway blockage that causes them to need CPR. It’s crucial that kids receive CPR right away to increase their likelihood of survival. Before starting CPR, check that the infant or child is unconscious. With adult CPR, it’s generally recommended that you tap or shake the person, but be sure not to shake an infant. Methods to determine if a baby is responsive include tapping or flicking the soles of the baby’s [...]

By |February 22nd, 2016|Parents|Comments Off on Important Differences Between Adult and Child CPR
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