Tara's Diary

The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley

‘The No-Cry Sleep Solution’ offers gentle ways to help babies sleep through the night. Pantley, author, parent educator and mum of four developed a ten-step programme for improving a baby’s sleep. The book comprises the following topics: the sleep pattern of babies and realistic sleeping goals, analysing and improving sleep patterns with sleep logs, sleep solutions and how to create a customised sleep plan.

The book contains a wealth of information on the topic of baby sleep and tips for better sleep for all kinds of families – co-sleepers or crib sleepers, breastfed or bottle-fed, and so on. All the strategies are based on the intention that no baby should be left to cry in the process of falling asleep. On the contrary to most sleep advice books, Pantley’s solutions are gentle methods that require time, generally many weeks, for a success. But her strategies actually work in the long run, unlike most of the quick and dirty methods available today. Why? Try to think from a baby’s point of view; if you’ve ever tried to change your diet for example, it weren’t the quick methods that brought a long lasting change of your eating habits. The successful methods are the gentle ones, the ones that change your habits in a slow way that feels good, without pressuring yourself into something unknown and unwanted. It’s the same with babies and their sleep. Firstly the quick methods just don’t work in the long run, and secondly it’s only fair to respect our babies as human beings and treat them the same way we treat our adult friends. We’d never force our friends into a rigid scheme they absolutely hate and respond to with crying. In my opinion, the only downside of the no-cry sleep solution book are the rewards cards Pantley proposes for encouraging toddlers to change their sleep habits. But other than that I found the book very interesting to read. The best point of the book is the one when Pantley asks the reader if their baby’s sleep problem is actually a problem for the reader themselves, or if it’s only society who considers it as a problem. This is exactly what happened to me with my daughter. Until she was 8 months old I was very uncomfortable because I thought I need to ‘improve’ her sleeping habits, until I realised that for us, our sleeping arrangements are actually just perfect, even though she didn’t sleep through the night. I simply moved her into our bed and the problem was solved – I didn’t have to get up anymore and got all the sleep I needed. However, if a baby’s sleep is a problem for their parents, this is the sleep advice book I would most probably recommend.

‘Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves’ by Naomi Aldort

‘Raising our children, raising ourselves’ is written by parenting and family counsellor Naomi Aldort. Her concept revolves around the idea that neither child nor parent must dominate. Aldort says it is ok to trust our children and our natural instinct to love them unconditionally.

The book begins with the concept of healing talk and the highly useful communication tool S.A.L.V.E. What follows are the discussion of the five primary needs of children and the book then moves on to the topics of love, self-expression, emotional safety, autonomy and power, and self-confidence – everything that is needed to help children grow into sensible, self-confident and empathic adults. Not only is the book incredibly helpful in everyday family life, it also provides a highly interesting insight into childrens’ minds. I like the fact that Aldort says it’s ok to treat children as respectfully as we would treat a grown-up friend. All in all a great and wonderfully reassuring book.

‘How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk’ by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish

‘How to talk so kids will listen’ is a guide to practical and effective communication with children. Faber and Mazlish’s ideas help replace everyday arguments between parent and child with positive and productive talk. The book helps parents cope with a child’s negative feelings, express anger without being hurtful, engage a child’s cooperation, set clear limits and still maintain goodwill, use alternatives to punishment and resolve family conflicts peacefully.

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We all have witnessed countless situations, in our own families and outside our homes, where parents and children were arguing, each having their own view about the situation, neither capable of understanding the other’s view. Of course, this isn’t an exclusive problem to parent and child relationships, we encounter this on a daily basis in adult relationships too. The difference is that we’re more aware of the effects of our words on another adult since we have the same grown-up minds. When talking to children however, most of the time we don’t really try to understand the effect of our words on them, we just assume we know it, because they’re children – small, immature and, well, kids. After reading this book however, adults will understand that children’s thoughts are much more complex and intelligent than assumed in our society. They may be small, but deserve to be treated as respectfully as adults. Their thought processes are already very mature, and if we want to help them build a sound foundation, childhood is the time to begin – it’s never too early. With the right speech we not only help them grow into sensitive and confident human beings, but also we facilitate and enrich our everyday life with children. When spoken to in the right way, children have an amazing ability to find their own solutions and to act in an incredibly mature way. But they need the help and guidance from their mature parents. It’s in our own hands how our children will turn out.

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This is a great book on so many levels. The advice is incredibly practical and helpful as it encourages to think about and to really understand the effect of speech on children, and also, the style of the book – plain text, dialogues and comic style explanations, make the book very easy to read and to remember.

The pace of Tara’s change since she turned one is amazing. When I think back to Christmas I can’t believe how different she was back then, only three months ago. Her intelligence seems to have made a huge leap, and actually all my friends with similar aged children say the same. 12 months seems to be a huge turning point. They end their first year as babies and grow into toddlers.

Tara’s talking skills have seriously taken off in the past few weeks. Before she turned one, she tried to say three words. Now she picks up new words on a daily basis, her vocabulary comprises about 20 words by now. Of course not the proper words, she has her very own toddler language. There’s a system to it though: she only says one of the syllables of a word, but will repeat this syllable as many times as the actual word contains syllables. For example, toilet is tata. Tae is Tea. Ia is ear. Papa means pasta and brrr (said in a very loud and agitated way) means bread. The other interesting thing about Tara’s language development is due to the fact that she’s living in a bilingual home. Even though Martin and I both are Swiss, he talks in Swiss German to her while I use English. Most of the things she says are in English so far, but she understands both. And this week something interesting happened. As we were walking to the shops it started snowing. I said to her ‘look Tara, this is snow!’ and she said: ‘nee’ which is the second part of the German word Schnee for snow. We were in Switzerland a few weeks ago – she never tried to say the word back then but clearly remembered now what we were calling snow in German. While she’s only able to say a few words, she understands already an awful lot. We can give her little tasks like ask her to fetch things and we have to start to be careful what we talk about in her presence.

A few weeks ago Tara became increasingly fascinated by us using the toilet – she wanted to be there whenever we used it, wanted to observe what we were doing, with lots of giggles involved. We thought this would be a great time to introduce a potty, and she took it like a duck to water. We’re not training her, but put her on the potty every 2 hours or so and now, sometimes, she even tells us when she needs to use it. I’m not in a rush to get her nappy free, I want her to have fun on the potty without any pressure and I’m pretty sure the rest will sort itself out automatically.

While she was only observing things in year one, Tara now wants to be a proper part of the family and help out in the household. At the moment she’s completely obsessed with tea and coffee, living in a coffee shop would be heaven for her right now. Wherever she sees a mug she points on it and says ‘tea, tea’, whether it’s in a department store, a picture book or at home. When we put the kettle on she gets all excited because making tea is now her task. She does everything by herself, except pouring the hot water of course. She insists on getting the milk out of the fridge herself and pouring the milk into the tea (she’s not walking yet, so she demands to be carried or walked everywhere, from cupboards to fridge). It’s not always the ideal amount of milk that finds it’s way into the tea but we’re getting there. She also helps with loading the washing machine, putting away the dried plates and things, cleaning the table and so on.

In the past few weeks, all of a sudden I felt the urge to get new toys and new things to do for her, and I’ve now become a regular customer at the Early Learning Centre stores all over London. She’s outgrown her baby toys and isn’t interested in simple objects anymore. She now plays very differently. There’s already a bit of pretend play (guess what, making tea is her favourite). We bought her a beautiful wooden London bus, a play village and lots of crayons, finger paint and stamps. She absolutely loves the finger paint, we’re doing an art session almost every day.

Of course, the darker side of toddlerhood is slowly emerging as well. An incredible impatience, a very loud, shrieky voice to make herself heard when she wants something that’s out of her reach, and mood swings. Bring it on…

‘Unconditional Parenting’ by Alfie Kohn

The book Unconditional Parenting is a provocative challenge to the conventional wisdom about discipline. The first part of the book explores how punishment and rewards are detrimental to raising empathic, secure and happy children and the second part is all about unconditional parenting and how to implement the concept in practice.

I truly enjoyed this book. It is heavily evidence-based with lots of examples of research and studies, which is interesting to know and which can be extremely helpful when confronted with opinions from people who strongly believe in discipline. I already had an idea why punishment is not good, but it was an eye opener to read about how rewards, even verbal rewards, are as bad as punishment. The chapters about unconditional parenting are equally interesting and helpful as they provide many ideas about how to handle situations in the absence of punishment or rewards. However, I mostly enjoyed the last two chapters which explore why it’s good to let children choose their way as often as possible and how to incorporate this in everyday life, and also how we can assist our children to become empathic and helpful through helping them see the world through other people’s eyes. When we as parents take the child’s perspective rather than insisting on our grown-up perspective, we help them do the same.

This is a great book for anyone wishing to raise their children beyond the conventional wisdom of discipline. Thanks to its emphasis on research and studies, this book is especially helpful for people who doubt that children can be raised without rewards and punishment.

‘Playful Parenting’ by Lawrence J. Cohen

Playful Parenting is a book about children’s play – but in a much more meaningful way than it might sound. Cohen is a psychologist specialising in children’s play therapy and his book provides an amazing insight into the deeper meanings of play. For children, play isn’t just a time filler, it’s their job and they take their job more seriously than most adults take theirs. Through play, children explore the world, communicate deep feelings, get close to those they care about, work through stressful situations and blow off steam. The book starts off with the value of play, then explains how play can help parents re-connect with their children when they’ve drawn back into their own worlds of negative emotions, then the book talks about why children play certain games adults don’t like very much (war games, barbies etc.) and how we can make those games more meaningful and even enjoy them. Later on, Cohen talks about discipline, and how to make discipline more fun and more effective. Playful Parenting is an incredibly helpful book for parents of children aged 0 to 20 (and beyond). Before I had children on my own, I was scared sometimes of the thought of ending up like those disconnected, grim looking mums you see on the streets. I was determined to find a way to make parenting more fun, so that both parents and children can enjoy their life together, with fun and giggles instead of having to pretend we adults aren’t fun to be with, just so that children look up to us parents. If done correctly, play can be an incredibly powerful tool for parents to connect with their children, and to help them grow into amazing adults. I love this book and will re-read it many times in the coming years.

I really enjoy introducing Tara to new foods. And I love baking. But as long as she doesn’t realise yet how glorious sweets and salty foods are, I don’t want her to eat it, in the hope she develops a taste for healthy foods too. I’ve found a great recipe for wholesome, sugar and salt free muffins, and even I really like them.

Here’s the recipe:

(I use the American cup as measurement because it’s so quick and easy – if you don’t have a cup measure, just pour 2.5dl of water into a mug and use this measurement – 2.5dl is how much a cup is).

I’ve never liked the idea of my children’s bedroom exploding with toys. Before Tara was born, Martin and I spent a couple of weeks in a Thai jungle, and especially since I saw how happy those children were, without the toy overload of our society, I was determined to try to not to accumulate too many toys. Having only a small amount of toys means that the toys need to keep the kids entertained for a long time. These are the toys which the children have to use their imagination for (also, these are the toys that have the largest educational effect too). Last week I went to the crazy world of Hamley’s in Regent Street – the world’s largest toy store. It’s absolutely massive, receiving around five million visitors per year. To my surprise, Tara was quite happy with just watching the toys from my sling. That was a relieve. Anyway, Tara got a bit bored with her old toys which she’s outgrown, so I was looking for a new one. And I found one. It’s beautiful and will keep her entertained for many years I think.

The Big Red London Bus is made of wood and consists of the bus, two decks with chairs that can be taken out, a removable ceiling and lots of little passengers. At the moment Tara loves just playing with the passengers or with the bus, but the time will come soon when she’s going to do pretend play with the entire set.

Big Red London Bus, by Hamleys, £30. From 3 years onwards.

The Christmas Day a year ago I spent pacing up and down the house in labour. This Christmas Day, I spent the morning leisurely baking a birthday cake. Christmas will never be the same again, that’s for sure. The birthday of your child will always be a very special day, giving birth is about the most magical and wonderful thing in the entire universe (apart from the pain!), and this combined with Christmas Day is about as special as it gets. Tara absolutely loved her first cake, she was all quiet when eating her slice (quietness is a very rare occasion). In the afternoon, Tara and I spent an afternoon nap together. While she was peacefully asleep I spent the hour contemplating what was happening this time last year – spending the day at home, me in labour and Martin counting the minutes between contractions, then the transfer to hospital and a couple of hours in labour there. Then the time when I thought I was too weak to survive the birth, the arrival of our daughter and the first hour we spent together as a little family, the first night at hospital with her and our first days at home. It’s strange how the mind forgets all the pain, sleepless nights and feelings of desparation when it comes to birth and babies. In the end the only thing that stays are the beautiful memories. Isn’t nature kind (or just plainly ingenious, because otherwise the entire world would consist of one-child families).

It’s been an amazing year. I’ve gone from not knowing anything about babies (never ever changed a nappy before!) to a confident mum. And Tara has gone from a tiny, helpless and clueless little bundle to a confident, happy, chatty, crawling and curious little person. What a journey. Sometimes I’m a little sad that my girl is not the dependent little baby anymore, but at the same time I’m incredibly excited about what’s to come, while being grateful for the many sweet memories about baby Tara which I’ll be going to carry in my heart forever.

Happy birthday my wonderful daughter.