You can’t start too young

Some people think it doesn’t matter what you say or feel around a baby, they are too young to understand.                           

They couldn’t be more wrong!

A young baby has spent most of the nine months in the womb as a conscious being; feeling your emotions and hearing your words. Although it is now physically separate, it is still tuned to pick up both your feelings and tone of voice.

Being born and becoming a separate entity is still a shock, even if the pregnancy has been a positive experience with a relatively easy birth. It is desirable to keep that calm, safe link for as long as possible after birth to extend that feeling of safety and intimacy.

Babies should be able to feel the reassuring warmth and heartbeat of another person, as often as possible. This why amongst other things, we recommend not leaving the baby alone in a separate room in the early months of infancy. The more time we, and other people, spend talking to and singing to babies, the better it is for their feeling of self and ultimately their self-esteem.

Value of Routine

It is well known that toddlers get great reassurance from routine and predictability. This should start as early as possible. The saving grace for busy parents has to be that babies and toddlers cannot tell the time. Their reassurance comes from sequence not punctuality. So if the sequence is food, potty, bath then that is more important than running to exact minute or even hour!

However once the ability to express disobedience becomes obvious, it needs to be handled firmly but gently.

If it is ignored, it becomes acceptable behaviour and rapidly becomes a habit. The handling of things at this stage will determine the future behaviour of your toddler and growing child. The roots of toddler bad behaviour start in babyhood.

Once bad behaviour has become manifest, it is a lot harder to contain than if it was headed off in the first place.

How Children Learn

Babies and young children learn from what happens around them, they learn from what you do and say. For example, if a baby is talked to and played with in the middle of the night they will become confused and find it more difficult to understand the difference between night and day.

The old proverb ‘out of sight out of mind’ is exactly that in the world of a small child. Moving a child away from something they are not allowed to touch is a far more valuable lesson than moving everything away from a child. If you move something out of the sight of your child, it has ceased to exist as far as they are concerned. If you move everything breakable or valuable out of his reach he won’t learn to follow instructions and that some things are not for him.

These are important things children need to learn in order to make sense of their environment and develop into responsible young people.

If your child never experiences seeing something she cannot have or touch, she will never learn a very important rule of life.

Firm boundaries and organized set routines help children identify what constitutes good and bad behaviour. It helps them recognize the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Moreover, boundaries show that you care and give your child a feeling of security and safety.

love Jean

Children > You can’t start too young