@cph Remember this for the rest of your and their life. Kids are sponges and they absorb everything about you until they either decide not to or they have learned who they are. I have twin two year olds and I'm rapidly seeing that they pick up on everything that my wife and I do. From how we talk to each other, how we play with them, how we treat our animals, clean the house, eat our food, the words we say (and some we shouldn't) etc...they seem to become a mirror of who we are on a very basic level.
Which my follow up to "don't expect them to do what they haven't seen" is "you can't give what you don't have." A positive self image was something I didn't have growing up cause I watched my parents battle with their weight and say negative things about themselves which I internalized for myself. Be kind to yourselves so they can learn to be kind to themselves as well.
@cph This was a very big lesson for me and my wife with child #1. My wife doesn’t do a great job at it and I have had to explain “why would she know what drying off after a bath looks like if she didn’t get expressly shown?”
@cph I recognized this as well. I typically use babies and toddlers around my daughter as ideas on what to teach her next, but a lot of people think I’m comparing my daughter to other kids too much when I do this. But I’m only using other kids as a “oh, I didn’t know we could do that, I’ll try”, and not a “well why isn’t my kid doing that??”. It’s frustrating.
@cph That’s everything with kids - they have to be taught almost everything. It’s why I don’t understand not sleep training. Sure, they’ll figure it out eventually (just like everything else), or you could just teach them earlier on.
@shelb I think "sleep training" is a sore subject because there's different ways to do it and some people think leaving your child to cry will harm them. I know sleep training can be just bottle-bath-bed-story-sleep though depending on what advice you've been given and what actually works for your child.
We never had to sleep train, we're lucky that my daughter sleeps through anyway. We just take her up to our bed and lie with her in the middle and she'll eventually go to sleep. She's nearly 2 so bedsharing would be ok but we carry her to her room so she doesn't kick us in the face all night. She's got huge separation anxiety so leaving her in her room to cry it out would probably end up with her crying so much that she threw up and would probably really traumatise her.
@gamebancadoithuongonline We too got lucky in that she’s slept till 6:30 every day for months barring the odd few times. 6:30 is fine as it gets us up and ready
@cph You’ll drive yourself nuts if you focus on those milestones. They can be months “ahead” or “behind” but it’s not a big deal either way. My kid was late crawling. At 9-10 months he’s finally going at it, but he’s also starting to stand up on his own now.
Some kids skip crawling altogether. Yes, somethings like being non-verbal very late can be an indication of something else, but even then the buffer between “not a problem and potentially an issue” is pretty wide.
@cph My daughter was 10 months old and doing a lot of jabbering. I sat her in my lap and started saying “DA DA” and pointing at myself. Did that over the course of 30 min while I played with her, and within that time, she said her first word. “Da da”
She is now almost 7 years old and never stops talking.
@cph My favourite comment about babies and toddlers development is: "little ones don't know when they should be doing things because they can't read the articles saying so". And since then we have taken everything as a "she will do things at her own pace".
She didn't start accepting any solids until 11 months,
She screamed bloody murder at the sight of a shoe for the first 2 months of us trying.
She refuses to sleep in her own room until about 13 months
The timeline everyone says is really more of a guideline I think
@cph Similar to this: read to your babies. Buy a shit ton of board books, or borrow them from the library. Read a bedtime story to them every night starting from 6-months. Make it part of their routine. Point to words here and there as ypu read them. Point to the pics as you name the people and things.
I have a 4-yo son who reads at "level G", he's been recognizing words out in the wild since just before age 2. The first word he recognized was "library" because it was a word written on an RFID sticker in the back of every book we read him.
I don't know how typical my son is... It seems he's pretty advanced in reading compared to the rest of his JK class (and don't get me wrong, he struggles with stuff too) but barring some sort of literary savant thing, It must have been our constancy routine reading to him.
@cph I always tell my wife “people don’t know things unless you tell them” and this is like that. She complains about people at work being lazy but I told her maybe they are just ignorant and sure enough they were ignorant and bored and hated it. Now everyone is less lazy.
My son though I been trying to teach him to wave bye for about a year now unsuccessfully. I’ve gotten him to clap a few times but he’s a little developmentally slow. Doesn’t mean he can’t get it just that I gotta work with him as much as I can to make things work. He’s 20 months with no words but I’m working on the sign language now with him on top of talking to him so have as many ways to communicate as possible and I’m getting some of that back now. It’s pretty amazing how we adapt when we need to.
@cph Thank you for sharing this. I literally googled how parents remember to teach kids all these basic things like waving bc my daughter just got assessed at 11mos. When they asked me if she can wave, I had to think and go “hell, I don’t even wave myself! I just say the words! Of course she isn’t waving”. Now I feel extremely guilty bc how is everyone ride knowing what and when to do stuff?
