Tag Archives: phases

A Child’s Physical Phases

We focus a great deal on the mental and emotional phases that our children go through, but physical development plays an important role in our children’s growing up too. Not every child develops at the same pace and while some physical phases appear on the chart at the doctor’s office (crawling, walking, climbing and skipping), others are unique to a specific child… When I look back over my children’s growing up years, I can see there were some pretty quirky physical phases that they all went through—one of my daughters went through several months where she tried to watch herself … Continue reading →

How Much Can You Really Shape Sleep Habits?

Periodically, I try to write about the trials and tribulations of the family sleep “issues” because this seems to be one of the topics that comes up most often in conversations among parents—especially newer parents of young children. Napping, how many hours of sleep a child needs, the exact arrangement of those hours, where the child sleeps, etc. are all big concerns for many parents. Now that my three are nearly grown and I look back, though, I wonder just how much of an impact or how much control I have actually had in shaping their sleep habits… I do … Continue reading →

Interruptions in Child Development

Most of us parents have witnessed as our children started out on a new developmental stage—either in a burst of new skills or gradually learning something new to add to their repertoire. What can be disconcerting for a parent, however, is when a child starts out on a new developmental stage and then stops or regresses. Most of us cannot help but wonder if something is wrong… I have heard more parents tell tales of toilet-training, for example, that starts out fabulously and then the child loses interest, regresses or it becomes necessary to start all over. For some reason, … Continue reading →

Children’s Taste in Popular Music Starts Young

If you thought that your child wouldn’t become interested in popular music (rock, rap, hip-hop, or whatever) until he or she was a teenager, it may come as a rude awakening when your first grader starts singing the annoying hit of the day! Music companies and marketers understand that the market demographic for popular music is getting younger and younger, so parents benefit from getting a grasp on this developmental stage as well. Interest in popular music really isn’t new. It is completely normal and developmentally appropriate for children to start to notice and respond to music heard on the … Continue reading →

Take Advantage When Rules Matter

I have made no secret about the fact that my life is now filled with teenagers and teenagers are not particularly interested in following rules, regulations, or any one else’s expectations. In fact, one of the main jobs of the teenager is to rebel, question, and experiment in order to find his or her own way in the world. BUT, for younger children that is not necessarily the case. There is a wonderful window of time in the early elementary years, when many children are fascinated and consumed by rules and regulations. For parents, this can be a time to … Continue reading →

Staying Close…From a Healthy Distance

So much of parenting—like so much of the rest of life—comes down to balance. Not only do we try to balance work and family, personal needs and other responsibilities, and quality versus quantity time with our children, we are also called upon to learn and adjust our parenting for various phases and developmental stages as our children grow. Finding a way to stay close and attached, and still allow our children the room and space to venture out on their own can be a huge parenting challenge. I can’t help thinking back to when each of my children was learning … Continue reading →

Preferred Parent?

It is normal for any parent to feel jealousy if a child seems to bond with someone else more easily than with them. Perhaps those feelings are exacerbated for adoptive parents who’ve waited a long time to be parents and who may secretly wonder if they are missing some primal biological connection. But it’s important to keep the situation in perspective. In reality, all children, adopted or not, will go through periods of seeming to prefer one parent over another. One common reason is simply time spent together. This works both ways. Naturally a child may bond first to the … Continue reading →

Parenting is a Roller Coaster Ride

There have been times when I wished parenting and life with children was more linear. To read the child development books, things look rather neat and tidy. Children move from stage to stage, phase to phase, and move along the stepping stones to adulthood with clear purpose. But in real life, it just doesn’t work that way. Periods of developmental bursts can often be followed by some types of “regression” and things can often seem rather up and down, push and pull and downright sloppy. What I have found in my parenting experiences is that stages tend to be more … Continue reading →

Murphy’s Law of Toddlerhood

Your toddler loved to eat oatmeal and ate it for three meals out of four in the day. Now you can’t pay her to eat it. She went through an apple juice trend, refusing all other drinks if it wasn’t apple juice. Now she just turns her nose up at the offering. In our house, it was treasure. That’s what the midget called chocolate chip mini muffins. She developed an obsession with them. We couldn’t swap them out for any other food when she wanted treasure for a snack. Then one day, she just stopped eating it altogether – leaving … Continue reading →