Pre-school Parenting Secrets: Talking With The Sky

Talking with the Sky

Brian Caswell, David Chiem, Kylie Bell

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9789814338646
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

As parents, we are the earth from which our children grow. How we prepare and fertilise the soil will define their relationship with the world. It will determine the nature of their lifelong conversation with the universe. Pre-school Parenting Secrets: Talking with the Sky is every parent's guide to preparing pre-schoolers for life in the 21st Century.

Best-selling authors and educators Brian Caswell, David Chiem and Kylie Bell have spent their lives in education, research and the arts. In Pre-school Parenting Secrets: Talking with the Sky, they have combined their prodigious talents to create the decade's essential guide to pre-schooler parenting, turning years of pains-taking research into simple and practical strategies, and fun activities. And the best part is that the process is FUN — for both child and parent!

Contents:

• The Seed in the Palm of Your Hand
• The Science: What Research Tells Us Abut the Needs of a Child
• The Physical Needs: Understanding Your Child's Basic Physical Needs — Healthy Development through Sensible Decision-Making
• The Emotional Needs: The Power of Mindset — Building a Healthy and Resilient Self-Image in Your Child
• The Social Needs: Fostering Effective Communication and Social Skills

Readership: Parents and educators.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SCIENCE

What Research Tells Us About the
Needs of a Child

SACHA

Brian writes:

Recently, I received an invitation to Sacha’s wedding. Sacha is a beautiful, talented and confident young woman of 25, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for almost 20 years.

Looking at her face, smiling back at me from the photo on the wedding invitation took me back to the first time I met Sacha...

It was October 1992, in Sydney, Australia.

Amanda B. sat opposite me in a comfortable chair, beside a picture window that looked out onto a lovingly-tended garden in full Spring bloom.

Amanda and her husband Greg were new friends. I had met them through work and we had connected instantly — as sometimes happens in life — but this was the first time I had been to their house.

Amanda smiled as she gazed across the room to where her daughter, Sacha, knelt, her dolls arranged into a row, feeding each one individually, from an imaginary bowl.

Sacha was a pretty seven-year-old, with blonde ringlets and striking grey blue eyes, that gave the impression she was looking right through you. When we were introduced, a few minutes earlier, she had said hello, politely, but she had made no attempt to shake my hand when I offered it.

Then she’d turned and continued playing, as if I had ceased to exist.

Amanda and her husband Greg were English. They had arrived from London a year earlier to begin a new life ‘down under’, with Sacha and one-year-old James who was asleep in a cot in the next room.

‘She still finds it hard to mother them,’ Amanda observed, more to herself than to me, as she watched her daughter playing. ‘The dolls, I mean,’ she added, as she realised that I might not have been on her wavelength. ‘But at least she is caring for them now. When we first brought her home, she didn’t even look at them. She didn’t know how to play, or what a hug was. It was heart-breaking.’

Sacha had come to live with Amanda and Greg at the age of four. She had been brought up in two different Romanian orphanages from the time she was no more than a few days old.

‘They told me they’d done their best,’ Greg shared once, ‘but the problems were so huge. Poverty, disease... Too many kids, and too few resources.’ He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the memory. ‘Most of the kids had been abandoned by their desperate parents, and the official response was to... warehouse them in these huge buildings, with unqualified staff to look after them. By the time we adopted her, she’d spent most of her first four years imprisoned in her cot, with almost no human contact. It’s amazing she’s come out of it so well.’

For Sacha, ‘so well’ meant that she was, at the age of seven, beginning to respond to people other than her adoptive parents, that she would occasionally speak more than three words together, and that she could play with dolls, and help Amanda care for James.

Children from situations similar to those experienced by Sacha almost invariably suffer from what psychologists call ‘developmental delays’ — especially in the area of emotional response — and often, those ‘delays’ become permanent. Not surprising, when you consider that they spent their formative years without the normal sensory stimulation and person-to-person experiences that the brain — including the emotional brain — needs, to ‘wire itself up’ for the most common human behaviours.

The less nurturing the environment, the more pronounced the developmental delays. In the case of the Romanian orphanages of the 1980s, the ‘production-line’ approach to addressing the orphans’ basic physical needs kept them alive, but it denied them the human contact which is so essential for normal brain development.

Unlike hundreds of other children from those institutions, Sacha was lucky. Greg was a clinical psychologist, and Amanda was a passionate primary school teacher, who took four years off work to spend time with Sacha, home-schooling her and giving her the one-on-one attention she so desperately needed.

‘Nothing you can do,’ she told me, between sips of her coffee, ‘can make up for what she lost in those first crucial years. The emotional foundations are so fragile that for every two steps you go forward, you slip back at least one. Sometimes, it’s like trying to climb up a muddy hillside in a rainstorm, carrying a bag of cement on your back. But you keep going. What else can you do?’

She placed the cup down on the table before her, and stood up, staring out of the window, as if the peace of the garden beyond the glass could absorb the remembered pain.

Finally, she turned back to face me.

‘Then there are the breakthroughs that make it all worthwhile,’ she continued, the smile returning to her face. ‘Like the first time she kissed me back.’

‘I’d spent hours, every day, just holding her; keeping up a constant one-sided conversation, rubbing her hair, and her skin, blowing on her face, kissing her cheeks or her eyes, or her head — anything to make up for those years of deprivation. Then one day, she looked up at me, and without any warning, she sat up and kissed me on the cheek. I cried with sheer joy for at least an hour. Of course, she didn’t do it again for a couple of weeks, but that was a special day.’

I watched Amanda wipe her eye, as the memory played itself out. ‘You do what you can,’ she said, at last. ‘And wait for the golden moments. That one was 24 carat...’

Today, Sacha has an honours degree and a burgeoning career in public relations. She spends her weekends partying and playing netball, and I am sitting here looking at her smiling back at me from the invitation to her upcoming wedding.

It is the happy ending that her parents prayed for during the difficult early years — the one that they worked so hard to achieve. Sacha is living proof of the power of connection — and the vital importance of creating a secure attachment with our children.

Marcel Proust once wrote:

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Fortunately, few children in our prosperous and privileged society experience anything like the traumas that marked Sacha’s early years.

As parents, we all try to make our children happy, to give them the support and the confidence, to grow — but, sometimes, we receive mixed messages about how to fulfil this, the most important of all parental roles.

Notice that Proust doesn’t say ‘Let us be grateful to people who buy us things’, or even ‘Let us be grateful to people who educate us’. Rather, he looks at the most basic need of a human being — to be happy.

And for young children, indeed for all of us, to be happy is to belong — to feel a secure attachment with those whose role is to ‘make our souls blossom’.

As the anonymous observer points out:

Children spell LOVE, T.I.M.E.

Time to connect. Time to feel close. Time to share the experiences that shape their understanding — of themselves and their place in the world.

But such time is not measured in minutes and hours — it is measured in moments. The time we share with our children should be assessed not by its duration, but by its quality — by the memories it produces.

This chapter looks at our children’s most basic needs, and how easy it is to fulfil them — even in our busy lives.

A: Attachment and Bonding

Planting the Seed

Happiness held is the seed. Happiness shared is the flower.

— Sign in a Friend’s Flower Garden

The Power of a Hug

Ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Series Introduction: The Seed in the Palm of Your Hand
• Chapter One: The Science: What Research Tells Us About the Needs of a Child
• Chapter Two: The Physical Needs: Understanding Your Child’s Basic Physical Needs —: Healthy Development Through Sensible Decision-Making
• Chapter Three: The Emotional Needs: The Power of Mindset — Building a Healthy: and Resilient Self-Image in Your Child
• Chapter Four: The Social Needs: Fostering Effective Communication: and Social Skills
• Conclusion: Where to from Here?
• Bibliography
• Endnotes