Overparenting

How do I encourage him to grow? How can I allow to be curious and passionate and find fulfillment in life, while keeping options open or pushing him to succeed?

Some notes from the book I read called “How to Raise and Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap.

Things I would like to take away and remember:

1. I’m raising an adult: Someone who can be responsible for himself and things beyond his immediate needs and wants.
2. Kids need free play
   • Finding friends who can play
   • Having open ended materials to play with: Boxes, Lego, blocks, fabric, craft
   • Letting him decide on what to play
   • Letting him resolve his problems and decide when he needs help
   • Having outdoor time
3. Help them experience “flow”
   • Lose track of time, don’t notice hunger and just go on and on
   • A plce where they feel private (his room?)
4. Teach life skills
   • Scaffolding: First we do it for you, then we do it with you, then we watch you do it, then you do it completely independently.
   • E.g. making meals, wash dishes, bathe unsupervised, put groceries away, clearing table after meals, know name, address, phone number, making a purchase
5. Teach them how to think
   • Resist giving them the answer or solve the problem
   • Ask them what they think is a good solution
   • Allow him to choose what he wants to do, play, pursue
   • Discuss an event/ book/ movie that has different perspectives, ask what they think then express counter opinion
6. Prepare them for hard work
   • Chores!
   • Pitch in to help with jobs that have no direct benefit to them i.e. Groceries, Spills where you ask them for help
   • Don’t overexplain – chores are part of being family, no need for apologies or justify the request
7. Let them chart their own path
   • Observe and expose him to different things that can open up areas for further exploration
   • Finding mentors
   • Identify strengths
8. Building resilience
   • Emphasize growth mindset (The brain is a muscle!)
   • Show unconditional love
   • Let them take risks
   • Combat perfectionism – Give it your best effort
   • Give specific feedback/ criticism
     • Give specific praise about actions
   • Letting bad things happen
9. Listen to them
   • Be available – carve out chatting time. Show interest in what matters to them
   • Mirroring to show you understand
   • Focus on their feelings and keep your own under control

2nd Week of School

Second week of school started without a hitch. Little C has begun to make new friends and he likes his new teacher. Their grade/ school seems to have decided on not having homework so we’ll probably spend our time practicing Chinese. I’ve got a new bunch of books delivered from China!

 

Moving on to Chapter Books

Little C is starting to read more complicated chapter books that don’t come with pictures on every page. He devoured two Geronimo Stilton books the day they came back from the library. I inducted him into the series via the graphic novels before moving on to the chapter books. For a while, I was wondering how I could help to encourage him to move on from picture books and graphic novels and the dreaded Captain Underpants series.  He seems fully capable of reading and comprehending the more verbose books but showed little inclination to read them. He really enjoys audio books of the classics like Roald Dahl and the Narnia series but never picked up any of the books. I guess reading stamina isn’t something that happens all at once. Hopefully, this will open up a wider range of books for him to enjoy.

I remember when I was young and at that stage. I was reading mainly Chinese at that time since I barely have 10 English books in our house at that time. It was my brother who introduced me to the first interesting novel – 侠客行 by 金庸. It is a martial arts novel but it had ‘funny’, crude, curse words which appealed to me then.  Kinda like potty humor that my son enjoys >.<

What do Stay at Home Mums do All Day?

I often read many stay-at-home bloggers complain about how infuriating it is to be asked “What do you do all day?”. The recipients of such comments often get defensive and huffy and start listing out how their job scope includes being chefs, drivers, educators, nurses etc etc. I wonder sometimes if other people are truly curious about what happens because they don’t know what taking care of a child encompasses.

When I think of myself before we had kids, I was totally misguided and clueless about taking care of young children. In fact, I didn’t even like them. I never paid attention to newborns or coo over how precious they are. In fact, I still don’t think newborns are cute. I’d much prefer my little 4 year old anytime. Before I experienced it myself, I never imagined that taking care of a young child would be so much work. I’ve never had to take care of younger siblings/ cousins/ neighbors, so I only knew what I saw on TV i.e. that taking care of an infant is simply giving them milk, changing their diaper, enjoying their wonderful smiles, buying toys for them to explore by themselves and then putting them on the cot when they are sleepy/ asleep. Easy peasy, right? Then reality hits and you realize that there’s a lot more to it  – waking up every 3 hours at night, carrying your baby while he naps, taking care of a sick child, worrying about milestones, clearing the endless washing up, having to entertain the baby who has an uber short attention span, cleaning up puke, poop and any other possible excretions that a body can conceive of.

Having been both a stay at home mother and a working mother, I have great respect for both because it takes a lot of energy and effort to be either. A working mom is obviously a tough choice to take. There is a lot less time to spend with your children – on weekday nights, you’ll have maybe an hour or two after dinner before their bed time and you are all exhausted from work and commute; on weekends, there are still chores and errands that needs to be done. When Calvin was in daycare, I found that I didn’t enjoy this lifestyle at all. It was too hectic and stressful and there was too little time to reflect and plan. I felt like we lived day to day like clockwork. I didn’t have time to grow as a person then. I was too busy and too exhausted. It didn’t help that I wasn’t having enough sleep at night and he was constantly sick and not exactly thriving in the day care environment. I constantly wished I had more time and I salute those who can juggle this difficult balancing act.

For me and Calvin, the stay at home path was much better. After we started our 2nd stay at home stint, Calvin started eating very well and not falling sick so much. I still wished I had more time on my hands. It was not easy to juggle taking care of the household and being a 24/7 mother – Calvin never really played by himself for more than 10 minutes until he was almost 4 years old? I was still learning to cook at that time and it was very time consuming to have all our meals home cooked everyday. I am glad I had the opportunity to take this path because I enjoy being very involved in his growing up. I’ve learned a lot more about motivation, child psychology, teaching techniques, language acquisition, calming techniques (self and others) etc. I could have “outsourced” some of that to enrichment centers that teach phonics etc but I like learning about the how and why so I spend a lot of my time reading about homeschooling experiences, science experiments, math and language activities etc. I get more time to plan out fun activities for him and learn about his interests.

I’ve also learned more about myself as a person and I find myself maturing. Before having Calvin, I felt no different from when I was in college – I did what I wanted on a whim; I had no responsibilities other than to hold a job; I thought of myself as a static persona and I was not sure about how I could grow – when I thought about myself becoming a manager in the future, it felt strange and unreal. Now, I feel like I am ready to go back to work after having grown up a little more. So when Calvin grows up and no longer needs me at home, I might once again go back to work if I still can.

So back to the question of “What do you do all day?”.  Perhaps if we try to listen to the question with a positive mindset and assume that the person asking is merely curious (or just trying to make small talk), we may not feel quite as offended. Would people be similarly offended if they were asked about their day at the office? Maybe it is because this is a sore, tender topic for stay at home parents who are worried about their sense of self worth when they do not possess tangible achievements like a promotion or a raise that you may get at a workplace. So much so that even possibly innocent questions will lead the self conscious to feel judged when they are not.

For me, maybe my answer will be”I am growing up :)”.

My Little Projects

This school year, I have been feeling much more energetic and purposeful with the feeling that with my sweet loving family, I can weather anything that come my way. Now that Calvin seems to be learning how to socialize in school and is showing improvements in his gross motor and fine motor skills, I can embark on my other little projects with him. He is still behind his peers in many skills but as long as he is showing progress, there isn’t a point in stressing about it. That’s what many of my projects are about anyway, to help him build up skills in interesting ways.

Writing Skills

Objective: To be able to write comfortably with a tripod grip by the end of the school year.

He generally prefers to use the immature digital pronate grasp which is supposedly typical of 2.5 – 3 year old kids. I’ve been coaching him to try using a tripod grasp instead with varying success. He has tried it when I correct him but still generally reverts to the more comfortable immature grip.

He often reverses his letters. Though that is supposedly common till age 6, it’s disturbing when he inverses every single letter in a word =_=

Most mornings, he’ll do a little handwriting practice while I prepare breakfast. I have some tracing sheets in a file with pictures and letters that he can trace.

We work on fine motor activities like opening clothes pegs, play doh, baking alphabet cookies etc. He plays with Lego all the time so that should help too.

We also do cutting and craft. His cutting skills are surprisingly good. Perhaps from all the car magazines he used to cut out. Having sharp left handed scissors certainly seemed to have helped too. We’ve been working on his skills like cutting zig zags and right angles. After a few tries, he seems to have grasped it. Looks like we should be doing shapes soon?

 

Reading Skills

Objective: To be able to read simple books with comprehension.

We are working on both Chinese and English languages. For Chinese, we are going through the 基础汉字 books I bought on our Singapore trip. We are now on book three and he can recognize at least 45 words. We used another book before (四五快读） but the material is more dry and pictures not attractive so it was hard to get him to practice enough to remember the words we learned but the main objective then was to introduce new vocabulary to him because our spoken chinese is still pretty much like 3 year old level or worse? These set of books repeats the words in different settings and he seems surprisingly willing to work on it. I’ve also tried a few games to help him revise the words we learned like word treasure hunt, secret code stuck at the front door, pointing out familiar words as we read and word bingo. He finds it discouraging when he does not remember too many of  the words and would sometimes be reluctant to work on our lessons, so I’m providing some scaffolding by offering to read over the sentences one time so he can repeat after me. I’ll need to think of some novel ways of helping him revise.

I’ve been putting in more chinese audio stories during his quiet time music. I rotate them out every 2 -3 days. With repetition, he seems to be getting familiar with the stories and will sometimes talk to me about them or ask me the meaning of the words. I’m surprised at how much he was able to understand. We are also resuming our 巧虎 videos in the morning for greater exposure to spoken chinese.

I’m still quite unsuccessful at speaking chinese to him more frequently. I find that my grasp of chinese is much poorer and I am not able to express myself well. No big surprise since it has been more than 15 years since I actually read a chinese book and I’ve rarely spoken chinese for the past 12 years. I can read and comprehend but the right words do not always present themselves when I need to. I guess it all boils down to practice too and I’m not sure reading manga in chinese is of great help. On the bright side, he has been making effort to use chinese to communicate to me. It is usually in a single sentence like “我爱草莓优格” (I love strawberry yogurt).

For English, since he is familiar with the alphabet sounds, we’re now working on word families, beginning with the easier consonant -vowel-consonant  types like -an, -at, -ig etc. We do word sorts and talk about how the words are the same or different.  Calvin is also learning sight words every week, using some of the activities I found online e.g. sight word mazes, sight word search, mini books with sight words. We also did sight word bingo before. He also loves to play with his magnetic letters and pretending to make “Word World” words that looks just like the word they spell i.e. a sheep made out of the letters s-h-e-e-p. His speed at sounding out words has been improving though he still gets ‘a’ and ‘e’ sounds confused. I’ll try to have more word sorts that help to differentiate that. I’m still constantly on the lookout for fun games to make practicing more fun.

It’s funny, before I read the books on motivation and the growth mindset, I kinda thought things like reading would just come naturally without much intervention from me but now I’m acknowledging that we need lots of practice before we’ll become good at it. I guess that is a good change and helps sets us up for success a lot better, plus it gives me better perspective on the things as I see them as essential practice and inevitable mistakes rather than failure.

 

 

 

 

Keeping a Growth Mentality and Growing with my Child

It took me a while to notice, but I’ve been growing together with Calvin. A part of me thought I was already all grown up and mature but as we all know that is the fallacy of youth. When I think about how confident I was in my late teens, I start to cringe at my naivety. I guess true maturity is when you can acknowledge that you are not perfect nor invincible nor  knowing, but still essentially a work in progress with much more room for growth.

I’ve been reading the works of Prof Carol Dweck recently on how the different mindsets of people can affect their motivation and performance. It all started because Calvin will be starting formal schooling soon and I’m wondering what I should do to prepare him for it so he can have a good experience, but I probably benefited just as much from it.

People with a fixed mindset are those who believe that qualities such as intelligence or talent or personality are determined and cannot be changed; they also avoid challenges because of the risk of not appearing smart. They believe that talent alone will create success – effort is for those without talent.

With a growth mindset people believe that they can develop their intelligence or talent by determination and hard work. I can see a mix of both in myself. Having gone through the Singapore system with the multiple streams and focus on results, I have inevitably picked up the fixed mentality that fixation on results encourages.

And I think it was partly this mindset that made me sink into depression before. I felt like I was not rewarded for my talents and by proxy felt that I was inferior and trapped. I think if I had thought not so much on how I should be rewarded but how I can learn better, I would have felt better.

Even now, I sometime catch myself feeling down at being contented to stay at home and not have any ‘achievements’. It made me feel worthless. I appreciate the time I have to take care of Calvin, teach him and mold him and to be supportive of J, but still I wonder if I’m wasting my life not achieving. Recently, as I start to learn more about motivation and the growth mindset, I feel surprisingly liberated. I learn to recognize that in these years as a stay at home mother, I have worked hard at learning to cook a variety of meals; I have learned to be more patient and understanding how to build a strong relationship with our dear son; I have learned about how to motivate and communicate appreciation for other’s hard work. I’ve also had lots of practice mirroring and emphathizing and I feel that overall, I’ve become a better person. I think in view of all that it has been a great three years for me. I start to feel younger, filled with hopes for our future, unburdened of my own baggage of needing to look successful. I hope I will keep this new sense of wonder and hope as I move on.

On Motivation

To my great annoyance, my post disappeared after I retyped it a second time on the ipad. Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been fervently perusing parenting books recently, especially those pertaining language learning, motivation and other behavioral related books. Perhaps I’ve been gripped by the frenzy of preparing Calvin for imminent formal education. Or maybe these are subject matters that have always interested me.

The one I’m reading now is about motivating children to love learning. The author talks about three factors that will help: competence, autonomy and relationship.

Competence

Humans enjoy feeling competent. You feel competent when you complete a challenge not when you finish an easy task. Children need to be encouraged to challenge themselves to help with feelings of competency. Help preschoolers gain competence by

– using rich language in everyday dialog

– listen attentively when they recount their experiences or a story

– write down make-believe stories

– explain vocabulary that he/ she hears

– teaching songs, rhymes, word play

– reading and asking questions, pointing out pictures, predicting story

– sorting, learning shapes, estimating, comparing, , measuring in everyday activities

– teaching children to feel competent by giving positive feedback, but also balance with costructive criticism that encourages improvement

– agree when he tells you a task is difficult and then give suggestions on how to tackle problem, help break down tasks

 

Autonomy

– Giving the freedom to choose among acceptable alternatives

– Do not nag or force them to do things. Use empowering language where they make the decision in the end. E.g. “You may want to try etc…”

– Discuss consequences with them but no negotiations after that.

– Use factual statements instead of commands E.g. I use the thesaurus to avoid repeating the same words.

 

Relationship

– Acceptance: Your child knows you love him unconditionally

– Connection: Interested and involved in his life and understands his needs

–> Use ’emotional coaching’: instead of denying his negative feelings, acknowledge them but still set limits on behaviour (no hitting etc)

– Support: Respect him for who he is. Support his autonomy

– Teaching children value of trying hard in school, learning is important

 

 

Looking Back on 2013

It’s funny how much can change in one year when you are watching a child. One year ago, Calvin started feeding himself during mealtimes and was learning how to gargle. He also barely knew any chinese whereas I hear him singing a variety of chinese songs recently.

Throughout the year, he learned many more things like putting on his clothes and shoes, using the potty, falling asleep by himself at night and jumping with two legs off the ground. He had many new experiences too like joining the gym, visiting the kids museums, playing with sensory bins, planting and harvesting strawberries and tomatoes, lapbooking, hiking at Shenandoah National Park, playing with Lego and of course our trips to Virginia Beach, Washington and San Francisco.

On our part, we have overcome some personal hurdles and also Johnny passed his qualifying exams. Woot.

It certainly has been a hectic year. I didn’t even realize that so much has happened.

Playdate at Pen Park

After the teacher’s conference, we decided to try to set Calvin up for play dates again, this time without asking him for his opinion. The last time when we tried to be democratic about it, he always said “No”. So we followed their advice to ‘Just do It’. We arranged for him to go to the park with another boy, C, who is a little younger than him (3 months by adjusted age) and somewhat similar temperament – easy going and likes to play independently.

We were a little late thanks to some road construction. By the time we got there, the kids were hungry for a snack so we started off by sitting down together, eating and sharing some crackers and grapes. Coincidentally, C’s mum was teaching in Johnny’s department some years back, even though she’s now a stay at home mom. So I guess she has even more years of studying “wasted” by staying at home. I instantly felt some rapport with her.

Calvin started running off the play by himself at the playground while C was still finishing his snack. I started playing ball with C before I said “Is Calvin hiding? Let’s go look for him”. So off we went to look for my little red blur of activity. I played together with the two of them to help bridge the communication gap. In Calvin’s mind, he was probably just playing with mama. So we pretended to be on a spaceship that crashed. I got them to play side by side for a while. Then Calvin decided he wanted to play ‘Hide and Dash’ with his dad. We got him to go over to C and his mum and explain how the game should go so we could all play together. I got the opportunity to teach him to look at his friend when talking. And then we were off, dashing off to hide and then when we were found, we would dash off to hide at another place. I certainly got some exercise this morning.

After a few rounds, Calvin wanted to continue but C wanted to play something else. Calvin was surprisingly able to accommodate and followed his suggestion to play an “Up and Down” game where they take turns climbing up and sliding down a slide and then zapping someone with their static 😛 Then Calvin wanted to play tag, so we had more dashing fun before it was time to go home. I am glad the two of them had a good time and played well together. We’ll probably have more play dates soon 🙂

A Good Mother is Better Than a Good Teacher – 好妈妈胜过好老师

I read this Chinese book that another mother recommended on her blog, <<好妈妈胜过好老师>>. It’s written by a Chinese teacher talking about her experiences in raising her own daughter and what she believes are good practices in bringing up a child with good attitude and character.

I agree with her philosophy though there are some things that I do not agree with of course, like when she recommends letting kids read 古文， an old form of written Chinese instead of modern Chinese. My Chinese is pretty decent but I never liked the 古文 that they made us memorize in secondary school in Malaysia. I guess this is mostly cultural because we don’t have need to have such scholarly proficiency in Chinese. To be honest, no one even writes that way anymore. That’s the equivalent of saying I should read Shakespeare to Calvin and hope he’ll learn how to use the words ‘thee’ and ‘thou’.

There were many things that I agree with though, like how she says studying should be kept fun and parents shouldn’t obsess over things like scores and ranking. What is more important is to focus on whether the child is learning. I think it is similar to the Western theory about giving praise to the process and not the outcome/ person. E.g. ‘You really worked hard to learn to ride the bike’ as opposed to ‘Good girl’, ‘Great job’. I’ve been working hard on that for a while and I’d like to think I’ve improved. I’ve been trying to point out how he has worked hard on putting on his socks and he’s much faster now because of the practice etc. I’m thinking of taking it one step further with a little notebook for all his good ‘deeds’. This is a suggestion from the book that I thought was worth trying out. She calls it the ‘记功簿‘, where you record the good things your child has done and also emphasize their efforts on things you hope they will improve on. I’m not sure if Calvin will take to it, but there’s no harm trying 😛 I started it today and he was interested in putting the little sticker stars in and he also remembered what I praised him for. I think maybe the biggest benefit of this is that I’m more focused on the positive side of what he does and helps me to be more zen, especially when I’m tired and grumpy.

I also liked how she emphasizes the importance of reading. It’s a little contradictory to what she said about reading classics to your kid, because she also says it’s okay for children to read any kind of book as long as the writing is not trashy and the values are not dubious I would guess? As I said, I’ve always thought that children who read widely can’t do that poorly academically. And J is a good example of having good English despite reading mostly non-classic, popular science fiction/ fantasy books and those choose your own adventure books. I personally read a lot of popular fiction and trashy romance novels, albeit I also put in conscious effort to read classics and award winners. I think we’ll probably let him read whatever he likes unless it’s not age appropriate.