Many of you out there are involved with children and I'm sure will have some great ideas to share. It just needs to be a paragraph or two, and here's mine to kick things off:
My son loves books. He loves reading them with us, he loves turning the pages, he loves pulling them off the bookshelf and he loves ripping the pages out once they are lying helpless on the floor.Please do add them in comments here and they may well appear as the Yes Vote's campaign's tip of the day!
To stop him from getting them in a vulnerable position in the first place we've loaded up the shelf with books, and then jammed one more book in by use of a hammer. This way they are tightly stuck and he cannot get at their pages. You do need to be sure your bookshelf is secure against the wall though, to be sure your child can't pull it down on them. He also has a stack of his own books which are less fragile and he can pull on these to his little bitty heart's content.
In time my son will learn to treasure books as we do, but until then this will keep them safe, and avoid angry situations when dearly loved pages are found fluttering alone without their companions. He's too little to understand why we are annoyed at his actions, so limiting the possibilites in the first place saves everyone angst.
The Hand Mirror has pledged its support to the Yes Vote campaign, as Anjum and myself have already written about here, and there will be more on this issue yet to come.
6 comments:
I wish I'd thought of that Julie - or that I had a dollar for every page my kids have ripped out of a book...
It doesn't work for everyone I guess, but at our house we spend time talking about how our actions make other people feel (and whenever one of the kids is naughty, which isn't often, this is what we focus on). My son isn't quite three yet, but even he enters into the spirit of things. Whenever I give him a biscuit, he demands a second one to pass on to his sister, bless his little baby heart.
Anyway, I should be telling the Yes Vote people this, not THM ... :-)
Gosh, parenting tips from Moz... don't microwave the baby, no matter how much it wants to get in there and go round and round. Actually, same for the dryer and washing machine. Cats are much the same, although they seem to survive the tumble dryer without damage (or learning that it's a bad place to sleep), so perhaps the baby ...
sorry Moz bad taste joke - i don't know about anyone else but babies and washing machines/tumble dryers still bring images of Nia Glassie. Sorry if i am being oversensitive but it struck a bit of a nerve
My best parenting tip (and the thing that really underpins all my parenting) is that you need to look for the reason behind the behaviour because kids almost never misbehave without a deeper reason and addressing the behaviour without addressing the cause is next to useless. Often the cause is obvious - for example if the kids have been cooped up indoors all day it's no wonder you can't get them to stop bouncing on the couch but sometimes (and my oldest is the king of this) the connection isn't that obvious and it takes some detective work - pain, hunger, fatigue, jealousy and anxiety can all often show as inappropriate behaviour.
Sorry Anna, I've just spent time explaining to kids that they can't go in the machines and they soft toys can. It's also a persistent theme in Calvin and Hobbes. Certain cats are also prone to sleeping in dryers, and do occasionally get dried.
The Nia Glassie thing largely passed me by.
Hi Moz - wasn't actually me who raised the issue, although I like most people was very disturbed by the case. And I spend more than my share of time taking toy trains, shoes and random other stuff out of the clothes dryer...
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