Babies/ Toddlers

I enjoy reading the blog The Naked Ovary. She has just brought a toddler home from China, and this weekend posted about her struggles to help her new daughter sleep. After posting a big long comment at her place, I decided to also share my comment here, since sleep issues in newly arrived kids are so very common. ************ My reply: One of my sons came home at the age of 20 months when his 'big' brother was only 23 months of age. My new son woke crying in terror several times a night due to the huge change in his life, and my 23 month old also woke up at night occasionally. AND they slept in the same room, so they would sometimes wake each other. (Not always… [more]

(Part One here) So what types of sleep training work for a newly arrived child? The name that is most often heard is Ferber. People talk about 'Ferberizing' their babies. That is, they put them to bed and let them cry for a few minutes, checking on them now and then, and then gradually increasing the time away until the child decides the parent isn't coming and goes to sleep. There are many ardent proponenets of Ferberizing including some adoptive parents. But to me it sounds way too close to what babies have already experienced in orphanages- response only when it is convenient. It may indeed work for some adopted babies. But it has the potential to be very damaging to a child predisposed to… [more]

James Dobson, in the book “Bringing Up Boys” quotes his father as once saying, “If you let that child get bored, you deserve whatever he does to you!” He must have been talking about a toddler. Toddlers are energetic, inquisitive, and mobile--- they make things happen. But despite this new competence, Dr. Coco Readdick, professor of child development at Florida State University, says toddlers “are still babies. In our rapid culture, we gave them new nomenclature by calling them toddlers. But in anthropological literature, they are referred to as ‘knee babies’. They love to venture off, but pretty soon they’ll need to come back. They are just learning to be autonomous,” she says… [more]