Sometimes, you CAN forget the rules

 Back in the day, the American Sign Language signs that early baby sign language books recommend for parents to start with included the signs for “more”, “eat” and “milk”. After your baby mastered these three signs then, you were told to introduce other signs.

I'm not a good rule follower and because I knew more than those three signs, I signed with my son, Joshua, and showed him any sign that I knew related to his interests. Joshua’s first sign was “fish”. His first successful attempt at symbolic communication wasn't to make a request for something he wanted. It was an attempt to share and comment about a book that I was reading to him. He wanted to connect with a character in the book and he could do it using clear language at 9 months of age! Although our first signing experience wasn't at mealtime, it can be a great time to begin signing. Introducing signs at mealtimes keeps the experience fun, interactive and encourages more of a connection with the experience. 

How to sign at mealtime

 Use the ASL sign paired with spoken words to talk about, describe and comment on what’s on the table. You can label the foods on the table, talk about quantity, color and the sensory components of the food. Play a game by signing hot or cold and see if everyone can find a food on the table that fits the description. You can do the same with color signs. Be sure to practice please and thank you to work on manners. Teach more, eat and all done to empower your child to read their own cues and communicate that to you. The signs to use at mealtime are limitless! 

Mealtime Signs

HOT


to sign “hot”, place a clawed handshape in front of your mouth and twist it out and down quickly as if being thrown away from the body.

COLD

To sign “cold”, place both fists at the side of your body and shake your arms, as if shivering.

DIFFERENT

To sign “different”, cross your index fingers in front of your chest and then separate them lifting up your two fingers standing straight up.

 

Remember to keep things fun while you learn the signs together!   Need more ideas? Purchase your copy of The Baby Signing Book by clicking the link below. What signs are YOU planning to start with? 

Sara Bingham is the founder of WeeHands and the author of The Baby Signing Book. She has been studying American Sign Language (ASL) since 1991 with the Canadian Hearing Society, the Bob Rumball Centre for the Deaf in Toronto and at Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario. Sara has worked with the Toronto Preschool Speech and Language Services and as instructor within Durham College's Communicative Disorders Assistant program. Sara is the mother of two and a frequent contributor to parenting magazines and baby-related professional websites.

If you think sleep is over rated, then think again! While many of us recognize how sleep contributes to our overall health and wellness, we are quick to move it to the bottom of our priority list. There is a growing body of research aimed at helping us to understand just how important sleep is, particularly for children. The link between adequate sleep and cognitive development, depression, academic performance, behaviour and healthy eating habits is well established.

If you are looking for some simple steps to put back sleep back on your family’s priority list, consider the following:

Make time for Sleep

• Is your child getting enough sleep? While all children have different sleep needs, the National Sleep Foundation suggests that children ages 1-3 require about 12-14 hours; preschoolers ages 3-5 need about 11-13 hours; and school-aged children between 5-12 years need 10-11 hours per day. Setting an earlier bedtime can help your child catch up on lost sleep, particularly if school start times and daycare drop off times require you to wake your child up early in the morning.
  
  
• Be selective about extra cirriculars. We want to expose our children to a diverse range of learning activities, but it can overwhelm their day and push both mealtime and bedtime back. Over scheduling your child’s calendar can have a noticeable impact on how much sleep your child is getting. Look for activities that have the least impact on the timing of your child’s bedtime.
  
  
• Respect nap time. If you child is still napping, respect their need to sleep during the day as well. Limit scheduled activities, outings and errands during naptime and find other opportunities to spend time together when your child is well rested. Remember that well rested children sleep better at night.
  

Monitor Pre-Bedtime Activities

• Ditch the electronics. The more screen time before bed, the more likely it will be difficult for your children to initiate sleep (even if they have an appropriate bedtime).  Opt for other age appropriate quiet time activities in the hour before bedtime such as crafts, board games or sticker books.
  
  
• Focus on food. Sleep gives your body an opportunity to rest and regenerate. If meal times are too close to bedtime, your body will need to use its energy for digestion rather than rest. Try to ensure 1-2 hours of separation between eating and sleeping to allow adequate time for digestion. Mealtime chaos is common due to long work days, long commutes and evening activities. Take control by setting aside one day each week to meal plan and prepare meals in advance. Involve your children by making a list of house hold favourites and share meal prep responsibilities with everyone. 

Establish Bedtime Routines

• Be consistent. Consistency and predictability are important to children. When they know what to expect at bedtime, it makes it easier for them to make the transition from waking to sleeping. If your younger child struggles with following a pattern consider using a sticker chart to help keep the routine moving.
  
  
• Keep it calm. The majority of the routine should take place your child’s bedroom and the routine should be enjoyable for both parent and child. It can and should be quality time between parents and children. If something isn’t working, change it. For example, if your child doesn’t like bath time, then omit it from the routine.
  
  
• Keep it up as they grow. Older children need similar patterns to help with sleep initiation. Consider encouraging your tween or teen to create bedtime rituals such as make a nightly journal entry, listening to music or reading before bed to unwind.

Evaluate your Child’s Sleep Environment

• Make it dark. Our sleep patterns are regulated in part by light and darkness. Light cues trigger chemical changes, including the release of the hormones melatonin and coritsol. Even artificial light sources like night lights, steet lights, mobile devices, alarm clocks and baby monitors can inhibit our body’s natural release of melatonin, the hormone that promotes sleep and regulars our daily sleep cycle. Conduct a bedroom audit and remove unnecessary light sources and ensure window treatments provide an adequate barrier from natural light.
  
  
• Eliminate Distractions. Your child’s bedroom should be a calm and relaxing space. Clutter has a way of creeping into kid’s rooms and it can restrict their ability to focus. Maintaining an organized bedroom that is free from distraction will help your child concentrate on sleeping, rather than playing.
  
  

How do you make sleep a priority in your house? What changes are you committed to making?

Rebecca Earl is a sleep consultant based in Toronto. "My goal is to affect positive change in the lives of children and their families, helping to teach children the skills necessary to sleep happily through the night. My personal and recent experience with sleep deprivation provides invaluable perspective, ensuring comprehensive and supportive guidance." You can reach Rebecca via her website The Sugar Plum Sleep Co.

An introduction to Emotionally Aware Feeding {EAF}

When Jennifer invited me to write a guest post about EAF for her blog, I thought I would begin at the beginning and answer the question ‘What is EAF?’

EAF stands for Emotionally Aware Feeding.  In short, this refers to the fact that when you consider the business of feeding your child, you need to understand the feelings involved in order to give her a positive relationship with food. The long answer to the question ‘What is EAF’, however, is more complex and refers back to the world of psychological and therapeutic theory. As a Child and Adolescent Therapist, this is my home territory– I have applied the ideas usually associated with family therapy to the dinner table and come to some surprising conclusions.

So whose emotions do we need to be aware of? Most people focus on the child when tackling picky eating. It is easy to label a child ‘picky’ and decide that the problems are innate. Whilst I very much accept that certain feeding problems are inborn, the emotions I teach parents to be aware of are their own.

The first EAF rule is “Keep mealtimes relaxed and upbeat”. This might sound simple, but in fact it requires a degree of awareness of your own feelings in order to be achievable. So why can’t you fake it to make it? Because children know what is really going on. They may not have names for the feelings they pick up, but they pick them up nonetheless. In short, children don’t ‘hear’ your surface niceties and attempts to get them to eat with swooping aeroplanes and choo-choo trains approaching the tunnel – they ‘hear’ your anxiety about their nutritional intake and maybe even your hidden anger or frustration that they are rejecting what you have prepared…again.

Once you understand that you can’t pretend to be calm and relaxed at mealtimes, you may be wondering what you’re left with. The alternative is this: process your emotional reactions to your child’s eating then you can be genuinely calm.  Here are three tips which will help you to achieve this:

1.     Get your child’s weight and growth checked – if you know that there are no problems with her health, your anxiety will diminish enormously

2.     Process your own food history – by talking to someone you trust about how you were brought up in relation to food, you will gain important insights into what food and feeding mean to you and how this may be impacting on your role as a parent

3.     Focus on the social side of eating – if meals are about enjoying one another’s company rather than what is going into your child’s mouth, the atmosphere at the table will automatically lift.

There are many other aspects of EAF that can help you solve your child’s picky eating. I have written about these in my book War & Peas, published earlier this year. If you are worried about your child’s eating, the first step towards making a change is to step back from thinking about what he is eating and start to think about how he is eating. If his eating behaviours are tangled up with emotions and power struggles, you need to begin to separate these out.  Practicing EAF will enable you to do this.

Although EAF is simple and accessible, it is not easy. This is because you need to follow EAF consistently and will doubtless meet with resistance as your child tests whether or not the changes you have put in place are here to stay.  With a lot of determination (and support from friends and family) your hard work will soon pay off and you will start to enjoy happier and more relaxed meals with your child.

Jo Cormack is a counsellor and mum of three. She is passionate about helping parents of picky eaters, using an approach that she has developed over the past few years called EAF (short for ‘emotionally aware feeding’).  Her book  (War & Peas) explains how EAF works and why. It is available as an e-book and in paperback . She and her husband have been foster carers which spurred her on to research on picky eating as many children who are fostered have problems around food. You can reach Jo on Twitter and her Website.   

Get instant access to tips for helping with picky eating! 

Learn how to repair the emotional side of picky/selective eating with valuable step by step instructions when you purchase, War & Peas. 

Words are powerful, especially when you share your table with a picky or selective eater. Although it may seem logical to discuss the food on the table, mealtimes are not the place to make food the topic of conversation.



Some ground rules:

 Avoid sentences that start with “Have some...” “Just try...” “Why aren’t you...”. Instead, keep these two phrases handy. “You can choose from anything that’s on the table,” and “You don’t have to eat.” And then move on to ...

What CAN we talk about?

Fortunately, this is a much longer list.

1. Catch Up and Share: “How was your day?” “What wonderful things happened today at school?” “Who did you play with at recess?” “What was your favourite part of the day?” Open ended questions may not give you many more words than ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but it will get a conversation started and give your child a chance to share something about their day.
   
   
2. Laughter Goes With Everything: “Knock knock.. Who’s there?” “A funny thing happened at work today” “When you were little, you had this funny word for ‘elephant’” “I heard a funny story on the way home...” You can also find the humour in the moment. Having a good sense of humour keeps us from taking life too seriously, and is an admirable social skill.
   
   
3. Learn Something: “How many countries celebrate Christmas in the summer?” “How many national capitals can you name?” “How do you say thank you in Spanish? German? French? Japanese?” Turn learning into a game show with laughter as you help your child with homework, prepare for a future family vacation, or just general knowledge.
   
   
4. Now Playing: “Remember that scene when...,” “I saw a preview for...,” “My favourite part was...” Movies are great for conversation – they often lead to topics to learn about, they are usually humorous, and have fantastic discussion potential. “Why do you think he said that?” “What would you have done instead?” “Do you think that could really happen?”  Answers to these questions give parents unique insight into how their young table companion sees their world.
   
   

Meals are more about who is seated at the table and less about what’s on it. What do you talk about?


Learn more about how to NOT talk about food at the table...

Executive functioning skills are a part of our everyday lives as adults. These skills begin emerging in infancy and see rapid throughout early childhood and adolescence. There are many ways to encourage the use and development of executive functioning skills throughout a child’s day, and the iPad is no exception.

I’m a big proponent of utilizing the iPad as a tool to support professionals and parents in working with children. I love using it as a tool by itself, as well as a “springboard”. It’s key to take something the child is playing/practicing on the iPad and move it into multiple environment as well as across skill domains. Below are three apps I use when working with young children to support the development of executive functioning skills. I’ve included some key areas of executive functioning they address, as well application ideas.

One thing I want to emphasize, before discussing these apps, is how important it is to start using these tools and games in a fun way. If we jump right into using them with difficult topics/tasks, we lose the “buy-in” with children. Apply it directly with very fun tasks, and model it with more everyday tasks (ex: how you make dinner, how to get to the copy machine, etc). As you see their abilities improving, then you can begin applying it to “less fun but more necessary” areas.

Tara Roehl is a nationally certified Speech-Language Pathologist. She owns a telepractice-based private practice in Colorado focusing on the social/pragmatic and executive functioning needs of students with ADHD, High Functioning Autism and related disorders.  She speaks across the nation on executive functioning and the integration of the iPad with gamification theory in therapy.