Title: Toddler Skills for Personal Responsibility Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2005 by Margaret Paul URL: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 746 Category: Parenting

Toddler Skills for Personal Responsibility By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

There are three skills that are very important for our little ones to learn early in their lives.

1) Children need to be able to fall asleep on their own. Infants and toddlers who are always rocked to sleep, or breastfed or bottle fed to sleep, learn to depend upon others for falling asleep and do not develop their own falling asleep mechanism. This can cause much distress for parents who go through nightly nightmare of trying to get their infant or toddler to sleep. Instead of always picking up and rocking a crying little one, which only reinforces child’s dependency on you putting him or her to sleep, try patting child and then leaving for a few minutes. If you keep coming in, patting your child and reassuring him or her that you are here, eventually your child will stop depending upon you to rock, hold or feed him or her to sleep.

2) Children need to learn very young to play by themselves and amuse themselves. It is not healthy for children to be constantly dependent upon others, or upon TV, to amuse them. I work with many adults who never learned to “play by themselves.” These adults feel lost when they are alone, having no idea what to do with themselves. Instead of turning to creative or learning opportunities, they may participate in addictions such as eating, drinking, drugs, TV, work, spending, and so on. When children learn to play by themselves at a young age, they tend to be more self-sufficient and creative as adult.

I breastfed both my babies even though I had a demanding full time job. It is possible, but it requires a lot of effort. Determination. Willpower. And of course, a good breast pump.

I started breastfeeding my babies from birth. I was lucky. The hospital where I bore my first baby had a breastfeeding consultant. With her advice and support, I was able to overcome most of initial problems with breastfeeding. Things like engorgement, a few days after baby is born which leaves you with painful, rock hard breasts full of milk that wouldn't come out. Baby would suck but not be able to extract milk and cry in hunger. Mom is left in pain and frustration. For that, hot towels, as hot as you can take, applied as compresses on painful breasts as you massage breasts for 15 minutes to soften it before offering baby his meal.

Once you and baby are finally happily settled in a breast feeding routine, for most of us working moms, it is time to go back to work. The hours of separation would mean end of breastfeeding as milk dries up.

A lactating mom's breast produces milk according to baby's needs. The more baby drinks, more you produce. Likewise, once baby stops drinking you soon stop producing milk. To prevent that from happening, every 4 hours, you have to express out milk.