Louise Bates Ames Quotes

Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.

Fives feel so close to their mothers that they sometimes overestimate her ability to read their minds. They are often quick and a little impatient and don’t always give all the necessary clues as to what they are talking about. Then they tend to be quite angry if she doesn’t pick up on their story at once. It takes a quick wit to be a mother.

There is hardly anything in the world more exciting than something which is on the verge of becoming.

How old was I before I realized there were other places besides right here?” Seven

Enquanto a criança de oito anos é muito exigente consigo mesma, ela também é difícil com os outros. Ela pode ser briguenta e agressiva com as pessoas, especialmente a mãe".

Eight-year-olds are quite normally all mixed up with their mothers. The mother-child relationship at this age is one of the strongest, deepest, most demanding, and yet most tangled to date.

Avoid getting all upset by your child’s demands and rigidities. Try to see these behaviors not as badness or rebellion but rather as immaturity. Try to appreciate the wonder and complexity of growing behavior, even when it makes trouble for you.

finds

For some, if they do something very badly or if they refuse outright to carry out some command or suggestion, saying, “Well, I guess you’re going to need three chances on that. Let’s try again,” works very well. That is, you give the impression that an initial failure or refusal is not noteworthy or harmful and that people quite naturally expect a person to make more than one try.

Met head-on with harsh, unrelenting demands, a Two-and-a-half-year-old tends to become even more rigid, oppositional, negative, and generally difficult than he might otherwise have been.

when Mommy takes hold. In fact, his insistent “Mommy do” when Dad is helping out is often a cause for hurt feelings. It shouldn’t be. The person he wants is whatever person is not available at the moment, and if everyone is available, his demand

Give face-saving commands as much as possible. Try not to trap yourself in some inflexible demand such as “You have to pick up all your toys before you can have dinner.” Far better to suggest, “Let’s pick up the toys now.” Then, if he absolutely refuses to take part in the pickup, you will not be stuck with trying to push through an order in which you may have lost all interest before the situation has terminated.

Let’s do so-and-so,” and then, if need be, you can do the major part of the work yourself.

Where do the blocks go?”—when it is pickup time—may motivate the child to put them where they belong. If he doesn’t, no matter.

A good face-saving technique, after a child may have refused, is to make a joke or some humorous remark. Or, change the subject or leave the scene completely.

If a request cannot be granted, distraction of any kind may be your best bet and is highly preferable to fighting things out with his own weapons. So, distract; or, even better, terminate by changing the scene. If you find yourself involved in one of those fruitless (and boring) “I want—I don’t want” routines, in which the child demands some toy, food, article of clothing, or activity, and then the minute he gets it rejects it, and then when you take it away wants it again, it may be impossible to resolve the situation at his level.

For instance, when the child is in a bad mood and nothing pleases—he doesn’t want to stay, but he doesn’t want to go (and this, of course, is often the case when he isn’t in a bad mood)—some simple suggestion such as “But where are your shoes?” can shift his attention, with good results. Also, don’t give him more than one or two chances to make up his mind. If it becomes clear, and it often will, that he is not going to be satisfied with either of two alternatives, just pick him up and remove him from the scene, or otherwise terminate the situation.

Distracting and terminating may be two of your very best techniques when your child is Two-and-a-half.