Hello from australia - intro

[Marguerite]

Trish, maybe you need to view the mum as another difficult child in the equation, and work towards a larger routine in what you do. Make use of the routine and habits that are already there (such as you know you're likely to get a bad of soiled underwear). If possible, maybe show the mum an easy way to deal with the underwear - or would that backfire on the child?

For example, throwing them in to soak immediately. We each develop our own 'soak mix' but it's no good if you don't also follow through, empty it out and actually WASH them!

I think we've all had those times when there has been, say, a full potty in the living room. It's when that potty stays unemptied for days or longer, that it really becomes a gross-out factor and a statement on the parenting.

One of the most important rules I learned as a new parent - deal with it NOW before you sit down to rest, and then you can enjoy your rest so much more, knowing you don't have to cut it short to deal with the problem (be it getting dinner, dealing with the washing, emptying potty, getting the kids through their evening routine and into bed). But other parents often need to snatch those few moments of sitting down, and are quite happy to get up sooner as long as they've had that short break.

When I was in the hospital after having difficult child 3, I of course (fourth baby) was well into my own baby routine. If the baby cried, I would deal with his needs first because I could never relax when my baby was crying. And the sooner I dealt with his needs, the sooner I could relax and enjoy MY time. So at breakfast time in the hospital, for example, we had a common dining room and breakfast things permanently set up. We could get ourselves a sandwich, make toast or cereal, whenever we wanted. I loved tihs because I could feed the baby and then when he was satisfied, I could enjoy my own breakfast (with baby in the wheelie crib beside me, awake and looking around, or maybe snoozing).
But another mother there would ALWAYS make her toast, butter it and eat it even while her baby was crying beside her. I said to her, "I don't know how you can do that so calmly, I would just have to stop. I lerned to accept cold toast sometimes."

She said, "I don't like cold toast. My kids are going to have to learn this and the sooner he starts, the better."

I don't think she was a bad mother - nerves of steel, maybe, and her kids WOULD grow up knowing that they would always have to be prepared to wait a bit for their mother. Maybe not a bad thing, because kids shouldn't be raised with parents waiting on their every need instantly, either.

However, for my own peace of mind I prefer my way. I can't digest my toast if I have to eat it with acrying baby beside me. I especially couldn't BEGIN to make my breakfast after the baby began crying, as this mother did. She had her own strict routine - breakfast at 8 am regardless - and I was very different (breakfast when you're hungry and have the opportunity to relax and enjoy it).

WHat I'm saying - if you can find the chink in this mother, the common link of motherhood where she IS doing the right things, and amplify it somehow, you might be further along the road to success.

The friend I mentioned - I worry about her situaiton because I see her foster child's parents lapping up all the support and milking it to the nth degree. At one point my friend was even doing their ironing for them! They would drop the kids off with a load of dirty washing, friend would then drop what she was doing (for her own family) to do this woman's washing, then she would iron it all and have it ready in a basket. I would hear tales of the mother dropping off the kids and the laundry, and being annoyed if the washing and ironing weren't done a few hours later. Meanwhile my friend (who has health problems) may simply have been too unwell to even attend to her own household needs and her own child was being disadvantaged (ie no family laundry done). Then the foster moter would collect the clean laundry, take it home and who knows where it would end up? The kids were never seen in clean clothes, because the family pets in the house would use piles of fabric for bedding or litter trays.
My friend was trying to return some semblance of normality to that family's lives, but she wasn't doing it with their own routine in mind, she was trying to turn them into a mirror image of her own parenting and frankly, even I can't match her standards!
But te trouble is, even though the bio-family are loving towards their kids, they just don't know HOW to parent them. They don't even know how to look after themselves properly, just about every aspect of their own lives is a mess. It's frighteningly easy to be a financial disaster. All you have to do is 'forget' to pay your bills for a month. Spend the money on clothes, or things. Our society encourages us to HAVE things and implies that if we don't, we are somehow failing. It takes a strong and canny person to stand up to this sort of social pressure. If you're already starting behind the 8-ball, feeling that you've got a lot to make up for, then you measure your success as a person by the wrong standards. "I must be doing OK, because in my house I have the latest mail-order fitness machine, I have a Queen (or King) sized bed (no ordinary double bed for us) and the latest catalogue item. I get all the latest fashions for the kids (or I try to), or maybe I get them for myself because I must be seen to look my best when I'm having to argue with all those idiots at the billing centres."
They would be living on pre-packaed foods with high-dugar breakfast cereals, because this is the way tat advertising programs us. To actually cook a meal form scrach for your family - the advertising never encourages you to do this, so they would actually look down on anyone who does this, as a clear marker that you are living in poverty. And trying to look like they are NOT living in poverty, is why you would never get someone like this to get into home cooking!

I'm only throwing out hypothetical examples here, but I'm trying to help you NOT make the same mistakes my good friend here makes, of breaking her back trying to help people who just don't understand what she is trying to do. To them, I'm sure my friend seems utterly mad but loving with it. She keeps doing these wonderful things for the family and they do love her for her efforts but they don't understand any of it because they haven't personally experienced the effort that goes in to a lot of what gets done, and they don't understand how to value the end result. After all, why value clean laundry if you are used to simply buying more clothing instead?

We know that we can save bucketloads of money, if we steer away from pre-packaged meals and cook from scratch. But to a family fighting to present an appearance of non-poverty, that is unacceptable.
What is important here is appearances, not the reality, because they would ALWAYS feel poor, even if they won the lottery.


As you said, Trish - what chance do some people have, when they've had a rough start?

There are of course many factors but maybe all you can do is try to break the cycle at some point, instead of allowing yourself to be inserted into it.

Hang in there. Maybe we're getting in deeper to the larger problem than you originally asked. Sorry about that. But hey, that happens here - sometimes we dig and more comes out. Sometimes we dig and go off on a wrong tangent, too. I hope I haven't done that this time!

Marg

 

[therese005us]

My little cherub has made an interesting comment..... she wanted a book without pictures to look at. I wasn't sure she understood the word "without" so showed her two books, one with and one without. She chose the book without pictures (it had a couple of black line drawings, but no colours and small writing). She has been carrying this book around, looking at it, and now calls it her 'quiet book'. She can't read it, of course, and I'm happy to read stories to her from it... she can read one or two words, 'is', 'to' etc. Any ideas? I haven't come across this before....

thanks for reading

 

[Marguerite]

THis is the sort of stuff you HAVE to write down in a diary. It's the stuff youthink you will remember forever, but you won't because life gets really busy sometimes.

The "quiet book" - sounds very descriptive. Think about it - the letters are smaller, probably not printed in such a thick font, which would make it seem less like "shouting". In the same way typing all in upper case is considered 'shouting' in emails...

Plus the lack of pictures - maybe for her, pictures seem busy and distracting, instead of the usual assistance.

Something to try - when difficult child 3 was very little, letters and numbers seemed to be his 'key' to everything. He was non-verbal but could read letters and numbers. We used this to help him further, by teaching him the association between words and what they meant.

Three-pronged appeoach -
1) I made labels for ordinary things around the house, especially things he needed to use a lot or know about. I had labels for DOOR, CUPBOARD, WALL, FRIDGE, WINDOW, BATHROOM, STEP, CHAIR, TABLE. I typed the words into a text file and printed them out. If you use a font of just the right size you can use ordinary sticky-tape to completely cover the word and hold it down. Besides, if the words come off you can always reprint them. You could even use them as a game to get her to help stick them in the correct place with you. Get her to find where each word goes, then you stick it in place when she gets it right.

2) I made mini-books for difficult child 3 with words he was needing to use or learn. At the time he didn't seem to have words for people's names, so some of the first words in the book were his name, mine, his father's. To make the book I took a sheet of A4 paper (or whatever paper is the most common for you) and I folded it in half. I turned it 90 degrees and folded it in half again. Then another turn and another fold. Staples in a line down one side (you choose which side) to form a sort of dotted line, then tape over the staples on both sides to keep it safe from fingers. Cut the 'pages' open (by cutting along folds) and you have your book ready. So easy they are disposable. Then you decorate the book. Write a word and draw a picture to illustrate that word. I drew a picture of difficult child 3 on the front and wrote his name on it.
Words I put inside - GO (written in green with a walking stick figure), STOP (written in red with a standing stick figure). EXIT (a stick figure slipping through a slightly open door). These were words that difficult child 3 would see often and read aloud, I needed to show him the meaning. We would practice these words by reading them from the book then acting them out. We would say "Stop!" and stop immediately. Then "Go," and we would beging walking again.
He was in child care at the time, the childcare worker (who had him 1:1) used this to teach him his colours, in one day. I came to collect him and found she had used up the rest of the book with colours written in each shade as well as a swatch scribbled in. I had been gone three hours and in that time he had learnt a rainbow which he never forgot. She had also added FISH, BOAT and PLATE. Each mini-book should have 16 pages. I would sometimes make two or three at a time and have them handy.

3) A variation on social story. I would write a story about difficult child 3, especially writing about his daily routine (to help him get into a routine) and also to prepare him for a change in routine. Or I would write a story about a special day we had. Then we would take photos, and put it all together in a photo album (because the pages are easy to turn for a small child and they also are fairly stiff and solid, tough).
So we had a story about difficult child 3 which said, "My name is difficult child 3. I am a boy, I live at [our address] and our phone number is [our phone number]. I like to climb trees. I live with my father, my mother, my two sisters and my brother." And so on. I had him in all the photos, including the one of our house and him up a tree.
I did this when he was 5 and starting school. With the school's permission I followed him around the school and took photos of him in class, at the tuckshop, at the school library, in lines at the beginning of the day, having a drink from the bubbler and so on. I then put it together with times ("At 12.35 the bell rings and we go out to lunch. I sit on the benches in the shade and eat the sandwiches Mum made for me and when I've finished eating, then I can go and play."

Putting all these together in a sequence - the first two techniques got trough to difficult child 3, the connectedness between the symbol of the word, and the fact that there was a meaning. It was the key to his communication. For a kid who is already communicating verbally this is still an important stage because the key is simply reversed. The child knows the sound of the word and the meaning of the word and now needs to link this in with the last piece of the puzzle - the LOOK of the word. This method builds familiarity and confidence with the words but the emphasis is on whole word recognition. The other problem we had with difficult child 3 - he learnt nouns well enough, even some verbs andadjectives, but he needed to learn the other smaller words, the prepositions, the conjunctions, the articles, in order to communicate fluently. For a non-reader it's the same story - you need to learn to read these words fluently in order to fully and smoothly comprehend the meaning of the whole sentence.

Every child loves to read about themselves in a positive way. Even a shopping trip, something mundane for you maybe, could be exciting for her especially if it is overall a fun experience. Take your camera along next time you shop for groceries, and as you shop, compose a book with your camera. Make difficult child the subject of this book in the first person if you can. The advantage to this - when she needs to repaeat any of the information verbally, it will sound natural. For us, it paidoff when someone said to difficult child 3, "Where do you live? What is your name?" and because he had the text of his book memorised, he was able to recite the information. Even the phone numbers. He just needed to be given the right prompting questions, based on the text of the book.

So for a shopping trip with your difficult child, for example, you could have:
"My name is difficult child. I live at [your address]. Sometimes I visit my mummy, she lives at [bio-mum's address]. Today I am going shopping with [whatever she calls you]. We have a shopping list. It is a list of things which we know we have used up at home, or maybe things we have already decided we want to buy. That way we already have some idea of how much money we are likely to need to spend and we are less likely to forget things which might be important. we're also less likelyto buy more of something we don't need. Here I am, choosing which baked beans to buy. I get the right ones off the shelf and put them into the shopping trolley. See how full the trolley is getting! When we have got everything on our list that is in this store, we go to the checkout with our trolley. We put them on the conveyor belt and they move along while the person at the checkout scans them and either puts them into bags, or back into our trolley (if we say 'no bags please'). We then wheel our trolley back to the carr and load everything from the trolley into the car. When we're finished, I put the trolley back into the trolley bay. A man will come along soon with a big tractor and collect all the trolleys and take them back to the shops. We then get back into te car and drive home. Once we're home I help bring in the shopping and we put it all away in the cupboards. Some items go into other places in the house - new toothbrushes go into the bathroom. So does bubble bath. I LOVE taking bubble baths! We bought a lavender scented bubble bath today, I can't wait to try it!"

You fiddle with it how you want, make it fit what you actually do, but keep it in that mood. The aim is to have the child read a happy, loving story about herself doing what she actually did. You want the re-telling and her re-reading to make her feel good, so she will want to keep going over it. It won't matter if she memorises it because she will want to look at the pictures of her in the book, and this keeps her exposedto the written words. All the exposure helps get her used to the sight of THOSE words. When those words are next seen elsewhere, she would find them easier to recognise.

There is a final step in this process, you introduce it as andwhen you think she needs it/can handle it. This is the more mundane learning of phonics.
We spent money on this one. Back when difficult child 3 was little, the thing to get was the Leapfrog Phonics desk. We spent hundreds on this and still have it in mint condition with all the cards. Check out Leapfrog (and similar software) to see what will work for her. The drawback for Leapfrog is that the pronounciation is with a US accent! (Sorry, everyone else - it IS a problem for us here, our kids watch so much US TV and cartoons that you really can hear US accents in the school playground, it's a worry). However, I think in the case of the Phonics desk, we did have a more English-based pronounciation in some words/letters. It was toned down a bit. But a lot of software uses US pronounciation, you just need to personally reinforce the difference between "zee" and "zed", for example.

But then - I'm a pedant. I also studied elocution with Trinity College of London. Not that you'd know it these days; I'm much more ocker than I used to be.

Trish, I tihnk we've now moved beyond introductions with you. UNless you need to discuss stuff already raised in this thread by you or by others, why not begin a new thread next time? That way more people will look at it and hopefully feed back.

I really liked what difficult child said. It shows there is a mind in there, trying to find a way to express things. It reminds me of when difficult child 3 had the window open as we were driving slowly, then shut it as the car got faster because, he said, "the wind is poking my eyes."

Marg