Ask Moxie

Sleepless/Seattle

We had a great meetup here in Seattle last night. There were around 15 women who came, with or without kids, to have dinner at the Seredipity Cafe. (Which was excellent, we thought. Mmmm, mac and cheese with truffle oil...)

We talked about a bunch of things, ranging from food allergies to couples' therapy to baby signing to food and politics. But one thing we talked a lot about was sleep.

I've been saying for years that I think sleep is our generation's thing. Our big problem, and the thing that seems to hurt us most and make us feel most inadequate. Past generations had different things--my grandmother was upset that my dad wasn't potty-trained by the time he was a year old, for example. But sleep is ours.

I think there are several reasons for that. Probably the single biggest one is that we don't put our kids to sleep on their stomachs. Our parents put us down on a full belly and we'd fall and stay asleep easily. Since we know we can't do that because of the SIDS risk, we lack the one surefire trick past generations used to use. (I also think this is why we don't get much sympathy from older generations about the sleep thing, because they just didn't experience the same number of problems we did.)

Another factor is that past generations were more likely to have an adult at home during the day, which meant there wasn't that same crazy pressure to get everything Perfect before maternity leave ended. Past generations were also more likely to live closer to home, and have family support. Lots of us now don't have any kind of safety net, and are doing it all alone or close to alone. That makes the sleep thing more high-stakes.

And yet another factor is that we have so many more "experts" now. In the past, there was basically Dr. Spock and maybe one or two others. So if what he wrote didn't work for your kid, you just confronted the Dark Night of the Soul of being a parenting failure, made peace with it, and moved on.

Now, if you absolutely can't conform to what an expert says, you feel like a failure, but you move on to another expert, and the cycle begins afresh. How many times have you heard "Weissbluth made me feel like a failure and Pantley was totally useless but the Sleep Lady Shuffle saved me!" or "Dr. Sears can suck it but Ferber changed my life!"? So much drama, trying to follow someone else's Method. If you'd just been allowed to trust yourself, and given a list of possible things to try, you'd have gotten there in the same amount of time, but feeling empowered by your ability to figure your own kid out. (this is also why there's such passion about CIO vs. not--if everyone just was allowed to figure it out for their own kid without feeling like it indicated anything about them or the kid, it wouldn't be such a huge symbol of everything that we all had to get defensive about.)

Any thoughts? Lamentations? Words of hope for those in the trenches? Other hypotheses?

Q&A: The one where I feel like a shitty parent

Alisha (who clearly needs her own podcast, just for her email subject alone) writes:

Is there some fussy-farting-limits-testing-booshity thing that happens around the 7 month mark? Because the boy and I have been going ten rounds lately and he's kicking my parental ass. I don't know if it's the teething (it looks like his bottom eye teeth are coming in. I thought the top ones came before the sides?) or some sort of developmental thing (he's 32 weeks but he was 2 weeks late so developmentally that's 34 weeks? He's starting to sit unassisted for a few seconds and crawling is imminent, although I've been saying that for weeks) or if I'm just being punished for being smug, but my son is back to non-sleeping. It started a few days ago - a little extra rocking here, another round of Lullabye there. Small stuff that was easy to dismiss. Clearly a month of cushy snoozing (five minutes of rocking and he was out until 5 am; easy breezy naps) made us soft. Now he's taking forever to settle and once he is asleep it doesn't last. The minute his head hits the mattress he flips onto his back, grabs his blankie, and shoots us a self-satisfied grin.

FOOLS!!!

That's what the grin says, I swear it. You can practically count the exclamation points in his eyes. Lather, rinse, repeat (two to four more times) and you've got yourself one pissed off mama.

It's the joy - the exalation! - that makes me so crazy. It feels like a giant F- you to my parenting skills. We did CIO at 4.5 months and after 16 miserable, worthless days ended up with a baby who was terrified to go to sleep. Then we instigated a rock/jiggle/hum routine that worked wonders - until now. I've tried leaving him to cry again which sends him to Shitsville in a large, wailing basket. I've said fuck it and gotten him up which leads to a grouchy, bleary eyed babe and a difficult day. According to the books (here we go...) he'll nap better if he sleeps longer at night so I should ignore him until 6 am. (Actually they say he should be sleeping until 6 am which makes me want to punch them in the nose.) There's no way: his diaper is practically deteriorating by 4:30 (the outside actually squishes, it's so full) and I defy anyone to get a baby back to sleep after an early morning wipe down.

I'm trying to convince myself that this is just a phase (maybe he's transitioning from 3 naps to 2?) but there's an awful lot of You're Not The Boss Of Me happening lately, which is great developmentally but panty-twisting, mommy-wise. (We've introduced solids and he's starting to refuse the bottle. Sure, the nipple is good for chewin' and have you ever just opened your mouth and let the liquid spill out all over yourself? Apparently it's awesome. Awesome enough to do over and over and over and over.)

Excuse me while I take a moment.

Is this crap normal?

Oh, this sucks. I'm so sorry, although your email was super-funny and I thank you for that.

It sounds like a whole bunch of developmental, movement, and teething stuff all combined into a big ball of suck, plus the 37-week wonder week. Also, it sounds like your son may be really smart, and that's leading him to testing his independence a little bit earlier than usual. (Just like in that movie with L.L. Cool J in which they're training the sharks and then the sharks get smarter than the human are and attack.) It's tough with the smart kids, because lots of times they don't sleep as much or as well as the norm, and they get frustrated when they're aware of things but can't make their needs or will known.

At this age, he's probably too young even for sign language (you could start with the signs and he might understand at this point but probably doesn't have the physical skills to make them himself yet). And sign language likely won't help with the sleep. But talking him through every single thing that's going on all day might. Verbalizing feelings for him, like saying "You're angry!" when he's clearly mad, and stuff like that. I know people think a 7-month-old is too young to communicate, but their receptive language kids in so early, and you might as well err on the side of attributing more maturity to your kid than less.

But back to the main point, which is that the books are full of crap. OK, not necessarily pure crap, but the stuff in those books works for a certain subset of kids. And it's not working for your son, so for your purposes, the books are crap.

If it makes you feel any better, I got 6 emails since Wednesday about naps, so there's something going around. And there isn't anything in your email that's jumping out at me as obvious that you could fix. If you've checked the usual things (propping the head of the crib, cutting out solid for a few hours before bed in case it's indigestion, temperature check noises check, etc.), then it's just time to open it up to sympathy. You're doing a great job.

Readers, it's Friday. And yet none of us will have a weekend because our kids will be up at the same freaking time as usual on Saturday morning. Sympathy for Alisha, primal scream for yourself, or pie recipes all appreciated in the comments.

Guest post: A Daughter’s Pain, A Mother’s Strength

Num-Num wrote this for you guys, after reading all your kind comments about her post on parenting adult children:

I’ve been thinking about Dorothy Rodham lately. You know, Hillary’s mom?

Dorothy Rodham was 89 years old, on June 4^th, the day after her daughter lost the Democratic nomination for president. She looks younger than her years and centered, with a wide smile. Still…89? You’ve got to hope that by then your children will have ceased to need you. But she’s never stopped being a mother and, according to all reports, remains very close to her daughter and to her granddaughter. The few times I spotted the three women together on television, they were drawing strength from one other.

Dorothy Rodham had a dreadful childhood and a fifties-type marriage. Hugh Rodham ruled the roost. The few descriptions of her marriage in print hint at emotional abuse. The story of her parents’ abandonment of her, and her paternal grandparents’ cruelty lead you to believe that life with a domineering husband, if that’s what he was, and her children in a Chicago suburb was light years better than her past.

So how, I wondered,  would she deal with her daughter’s great disappointment? In my last post about how to parent an adult child, many of you liked the idea of keeping one hand lightly on the small of your child’s back and sending brownies. I’m not sure that would do the trick in this instance. After reading a bit about Dorothy Howell Rodham,  I asked some friends what they would say to Hillary, if they were her mother.

First me:  I’d bring a mega-box of tissues with me,  and I’d spend a long time listening. I’d probably need more than a few tissues myself. I’d bring some good chocolate with hot peppers in it (Whole Foods, natch),  because Hillary loves hot peppers and she needs chocolate. I’d tell her to go easy on the Bourbon and beer now that she’s off the campaign trail. But if a shot of schnapps, like the one my grandmother downed every night of her adult life, got her through the night for a while, well, okay. After all, Hillary has a track record of extraordinary discipline.

I’d control myself and not give vent to the anger I would be feeling because of the way she’s been treated, because she lost, and because I’d do anything to punish the people who hurt her. I’d keep telling myself that wouldn’t do any good, not for her, not for me. I’d tell her how proud I am of her and I’d also tell her that the 17 million who didn’t vote for her were plain stupid. Others could be easy on them, but I’m her mother.

A good friend, and one of Moxie’s Moms, had an important Don’t:  “Don’t tell her to suck it up, don’t tell her it wasn’t that important, and don’t tell her she’ll be fine! Don’t tell her your own stories of disappointment or turn the convo somehow to how her hurt hurts you.. Help her wallow a teeny bit.”

Another friend who was passionate about Hillary told me that she should Dump the Chump. Not really, she adds. Really, though, my friend would keep her away from news and public appearances, she’d bring in some silly films and comfort food. She’d encourage the tears (after all, you always stop) and she’d take her on a vacation, bringing Chelsea along.

The women I spoke with emphasized that when Hillary was ready, Dorothy ought to encourage her to keep on believing in herself and in the causes she worked for. When your child, no matter how old she is and how old you are, has processed the hurt, do what you can to help her up on the horse again. Maybe, just do something outrageous yourself, just to set a good example.

Archivist Alison on Jumping Monkeys

And we knew her way back when...

Archivist Alison talks about archiving family memories with Megan Morrone on Episode 38 of the Jumping Monkeys podcast. Her part starts at 22:50 and ends at 47:00.

She sounds to me exactly the way she writes--smart, funny, and engaged!

Guest post on Timeouts

Some of you may have noticed occasional comments from Sharon Silver, the Mommy Mentor. Sharon runs a parenting consultancy called ProActive Parenting that deals specifically with discipline of toddlers and preschoolers. Did your ears prick up yet? Mine did, because the toddler age is notoriously hard to discipline. Haim Ginott stuff works fabulously on 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds and your co-workers, but there isn't much in it that's concrete enough for a 16-month-old. The gap between baby and big kid is long, and I haven't found a lot of discipline techniques that aren't either punitive and focusing on control, or comforting but laissez faire.

So when I saw that Sharon concentrates specifically on that age group, I definitely wanted to look more at what she's doing. Her philosophy is that discipline is always better than punishment, and that parents need to be teaching their kids skills for living. She says, "Discipline expresses a parent's boundaries with the emotional volume turned down." She's been working on this age since her own boys (now adults) were that age, and has come up with some solid techniques.

She offered to write something for Ask Moxie, so I tossed her a reader question about timeouts. The question is from Rosemary:

"I’ve got a 20 month old boy who is telling me he’s “Big Boy Mummy, look!” as he trundles his way through life.  He is in child-care 5 days a week and he loves going there (literally runs out of the door in the morning) My husband and I having been having a long (like 6 month long) conversation on behaviour, discipline, limit setting, exploring etc and the techniques or policies that we want to use.  No brainer – smacking is out for us.  So, that leaves time out as the next most popular strategy but we have one problem.  It just feels so darn wrong to both of us.  We know enough as parents to trust our instincts, and normally that has worked for us. But, I’m starting to doubt my judgement on this as many people whose parenting styles I admire swear by time out.   I’m not sure it is the best fit for my son.  He feels things so deeply and he is attached to us like duct tape (which is just how I like it) and I know how scared he gets when he thinks he has lost us.  He is quite happy to roam around and explore as long as he knows where we (or his child carers) are.

Taking some quiet time to calm down, I understand.  But why does it have to be removed from everyone, sitting on the bottom step or in another room and staying for a certain number of minutes.  What is time-out supposed to be achieving?  No one has given me an explanation I can really understand yet.  All the explanations I’ve heard still seem to come back to one thing:  I’m more powerful than you, and I’m going to exercise that power to banish you from my presence. I understand that he needs us to be in charge and that I actually do have power  and need to exercise it in his own interests sometimes (and we actually run a tight ship around here).  And I guess, deep in my heart of hearts, I feel like taking him to another room and dumping him for some time until he’s got himself under control just feels like plain abandonment.  I can remember times as an adult when I’ve been out of control, and if my friend or husband had just walked away from me, I don’t think it would have helped me calm down much at all.

And here’s the big kicker.  What do I use if I don’t use time out?  We’ve had lots of success with him so far, just by really listening to him, actually teaching him to do things, using lots of modelling of positive behaviour, acknowledgement of his effort and when he manages to control himself, and trying to remove the big sources of frustration and power struggles.  We try and focus on the big things and let the small ones go through to the keeper.  But will that work as he gets older?

Here's Sharon's answer:

Your post raises some really important questions about timeout, and that’s great, even if other moms don’t like that you raised the issue. Your parental intuition told you that timeout wouldn’t work well for your child. Listening to your intuition is always a good thing, even if the only result is a deeper investigation into the topic. My post also includes a response to spanking as a form of discipline. You said you don’t spank, however there are others who do.

As a society we’ve learned a great deal about preschool behavior since the days when we were being raised.

We’ve learned that parents really are a child’s first teacher. We’ve learned, that just like adults, the way you speak to a child determines whether he fights with you or listens to you. We’ve learned that a child’s foundation, the core of who he is, is being built during early childhood. A child learns whether or not her emotions are accepted or punished. She learns whether self-control is managed for her, by spanking or consistent punishment or she learns, by how her parent deals with defiance, that ultimately, she needs to control herself.

Based on all that knowledge, plus the love parents have for their child, I wonder why anyone would spank in this day and age?

As your child’s first teacher what lesson do you hope to send your child when you spank, even if done lightly? Unfortunately by the time your child becomes a preschooler he will have learned that the way to get what you want from another person is to hit them. Is that what you intended to teach?

Timeout for little people has some issues as well, let me explain.

After 17 years of teaching parenting and 29 years of raising kids, in my opinion, timeout for preschoolers, no matter how long they sit, just doesn’t work well for little people and here’s why.

Timeout was designed as a time…out for both parent and child to take a short break so they can get calmer and then come back together to resolve the situation.

That’s not the way timeout is being used today. These days timeout is being used as the “acceptable” way we punish our children, and there’s a big difference between the two.

Parents usually begin using timeout around 18-20 months because normal developmental defiance has begun to appear. Every parent I’ve ever worked with started out with the best intentions for using timeout. The parent starts out being calm, gets down to eye level, says the right words, and is as loving as possible on the way to timeout. Then as the child approaches two or three the way a parent uses timeout begins to change.

The parent’s best intentions then squarely meet the child’s developmental stage and temperament and a collision happens that goes something like this.

The child refuses to listen or cooperate; he wants what he wants. Now’s the time to teach the child about his behavior, but the screaming the child does causes the parent’s brain to become confused. The confusion from the crying, screaming or constant demanding stops the parent’s ability to think clearly about what to do next. Not being able to decide what to do next makes the parent frustrated or angry, and can cause yelling to begin. The parent is unconsciously hoping that the yelling will be the magic key that when inserted into timeout will end this, sooner rather than later, so this can be done.

Unfortunately the yelling upsets the preschooler, possibly to the point of hysteria. I don’t know too many adults that enjoy being screamed at when they’re upset either! The crying causes the preschooler to revert back to a younger emotional place, just to survive the yelling.

You know that emotional place; it’s what’s going on when you say to your preschooler “why are you acting like a baby?” or “stop crying, you're acting like a baby!”

In order to survive the yelling, the preschooler shuts herself down and stops listening.

Ladies, you know this one well; we’ve been accusing men of this for years!

Because the child has difficulty processing her crying, your yelling and thinking at the same time, a preschooler is forced to gain more of the information about the situation from your body language and tone of voice than from your words. And since she’s young and still relies on immature reasoning, what has she learned? All that she has learned is when I cry or don’t do as I’m told, I’m sent away from you—to a place called timeout.

No real learning has occurred. The child has no idea what she’s supposed to do instead. The child was never allowed to try again so she could learn how to manage her emotions and resolve it in a better way next time.

Then the behavior happens again and she’s sent to timeout, again. Her behavior is stopped, for the moment, but she still hasn’t learned how to manage this so it doesn’t happen again, and this goes on day in and day out.

When you see it broken down this way you understand how young a preschooler really is, and you begin to wonder, does timeout work well for preschoolers, is there a better way?

The answer lies in this statement; sometimes the best way to get a child to do something is to speak their language.

I believe that preschoolers need corrections to be made at the preschool level. Don’t forget, your preschooler has only been on the planet for a few years. Even though he’s walking, talking, potty trained and maybe in preschool, he isn’t as old as he looks, especially when it comes to discipline and the ability to change behavior.

Why do I say this, because adults have the ability to use reason and logical thinking; preschoolers haven’t even developed the ability to use logic, and that doesn’t begin until around age 7.

Does that mean you can’t use timeout? No it doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that a better way to use timeout would be to match the concept with a preschooler’s developmental needs.

Just like our computers, I believe that it’s time for “timeout” to get an upgrade!

Here are three things I think need to be included in preschool timeouts.

1. The teaching a parent does needs to be done at the preschool level. An emotional child learns best when information is scaled down to just a few words and the words are something the child can understand even through the tears, words like sit down, no hitting, or use your words, versus that’s not appropriate.

2. The amount of time a child sits in timeout really can be much shorter than 1 minute per age. Having a child sit in timeout for a shorter period of time takes advantage of what I call “child time”, the true amount of time your preschooler can pay attention and hear you when she’s emotional.

3. The ability to “try again” needs to be included with your discipline.

Saying to a child, “you need to try again and show Mommy how you wait for a cookie instead of grabbing one from sister”, needs to be included so a child can learn what you expect them to do instead of what they did.

Deciding how you’re going to correct your child can seem over whelming at times, especially if you and your husband have different points of view or if you feel forced to use something that just doesn’t feel right.

Reading this gave me a big a-ha moment about the need to give the child the chance to correct his/her behavior. That turns the whole situation into a "do over" instead of a big crying scene that just makes everyone feel like a wounded jerk.

Definitely check out Sharon's site www.ProActiveParenting.net, where she has some great free resources (including a PDF about discipline vs. punishment that contains the insightful idea that discipline gives parents choices about how to handle a situation instead of locking them into one course of action) and some awesome paid downloads on a bunch of different discipline topics. She's also doing two parenting seminars in Phoenix, AZ on April 2 and 3, if anyone in the area is interested.

Now you guys know who she is, so when you see her comments here you'll know she's one of us, just a generation ago!

Comments on timeouts, or the difficulties of dealing with the toddler and preschooler years?

Thanks, Erma

Today is Erma Bombeck's birthday. For those who haven't heard of her, Erma was an American writer. She started out as a newspaper writer, but got married and had three kids, and for a middle-class woman in Ohio in the '50s, that was the end of a reporting career.

She couldn't stop writing, though, and starting writing a "little" column called At Wit's End for her local paper, talking about the light and dark sides of parenting. Her writing was self-deprecating and inclusive and funny. And other parents responded. In a year it was nationally syndicated, and eventually ran a few times a week in hundreds of newspapers. She went on to publish a dozen books of her collected columns.

I think Erma Bombeck was the mother of parenting blogs. Think about what you like about parent blogs--the not feeling alone, the not feeling like you're the only one who sucks at it sometimes, the not feeling like it's harder than you thought it would be--and realize that Erma did it first, by herself, with no comments section to help out. And she was funny. I mean, I sometimes crack myself up, but she was actually funny. Every column. For years and years in a row.

Spend a few minutes looking at the Erma Bombeck Online Museum. And then smile at another parent the next time you're out.

Q&A: rocking baby to sleep

Eric writes:

"I have been pouring over various entries in your blog for a while now and decided to ask you a few questions.  Based on different books (Ferber, Weissbluth, etc.) and doctor recommendations, my wife and I tried CIO and it was miserable...for us and our son.  It didn't feel right and we were reassured when we read your thoughts on babies who increase tension by crying.

We have found some success by rocking our son to sleep though it often seems to take ages for him to fall asleep.  This might seem ridiculous, but one question is about how to get our son into the crib without waking him once he does happen to fall asleep.  On several occasions, he has fallen asleep in our arms by rocking him to sleep but awakens as soon as we set him down in his crib.  Do you know of a successful way to put him in the crib without waking him up?  Also, what is your stance on rocking him to sleep?  I know that you suggest rocking as a way of calming a baby who increases tension through crying, but should we be letting him fully fall asleep in our arms?  The problem is that if we don't let him fall asleep in our arms and we attempt to soothe him while he is lying in the crib, it takes a much longer time and he seems to be more restless. 

We are experiencing other sleeping problems (night wakenings), but would really like to try to first tackle the issue of getting him to fall asleep without the nightly battle that it always has been.  I am not sure if his age would vary your response, but he is approximately 4.5 months old right now.  He was born approximately 3 weeks early due to my wife's development of HELLP Syndrome. 

Exhausted and eagerly awaiting your response,
Eric"

Ooh. Three things I hate combined into one post:

1) HELLP Syndrome. For those of you who don't know it, it's like turbo-ultra-mega preeclampsia, and is very serious. If the baby doesn't come out, the mother can seize and then her organs shut down and she dies. I'm glad Eric's wife and the baby came out of it healthy. We should all keep a close watch on our blodd pressure and the protein in our urine while pregnant.

2) The 4-month sleep regression. It just sucks. There's no way around it. 4.5 months minus 3 weeks puts Eric's baby smack in the middle of it. It's so so hard for babies to sleep at this age.

3) The cultural expectation that a baby that young should be able to go down awake and that if the baby can't it's something the parents are doing wrong.

Yeah, there are things you could be doing to screw up your kid's sleep. Some of them are obvious, like playing loud music at 10 pm in the same room your baby's in, or snorting coke while you're breastfeeding. Some of them are not so obvious, like drinking coffee in the morning while nursing(caffeine has a half-life of 96 hours in a baby's system--go figure--but it doesn't seem to affect some babies at all) or putting a kid in pajamas that make him/her too hot and sweaty all night.

But aside from a really small group of things, there's not much you can do to change the way your baby sleeps. It's largely a function of personality and age. If Eric's baby needs to be rocked to sleep, that's the way the kid is. It doesn't mean that he'll be like that forever, or even a month from now. Just that it's what's working now. By Any Means Necessary to get everyone as much sleep as possible.

So I think rocking your kid to sleep is fine, as is putting your baby in the swing, or nursing to sleep, or using a pacifier, or having the baby go to sleep with a comfort object or white noise machine or anything else people use. (If you use a comfort object, make sure you have a spare in case something happens to the primary one, or you're screwed.) You child will not need that thing forever, and you'll probably have a good instinct about when you can switch that thing out of the routine. At the very least, you'll do better making sleep changes in your child if you have some sleep under your belt, so think of it as strategic pacing.

But. If it takes forever to rock to sleep, I'd look and see if there's something else that might work better. Eric and his wife tried CIO so they know that doesn't work for their son. (In contrast, my second son didn't want to nurse or rock down, so I tried letting him cry and he fell right to sleep after a few minutes. Stunned me, since my first son would escalate if I let him cry for more than half a minute.) Maybe swaddling would work, or something else. I wouldn't be afraid to try other things, because they just might stumble onto something that will work faster than the rocking. Or maybe not, and the rocking is as good as it gets at this stage.

It's just awful staring down the barrel of a long, long bedtime routine (those of us in the 3-year-old sleep regression can sympathize). You're finally at the end of the day, and you know you're still facing an hour of getting the kid to sleep. No way around it but through it, but it still just makes you want to cry, and ask for your money back.

How many of us have suffered through the problem of getting the kid to sleep but then not being able to put the baby down into the crib?! It's the bloody hangnail of the first year of parenting. I've head suggestions of putting a heating pad/hot water bottle in the crib to leave it warm, then moving it right before you put the baby down, but I didn't have enough hands to do that. You can let the baby sleep for 20 minutes to get deep into the sleep cycle before putting him down (and then let all the blood rush back into your arms) and that might help. I've also heard that in Australia they don't have this problem because they all put their babies down to sleep on sheepskins, and the sheepskin magically keeps them asleep. Honeslty, I can't remember if I came up with anything good at that age because I was so sleep deprived that not much stuck from that phase.

So, can anyone solve the problem of putting the baby down into the crib and keeping the baby asleep? If you can patent it, you'll make mountains of money.

And if anyone else wants to sympathize or complain, please feel free.

 

Guest post: Archivist on managing your kids' stuff

Remember the post two weeks ago about organizing kids' stuff? I got an amazing response from archivist Alison Langmead that I had to share with you. Alison writes:

"First of all, please let me reiterate that I am an archivist and records manager, not a professional organizer or life manager or any such thing. It is my job to help organizations maintain, access and
make use of their stored information for both the short and long terms. That said, more and more information professionals are starting to look in to the serious issue of personal information management as it relates to the information economy and other broader social trends.

I have read through all the comments (pre-January 5th) to the "Help with Organization of Kid Stuff" thread and I have found them fascinating from both a personal and professional point of view. One
general response came to me right away. In my experience, I have found that people have natural tendencies towards keeping their stuff or destroying their stuff. Some people, for example, feel lighter when they clear out an entire closet, while others feel only loss. I call these extreme types "Destroyers" and "Keepers." I think most folks would consider Destroyer a harsh term, but I love it. I'm a natural-born Destroyer. Think Shiva. Perhaps the term "Purger" used so often in this thread is better. On the flipside, "Hoarder" has a major negative connotation for me. So, let's compromise and call these basic types Keepers and Purgers. Quibbles over taxonomy aside, I have found in both my personal and professional experience that there is a kind of personality continuum between these two ends of the spectrum, but
that innate tendencies do exist. Reading the comments to this thread, it has been very easy to differentiate the Keepers from the Purgers and all the gray areas in between.

All of this explanatory build-up has been to say the following: There is nothing so difficult or so emotionally burdensome in the personal domain as being a Keeper who feels social pressure to purge
excessively or being a Purger who feels social pressure to keep excessively.

Many commenters have noted thoughts such as, "I like to purge. Is this bad?" or "I keep everything due to an inappropriate sense of sentimentality." I am of the firm personal conviction that rebelling
against one's natural predilictions does not help us as we go through life. If you like to purge, then you need to accept that, and work with it. The reverse also holds. This is not to say that we can always
just keep and purge at will. We are in this world with other people who have other tendencies and needs. In my professional life, I am constantly in the position of reminding people that the process of
information management is a necessary balance between keeping and purging (or, to be terminologically precise, retention and destruction). If we keep absolutely everything, it becomes almost impossible to find any one given thing, which is almost precisely the same state of affairs that we find if we destroy absolutely everything. Finding the balance, then, between appropriate keeping and purging is what we are all looking for in this thread.

But, compounded with this, I believe that there is general social pressure for women, mothers especially, to be super organized. It is as if we are all supposed to be born with the innate ability to keep it all together. Some of us do indeed have this capacity, others do not. But those who are not so inclined often feel that they are somehow inferior to those who can. This is a crying shame. We should feel free to do whatever makes us feel happy and healthy and what facilitates our ability to raise happy and healthy children. This will be different for everyone.

For some of us, however, it is not social pressure that is the problem, rather physical constraints. If you are a born Keeper who lives with a partner and a child in a 450-square-foot apartment, your living conditions will pose extra challenges for you. Some of the really creative storage ideas found in this thread could really help you out. Balance and acceptance will again always be key.

Enough with that diatribe for now. As promised to you Moxie, I have a few general comments that you and my fellow readers might find helpful.

1) There is a difference between the act of reducing your family's holdings and finding a more compact way to store things. Decide which one of these things you want to do and do it. Do not confuse the two
issues. The first is an act of purging, the second, an act of keeping. They are both good and proper.

2) Scheduling things for purging can be a very good thing ("the one year rule," the toy "death row"...would "toy purgatory" be slightly less morbid? Maybe not.). But as other commenters have already noted, the key to this process is finding the precise right length of time to keep things before you purge them. Otherwise said, the trick to this is not the act of deciding to keep things for a certain period of
time, it's deciding what that "certain period of time" is and what action you will take at that time. By the way, I am less comfortable with the "everything that fits in this small box" rule. I think it leads to preferential treatment on the basis of size and not meaning. Which leads me to...

3) When trying to decide what to keep and what to purge, the pros are always considering their mandates and their user base. Maybe this would be a good thing to do in the personal domain as well. Ask questions like, "Who am I keeping this for?" And, "What will they be doing with it and for how long?" BE HONEST. If you are keeping your children's art for your own sake, then do it up right! If you are
keeping it because you want your kids to have it when they have their own kids, then do that up right as well! In addition, I couldn't agree more with those commenters who suggest that you involve your children
in these decisions when they are capable. Finally, if you are doing it because you are
afraidthatyoumayonedaywishtoseeitagainbutthenagainyoureallyneedthisspace,

then it is my opinion that you should confront that fear and come to some sort of compromise. This might be a moment for the swift one-two of transferring the items to compact storage with a plan to revisit the items later on.

4) Charity is always a good thing.

5) I really do not wish to be a scaremongerer about this, but making digital copies of physical objects is absolutely not a panacea for these issues. I could go on and on about this, and will do so, if requested. Suffice it to say here that, unless you are willing to go to your CD's every two years or so and make sure that all of the data you put on them is still there—meaning, you will need to open up the files and look at them—you might find that you have lost your records of these objects. All types of digital media are prone to corruption and failure. Hard drives even have an accepted "mean time between failure" figure associated with them. CDs, DVDs, hard drives, tapes...all of these objects _will_ fail. It is just a matter of time. Now, let's all take a deep breath. We can get around this problem. It simply takes effort. You have to go back from time to time and check in with your stuff. Just make sure it's still there. Copy it onto new CDs from time to time. By the way, professionally speaking, hard drives are preferred to CDs for longer-term storage, mainly because it's easier to check in on your stuff with a hard drive. You'll do it more often because you aren't sitting there for hours swapping disks in and out. And, one more thing, it is now well-understood in professional circles that, for the long-term, digital objects are *more* expensive to store than physical ones.

I think I've been on my soapbox for long enough. Please feel free to ask any and every follow-up question that comes to your mind. I love talking about this stuff.

And, thanks, Moxie for putting yourself out there and maintaining this fabulous resource. I cannot tell you how many times I have read and re-read a posting at 3am reassuring myself that I am not alone with my perceived faults and my very real fears. With all of our similarities and differences, we are all fantastic mothers."

You're certainly welcome, Alison. Thank you so much for your wonderful post! Questions, anyone?

Super picky eating behavior in toddlers

Judy Converse MPH, RD, LD of Nutrition Care for Children, responded to my post about super picky eating behavior in toddlers:

"I saw your post on this topic and have to jump in.  I'm a licensed registered dietitian in private practice who has specialized in pediatrics since 1999.

Here's the scoop: Doctors always tell parents not to worry about this.  Partly true: Some defiance around foods is normal at the toddler stage.  But, toddlers are also naturally curious when they are developing typically.  While they can have jags with a certain food for a bit, these should pass, as should the tantrums that can come with presenting new foods.  A natural curiosity to put things in the mouth and try them normally extends to foods.  In my experience, kids who simply will not do this usually have nutrition problems that need correcting.

What is not normal is for kids to continue exceedingly rigid eating patterns into school age years.  If a kid still eats five or fewer foods at age four, that is a red flag for me.  While they may get enough total calories to keep growing (sometimes they don't), they pretty much can't eat a diet that adequately meets their needs for learning, developing, sleeping, pooping, talking - all the things toddlers must learn to do.  If a child is truly entrenched in this, a nutrition assessment can find out if it really is cause for concern, or if all you need to do is add a good multivitamin with minerals and wait it out.

A big clue:  Kids currently get many, many more meds than prior to 1980. Antibiotics in infancy and toddlerhood can change eating patterns. Children with entrenched, rigid food preferences often have had antibiotics either very often (five or more rounds) or very early (in the first 8 weeks of life).  Adjusting the gut ecology back to normal often triggers an abrupt change in food preferences in children.  So, for parents really tearing their hair out, try antifungal therapy for intestinal Candidiasis.  This can be prescription or naturopathic (herbs and probiotics) - et voila - your picky eater suddenly picks up fish, steak, and broccoli.  The hardest part is convincing your pediatrician to try this - they are trained to believe this is only relevant if thrush is foaming out of your child's mouth or anus.  My experience with this is that it does matter if there is intestinal candidiasis without thrush, and that it responds very nicely to treatment.  There are medications like Nystatin that are very safe for infants and children for this.  Even Diflucan is now used in infants.   

Long short, no need for parents and kids to struggle through this.  You can find out whether it matters or not with a good nutrition assessment, and fix it."

Great information. Thanks, Judy, for setting the record straight and for giving us more clues to start piecing things together for our own kids.

Q&A: "in denial" about CIO?

Pamela writes:

"I'm the mother of a wonderful 10 month old boy. Wonderful in every respect except that he's a terrible sleeper at night. I haven't gotten a decent (more than 3 consecutive hours) amount of sleep since the 4 month sleep regression. He averages 3 wakings a night, around 11pm, 2am, and 4:30am. I've been holding out doing any sleep training in the hopes that he'll start sleeping through the night on his own.

Am I kidding myself? I hear of people saying their baby finally started sleeping through the night at 11 months, but were those kids waking up this much? I'm trying to keep the faith, but it's hard.

We don't have any problems putting him down at night (I nurse him, and put him in drowsy or sometimes asleep) and I generally nurse him when he wakes as well. Please give me some encouragement to keep
Ferber and Weissbluth at bay, or tell me I'm in denial, and my kid really does sleep worse than others and needs intervention."

Well, the only people who talk about sleep are the ones who have good sleepers. Basically, anyone who's tried something and it worked will rave about it, but people who try something that doesn't work think it's their fault so they don't say anything about it.

So for every kid who started sleeping through the night at 11 months, there are an equal number who didn't start until 15 months (another really common time--both of mine didn't sleep through until then, which is strange because they slept so differently from each other in every other way), and probably an equal number who didn't really sleep through regularly until 2 years. And for every kid for whom CIO worked, there are an equal number whose sleep got even worse because of CIO, or for whom it just didn't do anything.

Now: I do think you can kind of predict which kind of kid you have and when they'll sleep through. Basically, if you have a kid who's just a nightmare sleeper in every way--can't get to sleep easily, won't stay asleep, has big problems in the middle of the night--those seem to be the ones who won't sleep through until 2 years (or even longer, God help their parents). If you have a kid who can fall asleep but just wakes up a lot (like yours and my second one--which I absolutely don't classify as a "terrible sleeper" because I've just heard of so many worse sleepers, but no one's telling you that because they're afraid to say anything when the conversation turns to sleep) and doesn't seem to be particularly upset during the night, just awake, those seem to be the 15 monthers. The ones who are great sleepers in general but just go through the normal sleep regressions are the ones who sleep through at 11 months.

Not that it's always like that, of course, but this is what I've observed from people I know IRL and from the emails I get. (Read the rest of the post before you leave your comment telling me I'm dead on or full of it. :-))

Add in the other factor that really influences whether or not you do CIO, which is how your child responds to crying. If you have a kid who gains tension by crying (so if you let him cry he'll escalate and get more and more upset), you're an unwitting dupe if you do CIO because you're just going to make it worse for all of you. If, however, you have a kid who seems to need to cry/fuss to tap off some energy (like some adults feel better after "a good cry"), then the kid might actually need to cry for a few minutes to go to sleep. My first was the first kind, and my second was the second kind. (And yes, I was one of those "I could never let my precious child cry to sleep!" people until I had a kid who cried himself to sleep while nursing. Kids just seem to know what they need.)

To me, since you say he falls asleep easily by being nursed or comforted to sleep, I personally wouldn't mess with that by introducing CIO into the mix. Certainly not to get him to sleep initially. I might try a modified approach for the middle-of-the-night wakings of not giving him the nursing, but still responding to him, to see how he responds. In other words, get your partner to take a shift of 3-4 nights in which he responds to your son at night (I might still do the 2 am feeding, since it's totally possible that your son is actually hungry then, especially if he's an active kid). Some babies wake up out of habit, and if there's no reward of nursing they'll just stop waking up then because it's not worth it to them. If he cries and it's Daddy who shows up instead of the milk machine, he might just stop waking up because it's not worth his time. But sending in your partner is still gentle parenting that won't scare him or make him feel alone (although it very well might piss him off).

I'd give it a try for 4 nights or so to see how he responds to not getting you and your magic breasts in the middle of the night. It might go well (my older one dropped the 11 pm feeding in a couple of days this way and I was totally flabbergasted because I thought it would be a huge fight, whereas my younger one freaked right out when we tried that approach). If it doesn't, you're out nothing but 4 nights in which you didn't have to do all the wake-ups.

Basically, it's kind of a choose your own adventure depending on your child's temperament, so I'd just try some easy readjustments for a few days each to see how they work out before you jump to the big guns of CIO. Which might not even work anyway on your particular kid, so don't believe the hype. (Don't , don't, don't...)

If it makes you feel any better, I remember with both kids just feeling like 9-10 months was absolutely killing me with the endless sleep drama (and mine weren't even that dramatic, just waking up). I think it's when we parents really start hitting the fatigue stage. But everyone else seems to have a peppy, precocious sleeps-14-hours-at-a-stretch kid who's also walking and can say 5 words and sign 30. It makes you feel like a loser. A puffy, incompetent, wrung-out loser. Things are much better at around a year, even if your kid isn't sleeping through reliably then. Maybe only because you can tell yourself that if you made it through one year you can make it through 17 more.

Commiseration? Anecdotes? No philosophical debates, please, just things to make Pamela feel better.

(Breakfast meeting, lunch and dinner planned, about to check the weather to choose clothes for Monday...)