Control yourself. And your kids!

After an awesome summer I’m back at work teaching pre-k. We have a new curriculum this year that was created by some great specialists and one of our speakers was Dr. Pam Schiller. If you have a baby you need to know who she is, she’s fabulous! I’m telling you this because I learned some awesome stuff that I can relate to Annabelle.

There are ‘windows of opportunity’ when it’s prime time for a baby to learn certain things. One of the most amazing ones is Impulse control. That’s the mom with the screaming baby in the checkout lane who won’t give in. The optimal window for teaching impulse control is 16-48 months, after that the window slams shut and what they haven’t learned won’t be learned. The amazing part – children who display self control by the age of 4 score on average 230 points higher on SAT’s than those who don’t

So when this window opens make sure you start teaching self-control! Set boundaries and keep them, allow your child to help make rules and always be consistent. I guess that means it’s ok for me to give in every time Annabelle cries now, until we hit 16 months. Then I’ll have to figure out how to say no that the worlds most adorable small person. Until then she’s getting spoiled.

She mentioned some good books to teach self-control. Here they are: Where the wild things are by Maurice Sendak, Be Brown by Barbara Bottner, Harry the dirty dog by Gene Zion, Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells and Julius, the baby of the world by Kevin Henkes. I might need to buy another bookshelf… I’m not ready to give in to the whole e-readers for babies.

Speaking of e-readers for babies, another awesome thing I learned. She talked about TV and why we don’t want babies under the age of 2 watching TV and one of the reasons is that their eyes are developing and the way the picture on the screen makes the babies eyes fire when they watch. I’m totally paraphrasing here. Well the way their eyes have to fire to watch TV is how their little baby eyes will wire with the brain so when they start looking at print and trying to read their eyes will fire the same way they do for watching TV and create a bunch of problems with concentration and behavior problems from frustration because they won’t be able to focus on the paper properly because of the way their sight has been wired in their brains. All from watching too much baby Einstein or Telle Tubbies or whatever it is babies watch nowadays.