Expressing Emotion through Dramatic Play

Dramatic play is a form of the performing arts.  Here are just a few of the benefits that occur through dramatic play:

• Education
• Therapy
• Development of social skills
• A sense of power through reenacting experiences
• Increased development of language skills
• Learning differences between reality and fantasy
• Understanding symbols (using items and toys as real life objects)
• Even relief from emotional chaos and tension

Encourage your child to “dance about” what they have experienced. When a child dances she is expressing some of what has been used in daily experiences and dramatic play. Having a child dance or act out his feelings about a friend, a sibling, a pet, an experience moves that experience into the body and out for someone else. When a child is encouraged to communicate with her body she often feels less frustrated, calmer and better understood with greater empathy. Try “dancing about” something you want to communicate to your child that is a little beyond words and see what happens.

C.A.R. Strategies

Language is the Key teaches adults to use three simple strategies that encourage young children to talk. "CAR" is a simple way for adults to remember the three strategies.

C stands for Comment and wait.
A stands for Ask questions and wait.
R stands for Respond by adding a little more.

The "Language is the Key" program is based on a significant body of research in the following areas:

• Early language, literacy and play development
• Bilingual language development
• Family involvement
• Language facilitation
• Cultural relevance
• Adult learning

Language is the Key uses "Follow the child's lead" as the over-arching approach for early literacy and language facilitation. Children are more likely to talk about what they are interested in. Language is the Key teaches adults to respond to the child's interest when commenting, asking questions, or responding by adding more.

Comment and Wait. Modeling language by making comments that reflect the child's focus of interest is a universally recommended practice in language facilitation models. Describing pictures in books or what the child is doing during play, then pausing to allow time for a response, is an effective way to elicit language. Children need time to think and code their thoughts into language, so it is important for adults to give children at least 5 seconds to respond after they make a comment or ask a question. A longer wait-time also lets the child know the adult is interested in what the child has to say.

Ask Questions and Wait. Adults use two major types of questions to encourage children to talk or respond: open-ended and closed questions. Closed questions are those questions that require a yes-no answer, a pointing response, or a one- or two-word label. Asking a child "What do you see?", "Can you point to the cat?" or "What color is the alligator?" are examples of closed questions.

Open-ended questions generally require a more complex linguistic response and may require additional "thinking time" on the part of the child to formulate their response. Open-ended questions tend to elicit full sentences or even several sentences. "What is the chicken doing?", "What's going to happen next?", or "Why did the girl need a new bicycle?" are examples of open-ended questions.

Respond by adding a little more. Expansion of the child's utterances is a basic tool in language facilitation. The adult repeats what the child says and then expands the utterance with one or two new words. This allows the child to contrast her utterance with the adult's expansion and also hear the next level of difficulty for language production. For example, if the child says "ball", the adult says "ball, big ball." This reinforces the child's talking, gives her the support for the next level of complexity and provides new information.

Repeat again in Spanish, Korean, etc. "Repeat again in the home language" is a strategy for families who speak a language other than English at home. Children who are learning two languages simultaneously frequently mix the two languages.

Family History

by UPAT Parent Educator, Sheila Chaney

The power of family genes lives on in our bodies, and the power of how we see ourselves, others, and the world, lives on in our psyche.  That’s the strength of family history.  We inherit a genetic make-up and adopt values, attitudes and behaviors from those who birth us and rear us to adulthood. Nature and nurture—both leave influences that remain throughout our lives and influence who we are.  As babies we also come with our own unique personality traits, temperaments, and innate spiritual selves.
By looking at our family history and patterns we can decide what patterns we want to keep and what we want to change.  For example, If our parents suffered from heart disease, we may decide to watch our diet, exercise regularly, and get yearly medical checkups and advice.  We also may want to teach our children healthy eating patterns.

Humans are masters of denial.  Most of us will try to find ways to avoid examining painful experiences.  We tend to act angry, or to withdraw when we are feeling afraid, especially if we have no safe place to vent our anger; no safe person to tell our fears.  There is a tendency to ‘stuff” the emotions deep into our denial satchel.  Many people suffer bouts of depression, a common sign of anger turned inward, because their “satchel” needs a good cleaning out.  As we look at negative family and individual patterns our job is to unpack the past and current behaviors, piece by piece, clean it out an decide what to do with it.  If we need extra help ‘unpacking” we can ask for help from a qualified, safe friend or counselor.
As we examine family patterns, we can also rejoice at the good qualities, habits, and patterns found in our family and build upon the tremendous foundation.  As we incorporate those habits and values into our own family, generations after us will be solid in mind, emotions, body and spirit.  As a parent, our job is to increase our awareness and understanding of family dynamics and how the patterns-of-behavior influence and each individual in the family.

Family Systems
Any system is made of parts working together.  An automobile engine is a system.  A computer is a system.  A family is a system.  You are part of a family system. In a family, the parts are the members. They work together for the benefit of the whole family. Each member is important to the survival of the family.  Everything that happens to a member affects the entire family.  Changes in the family and in society as a whole affect the family system.

• Marriage, living together, birth, or adoption of a child affects the whole family.
• Divorce, death, or a family member leaving home affects the whole family.
• Addictions, illness or incarceration of a member affects the whole family.
• Children getting into trouble in school or with the law affect the whole family.
• Job changes or a change in income affects the whole family.
• Abuse or neglect of one member affects the whole family.

Family members are individuals.  Each is unique.  Each reacts to change within the system in individual ways.  Marriage or birth of a baby is usually joyous events.  They are stressful, but we feel good about the stress.  We handle the change. We feel happy.
Many changes cause pain.  Family members may cope with pain in different ways.

• Some deny it.  They pretend it didn’t happen. They live with hidden pain.
• Some act out in anger or rage.  They hurt themselves or others.
• Some face it, feel it, continue growing and go on.
• Some seek help or guidance through self-help books, counselors or therapists and classes so they too can continue growing.

Every family is unique and different.  Still, all families have many things in common.  They want to be happy and successful.  They want to rear happy, successful children. They want to give and receive love.

 

Family Functions and Roles

All family members have roles.  Roles have titles like father, mother and child.  Roles involve tasks like care giver, wage earner and learner.  The family, working as a system, has several tasks or functions:

• It provides food, clothing and shelter for the members
• It provides for the education of the children.
• It prepares children for other relationships.
• It helps children find their place in society.
• It teaches values and skills to the children.
• It protects and loves the children.
• It celebrates joys and grieves sorrows together.
• It sends children into society to accept new roles and tasks.

Healthy families help develop healthy feelings in the members.

• The members feel important and comfortable in their roles.
• The members show respect and honesty to each other.

Some families struggle with these functions and feelings.  Their members struggle, too.

• They may have addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, or even TV watching.
• They may gamble, over-eat, over-spend or even over-clean.
• They may abuse or neglect their members.
• They may develop depression or stress disorders.

All families function well at least some of the time.  All families have struggles, too. We either use our family history to choose to learn from the past, or we can deny that our family has any problems or concerns.  How we define our heritage assumes more importance than the legacy of our family per se.  Or, we can chart our own course and decide who we are and what our ”new” family (our own spouse and children) is going to be.

8 Things to Do on a Daily Basis to Help Your Child Learn

If you are looking for extra learning activities to do with your child on a regular basis, there are several very accessible things that you can do without opening your wallet, and they are right your own community - and most of them are literally right in your own back yard! Here are eight things that you can do to help encourage learning in your preschooler:

1. Allow your child to do things independently even if he/she takes longer than doing it yourself.
2. Provide plenty of social experiences for your child. Whether in a formal or informal playgroup, preschool, or other setting, your child will learn skills that can only be taught by other children. Sharing objects or time with an adult is different from doing so with another child. Children develop their imaginations by role-playing and pretending. Pretend play has been consistently linked to cognitive, intellectual, language, and social growth.
3. Provide daily opportunities to develop strength and coordination of large and small muscles. Go to the park, play ball games and tag, practice lacing, pour, stir, and participate in other functional activities.
4. Play games in which your child counts out loud (such as hide and seek), play board games that require your child to count the dots on a die, and use household items such as cans, boxes, and balls to explore shapes. Complete puzzles and play with interlocking building toys.
5. Provide plenty of opportunities and materials for writing and creative expression: crayons, sand, water, paint, paper, markers, scissors, hole punch, yarn, beans, and popsicle sticks.
6. Read picture books, poetry books, nonfiction books, nonsense books, nursery rhymes, and signs. Exposure to a wide variety of literature allows your child to learn different sentence patterns and hear vocabulary that you might not ordinarily use at home.
7. Talk WITH your child. (You talk TO your child when giving directions.) LISTEN to your child's stories. TELL your child stories. ASK questions. SHARE your ideas using descriptive language. Children learn language when they HEAR it and USE it.
8. Visit your local library or bookmobile regularly.

There are many other things that you can do with your child to encourage learning, but these are just a few things to get you started. If you are already doing these and you are looking for some new ideas to add, try checking out books on a particular subject, i.e. science experiments for children or books on how to draw dinosaurs. You may also enjoy going on learning walks, finding bugs in the backyard, or setting up a birdfeeder where you can watch different birds come and go. The possibilities are endless!

13 Tips for a Successful Beginning

Sending your child to kindergarten is a big step! Luckily, there are several things that you can do as a parent to make this transition easier on both of you. Here are 13 easy tips for a successful beginning:

• Find out whether your school has a kindergarten orientation, or make an appointment to visit the school and teacher before the first day of school.
• Talk with your child about some of the fun things that will happen at school, such as meeting new friends, listening to stories, and playing outside.
• Begin a healthy routine by making sure that your child sleeps at least 10-12 hours and eats a nutritious breakfast.
• Have your child tell you the plan for after school - exactly where to be picked up or which bus to take.
• Label all outerwear.
• Dress your child in clothes that can be put on and taken off independently, such as elastic-waist pants and shoes with Velcro closures.
• Dress your child in clothing that is appropriate for sitting on carpets and outdoor play.
• Pack a "reassurance" such as a family picture, a small stuffed animal, or a note from home in your child's backpack.
• Don't over-schedule after-school activities; your child will likely be tired.
• Check your child's backpack after school. There may be several forms for you to fill out and return.
• Celebrate the end of the first day.
• Begin your after-school routine, which may include a snack, playtime, and quiet book time.
• Ask your child specific questions about the day, such as: "Who did you play with? What was today's story about? Where did you play? What did you make?"

The Utah Child Protection Registry

Protect Your Family's Addresses:
The Utah Child Protection Registry is a free program provided by the State of Utah that helps you stop adult-oriented solicitations from being targeted at you and your family. The program allows you to protect:

• E-Mail Addresses
• Mobile Phone Numbers
• Instant Messenger IDs
• Fax Numbers

Companies and marketers that send adult-oriented messages, such as those promoting pornography, alcohol, illegal drugs, tobacco, and gambling are required to screen their mailing lists with the State of Utah and remove registered addresses and numbers before they send their solicitations. Marketers that fail to remove registered addresses face felony charges as well as substantial civil and criminal fines.

Click here to register e-mail addresses now

10 Tips for Eating Out With Your Child

10 tips to help keep your child’s eating habits from turning into frustrating public displays of disaffection and make your family’s meals out on the town more enjoyable for everyone involved.

1. Maintain a Healthy Attitude. Eating out requires a lot of social skills—skills that children must not only be taught, but be given the chance to practice. Each time you head out to a restaurant, be sure to remind yourself that being quiet and sitting still with one’s napkin across one’s lap throughout an entire meal doesn’t come naturally.
2. Pick a Restaurant That Caters to Kids… If there’s a “Kids Eat Free” sign in the window, the hostess is ready and waiting with a box of crayons, and the level of background noise is high enough to drown out any unexpectedly loud outbursts, it’s a safe bet you’re good to go. Don’t forget that as your child’s mealtime manners develop, you can look forward to dining at restaurants that cater to a more mature crowd.
3. BYOB. bring your own backup. Bringing along a couple of mealtime accessories can go a long way toward making the meal go smoothly and helping your child enjoy rather than ruin the ambiance.
4. Keep in Mind That It’s About Time. Many of the problems children have behaving in restaurants can be traced back to having too much time on their hands. Boredom and impatience are not your friends. Since the clock will be ticking from the minute you walk in the door, we recommend:

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Toilet Learning Skills for Toddlers

Cognitive and Verbal Skills Needed for Toilet Learning

If you know how to drive a car with a manual transmission, you probably remember how hard it was to master this skill. First, you had to locate the stick shift, the clutch pedal, and the gears. Next, you had to get a feel for when it was time to shift gears, and learn how to do so smoothly while easing the clutch pedal down and up again.
During the toilet-training process, your child must learn to coordinate an equally complex combination of physical and cognitive tasks. She must familiarize herself with the necessary "equipment" (her body and its functions), associate physical sensations with the proper responses, picture what she wants to do (use the potty), create a plan to get there, begin using it, and remain in place long enough to finish, which requires both memory and concentration. Throughout this learning process, she must be able to understand your explanations, commands, and responses to some extent, and express her own feelings about toilet use.

 

Body Awareness

Clearly, all of this learning takes time. The first steps in this process involve bodily sensation—the ability to associate an inner feeling of fullness with the bowel movement or

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Review: Crucial Confrontations

I love the insights of Crucial Confrontations. This one addresses a stress that is a sign of the times-debt. Whether or not you are in debt the principles of what it takes to break a bad habit are invaluable. If you and your partner are having a hard time breaking the habit of over indulging your child or if your environment is chaotic due to too much stuff (toys included) or a myriad of other stressors you can use the principles of the Influencer work to help you resolve “bad habits” and your families quandaries.

Dear Crucial Skills,

My husband and I have $40,000 in credit card debt. We've made all kinds of budgets and set all kinds of goals but still can't get together on this. We fight about it a lot and it's become a real source of conflict for us. We both want to get out of debt, but one bad deed keeps leading to another. How can we stick to our budget?

Signed,
Good Intentions

Dear Good Intentions,

What a great question to kick off the New Year. I'm sure you're not alone after a tough financial year—many of us have had to try to change our spending habits to help us weather everything from economic anxiety to a true financial famine. Fortunately, there's a lot you can do to change your good intentions into good behavior.

First, I'd suggest you and your husband play a game together. Let's call the game Name That Influence! The object of the game is to identify all the different sources of influence that are undermining your good intentions. You'll be shocked at how long the list is. Here are three questions to help you generate some specific answers:

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Giving Your Child Choices

Young babies don’t realize that they are separate beings from their mothers and fathers, but somewhere around their second birthday they start to realize that they don’t really want to take that nap or they’re not going to eat those peas. This can be a trying time for any parent but it can also be a time for celebration. Their child is learning to define who they are by discovering their own distinct likes and dislikes.

Is “no” your toddler’s favorite word. Do you find yourself battling your two year old over the simplest things?  Don’t worry! Toddler’s can try the patience of even the calmest and most experienced parents. What’s a parent to do? Offering choices is a simple but effective parenting tool that will help reduce power struggles and help your child feel they have some control in their life. Offering choices allow children to comply with your wishes while having the “last word.” Humans love control and our children are no different. They feel empowered when they are given a choice but we maintain control by deciding what choices to offer.

Giving choices helps children attend to the task at hand, comply with your wishes, learn decision making skills, avoid power struggles, learn impulse control and establish and maintain self-control. A skilled parent knows to offer choices that don’t make a problem for them or anyone else. They know to offer choices that they can deliver. They also know when not to offer a choice. In matters of health or safety, children have absolutely no say in the matter. A wise parent would not ask their child, “Do you want to wear your helmet?” or “Do you want to take a nap?” They know that these are times when the child does not have a choice. Children need to understand that they do not have input into every situation.

A sensible parent knows that two positive choices optimize the chance for cooperation. They offer two positive choices that move the child toward the goal at hand. When delivering choices follow these steps:

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