How to Parent Naturally

By Jenci4,ehow member

Theories abound in the world of parenting. You can find a theory to support any parenting style you want. Parenting naturally focuses on parenting according to a baby's basic needs and the natural resources available to the mother and the baby. Natural parenting considers what is best for the baby, the parents, and the environment.

Step 1:Birth naturally without any drugs. Although painful, this experience is rewarding. During natural birth, the mother knows where her baby is at every moment of his entrance into the world, and she can be present with him from beginning to end. It also gives the baby a healthy beginning, as he will not be affected by having drugs in his system.

Step 2:Breastfeed your baby. Breastfeeding comes naturally to a baby, and it gives your baby all of the right nutrients from birth on. Breastfeeding is also an incredible way for mother and baby to bond. It helps the mother return to her pre-pregnancy weight faster, and it gives your baby natural immunities to sickness.

Step 3:Use cloth diapers. Your baby’s bottom will thank you for the gentle cloth material and the lowered risk of diaper rash while the earth will thank you for not contributing to the millions of non-degradable disposable diapers thrown out every year. Cloth diapering is less expensive than disposables even with a diaper service to wash and dry all of your dirty diapers.

Step 4:Co-sleep with your baby. Co-sleeping allows the parents to get more rest, and it gives the baby love and care that cannot be found in a crib.

Step 5:Comfort your baby when she cries. All babies will cry for various reasons. If she is hungry, wet, hot or cold, soothe her in various ways. Stay close to her to show her your love and intimacy. Rock her or walk with her and speak to her in a gentle voice.

Step 6:Use all natural products on your baby’s skin and clothes. There are many natural baby products available for bath time, for protecting your baby’s skin and for laundry. Look for organic baby wash, baby lotion, diaper cream, baby powder and baby laundry detergent.

Step 7:Use only all natural cleaning products to clean your house. The chemicals in most popular cleaning products are breathed in by you and your baby every time you use them. Natural products will eliminate the dangers associated with these chemicals and will result in a healthier child and a healthier you.

Tips & Warnings

• Co-sleeping does not have to continue for years. Older babies and toddlers can learn to sleep alone without too much difficulty.
• While co-sleeping, remember to keep all the covers off your baby and to only use fitted sheets.
• Do not use pillow-top mattresses while co-sleeping.
• Do not use alcohol or drugs while co-sleeping.

If you are obese, co-sleeping may be dangerous for the baby

How to Prepare to Parent a Foster Child

By eHow Parenting Editor

The preparations for becoming a foster parent are the easiest part of foster parenting. Make sure that before you parent a child, you are prepared for all of the child's needs. You will need to care for their physical needs first and foremost, of course, but all foster children have very complex emotional needs. Each child will be different.

Preparations

Step1:Baby-proof or child-proof your house. This should be done as soon as you are approved.

Step 2: Set up a bedroom room separate from other children, if at all possible. Make sure it is somewhere that can be quiet and calm when the child is in it.

Step 3:Locate and check emergency caregivers or daycare center before you parent a child. Know the specifics of what may be needed (i.e. medical treatments, alternatives for allergies), and be sure the facility or caregiver can accommodate them.

Step 4:Make arrangements to get appropriate car seats, based on the general ages of the children you intend to parent.

Step 5:where you need to go for medical care.

Step 6:Ask your agency for information on Lifebooks. Some agencies will even give you a pre-formatted one for you to fill in. These are usually for birth certificates, social security cards and other vital records.

Step 7:Read books or talk to a child psychiatrist before you agree to foster parent a child to make sure you know how to handle any emotional problems.

Before the Child Arrives

Step 1:Set up an area in the room with children close to their age if you weren't able to create a separate bedroom for the child.

Step 2:Make arrangements with caregivers or a child care center before child arrives. Recheck to be sure they can accommodate all medical treatments or allergy situations before the child arrives.

Step 3:Before you pick up the child or arrange for them to be brought to you, check to see if they need a car seat. If they do, install the car seat. Make sure you have the car seat checked for safety. You can call 1-866-SEAT-CHECK or go to The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Website to find a location near you to get your car seat checked.

Step 4:Find out when the child's shots and checkups will be needed, and find out any other medical information you may need. If checkups or shots will be due within a month or less, make arrangements immediately. Doctors are usually booked a month in advance, except for emergencies.

Step 5:Obtain or create a Lifebook for each child before they arrive. Be sure to pass these, as well as baby books, scrapbooks or other records, along to the worker when the child leaves. You should keep a copy. The child may contact you one day, and it will make them feel good to know you have kept reminders of them. These records could also be lost as workers change.

How to Parent a Difficult Child

By Tracy Rose, eHow Editor

Parenting a difficult child is challenging, at best. Children who resist cooperating, refuse to listen or throw temper tantrums to get their way can be nearly impossible to control.

By establishing clear rules and assigning natural consequences to bad behavior, parents remove themselves from the discipline process and place the responsibility on the child.

Parenting in this way reduces the power struggles many parents and children face.

Step 1: Establish clear rules (discuss and agree upon specific rules with your spouse, if applicable.) Explain the new rules to your child in a calm manner. Don't wait until the child is upset to introduce the rules.

Step 2:Create appropriate consequences that will occur if your child breaks a rule. Make sure he or she completely understands what will happen if the rules are broken. They need to understand that choosing the behavior means choosing the consequences. This method of parenting puts the responsibility on the child.

Step 3: Follow through with every consequence you set up for making poor chooses. Consistency is the only way children will learn from their mistakes and avoid making the same poor choices repeatedly.

Step 4

Find teachable moments to talk to your kids about making the right decisions and about the consequences people face for making poor decisions.

Tips & Warnings

• Natural consequences are often the best way to help kids learn from their choices.
• Avoid being a friend instead of a parent to your child.

Managing Your Child's Anger: 9 Possible Triggers

By Toni Schutta

Children’s anger can be exacerbating for parents. After all, many adults still struggle with healthy expression of anger, so dealing with a child’s anger can be doubly frustrating.

When your child gets angry, take a step back and try to figure out what may have triggered the angry outburst? Many times, believe it or not, there may be a good explanation.

Listed below are nine common triggers for a child’s anger outbursts and possible solutions to help your child calm down.

The solutions may also provide ways to prevent the next meltdown:

1. Time of Day- Many children express more anger between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m., right when you get home from work and want to make dinner. Document what time of day is most troubling for your child.

Parenting Advice: Take 15 minutes to sit down with your child and talk over his/her day before you begin making dinner. Give your child something relaxing to do while you make dinner. A healthy snack may also tide them over until dinner.

2. Abrupt Changes- Children crave routine and structure. They don’t like curve balls.

Parenting Advice: At the start of the day, outline the day’s activities. Five to ten minutes before a change of activity will take place, tell the child what the change will be. Ie.“In five minutes, you’ll need to put the toys away and go take a bath.”

3.Too much stimulation- Children may get over-stimulated from too many activities in one day or too much of one activity at a time.

Parenting Advice: Try not to over-schedule. Plan down-time in every day. Avoid certain activities if your child is sensitive to stimulation.

4.Overtired- Most children need 10-12 hours of sleep a day to function best.
Parenting Advice: Make sure your child is getting enough sleep.
Develop a bedtime routine to prepare the child for bed. Allow for quiet times, even if your child doesn’t sleep.

5.Hurt Feelings
Parenting Advice: Help the child identify the feelings and talk with you or another person about them. Teach the child to ask for what they need from other people.

6.Jealous Feelings
Parenting Advice: Acknowledge that feeling jealous sometimes is perfectly normal and show your understanding. Try to focus on the strengths your child has and never compare siblings. Try to spend some time alone every day (or week) with each child.

7.Child Doesn’t Get Own Way
Parenting Advice: Pick your battles. If it’s important to you (or to your child’s safety), stick to your guns. Apply a consequence if your child doesn’t comply and follow through. You can also allow the child two choices s/he can select from.

This allows the child to feel some sense of control. If it’s not that important to you, let the child have what they want sometimes. You’re demonstrating to the child that s/he is a responsible person whom you can trust.

Not Sharing- This is a skill that takes years to master. Hang in there!
Parenting Advice: Have your child put his/her favorite toy somewhere that others can’t reach, thereby avoiding arguments.

Assigning an equal amount of time that each child can play with a toy can help, too. Giving the toy a time out so that neither child can play with it if they argue, can also work.

9.Too much energy
Parenting Advice: Allow your child time each day to run and jump and let off steam in a positive way.

Remember that expressing anger is healthy and normal, even for children. You can’t shield them from hurt feelings, but you can help by finding predictable patterns in your child’s outbursts and making adjustments that will cause fewer outbursts.

The Role Of Fathers In Child Parenting

By Donald Saunders

Although the role of mothers has changed little over the years, the role of fathers has changed considerably, particularly over the past 150 years.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, often referred to as the Victorian Era, the father was a very distant and rarely seen figure as far as children were concerned and his responsibility was largely confined to being the family's 'law giver'.

This changed during the early part of the twentieth century, due in no small part to the influence of Freud, and by the middle of the century fathers were seen much more as being the family's 'wise breadwinner'.

As we moved into the 1960s and 1970s however fathers were once more given a back seat role and many people viewed them as nothing more than 'sperm donors'. Today, it's difficult to define the role of fathers and it's very much a case of 'ask ten people and you'll get eleven opinions'.

So where do we start in trying to define a father's role? Well, the answer is that we have to return to basics and ask a few fundamental questions such as "what effect does their presence (or absence) have on the family?"and "why do children need a father?"

In trying to answer these and other similar questions the first difficulty that you encounter is that there is a wide variety of opinions. However, one thing that most studies agree upon is that children do not normally fair as well in the absence of a father and poor performance at schools, drug use, violent behavior and criminal activity are more frequently seen in children who are raised without a father.

But trying to determine just why this should be the case is not easy.
It seems likely that there is no single cause and that a combination of financial, psychological and other factors are involved. Whatever the cause, it would nonetheless seem that children need a father if they are to get the best start in life.

Apart from the traditional role of being the breadwinner and providing the basic necessities of food and shelter, fathers are also undoubtedly seen as providing such things as protection for their daughters and a role model for their sons.

However, many suggest that it is the role the father plays as one half of the parental partnership that is perhaps the most important.

Children are strongly influenced by everything that they see and hear and they see and hear a great deal more than we often realize. Observing the roles of mom and dad working together, children learn a great deal from the way in which matters are discussed and decisions made.

The manner in which responsibilities are divided between the parents with mom taking care of such things as bedtime routines, diet and household chores and dad being the guardian of such things as the front door (granting permission for the children to spend time with friends or go the mall) and taking care of the issue of pocket money, provides children with a model of parenting and teaches them a variety of skills.

This, combined with a host of other experiences common in a two parent household, helps to shape a child's view of the adult world and of the interaction between the sexes.

We could of course continue to develop this further and look in more detail at just how the interaction of two parents influences the children, but things begin to get a little bit complicated when we start to consider such things as the personalities of the two parents and the strength or otherwise of their own relationship.

Looking at the possibilities here would means looking at literally hundreds of different scenarios.
Perhaps the simplest answer to our original question of what a father's role is would be to say that it is many different things to different people and, while we could try to define it, perhaps it's simply enough to say that the presence of a father in a child's life is important and that, in general, children are better off with a father than without one.

Parenting4Dummies.com covers a wide range of topics and provides child parenting help, tips on only child parenting, advice on parenting teenagers and information on step parenting and divorced parenting.

Parenting a child with Down syndrome

By Agency Reporter

Down syndrome is a developmental disability caused by an extra chromosome. This abnormality impairs physical and neurological development, resulting in mental retardation and such physical characteristics as poor muscle tone, short neck, broad hands and feet, and slanting eyes.

Children with DS may also have respiratory problems, gastrointestinal problems, spinal problems, heart problems, and problems with hearing and language.

They are also at increased risk for hypothyroidism (a low thyroid hormone level), eye abnormalities (cataracts, strabismus, nystagmus, glaucoma and refractive errors), hearing loss and deafness (usually from repeated ear infections), mental retardation (ranging from mild (IQ 50-70), moderate (IQ 35-50), and sometimes severe (IQ 20-35), developmental delays (including speech and motor delays), leukemia (<1%>

In the nursery, children who are suspected of having trisomy 21 will usually have an evaluation to make sure he doesn‘t have a heart problem. This will include an EKG, chest x-ray, and a cardiology consult with an echocardiogram.

He will also have blood drawn to check his chromosomes to confirm the diagnosis and make sure he doesn‘t have a balanced translocation (which requires consultation with a genetics specialist to discuss the risk of having another baby with this condition). He will also have a blood screening test to check for hypothryoidism.

Problems that can occur in the newborn period include difficulty with feeding and poor growth, especially if he also has a heart problem. He may have to be on a concentrated, high calorie formula to help him gain weight.

His initial visit during the newborn period will include a detailed evaluation of his growth and development, with special attention paid to look for eye abnormalities. It is also a good time to get a referral to a Down Syndrome specialty clinic or support group if one is available in your area and to an Early Child Intervention programme for occupational and physical therapy.

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