Why I love the Ames & Ilg books
Feb 27, 2005 Parenting
The Ames & Ilg books were written by researchers at The Gesell Institute who studied and defined child development. I’ve mentioned these books before because they are my exception to my stated “avoid reading parenting books” rule (another exception are the books by Faber and Mazlish). The reason I think the Ames & Ilg books are good is that they give you a clear picture of your child’s developmental journey, knowledge of which will make you a better parent. (I used to teach parenting classes and a lot of parenting troubles come from unrealistic expectations or misunderstandings about child development.)
Let’s say your two-year old is into dumping things. Let’s say that any time you leave turn your back on him in the kitchen, he’s dumping oatmeal or boxes of cereal. If you have a copy of Your Two-Year Old: Terrible or Tender (they all have these unfortunate titles), you would be able to look it up and see that dumping stuff is age appropriate. That doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to living with oatmeal all over your kitchen floor but knowing it’s pretty typical of two-year olds will make it easier to figure out what to do next, especially since in the course of reading the book, you’ll learn a lot more about what your toddler is like.
Now don’t read the books for their advice — it’s out-dated, anyway — it’s likely that you can figure out what to do from within your own value parameters or else you can talk to other moms about how they handled the dumping phase.
Anyway, I’m reading the 8-year old book (Your Eight-Year Old: Lively and Outgoing) and yeah, they totally have Noah’s number. The most striking thing for me is that Noah is suddenly so physical. Way more than pre-holidays. He flies everywhere. If I ask him to go grab his coat, he races down the hall (slamming into the wall as his braking system), leaps over his sister and slides across the coffee table to get to it. He’s also starting to demand real autonomy, to the point that he’ll lies about, say, brushing his teeth because he’s annoyed that we told him to do it. Because of this, he and I have been talking about his need to feel like the boss of himself and how to balance that with our need to make sure he’s following through on the things we expect of him.
Noah was surprised to hear that it’s normal for kids to want to be more and more autonomous as they get older. I told him this was the point of growing up but that sneaking wasn’t the way to let us know he’s ready to make his own decisions. Then we talked about how we could negotiate some things (like how we handle television) but only if he can show that he’ll be responsible about his new-found freedom. We’ll see how it goes.
(By the way, I was telling Sandra that I’m updating my blog now using Ecto, which is how I’m adding in all of those tags to the links and also the iTunes thingie at the bottom of my posts. I downloaded it so I could write blog entries off-line, easily resize and upload pictures, but also because I became obsessed with having a “now playing” note on my blog. Crazy, eh?)
Speaking of which: Now playing on iTunes: “Stars and the Moon (Songs for a New World)” from the album Way Back To Paradise by Audra McDonald
February 27th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Dawn,
I have always thought that being aware of normal development makes it easier to deal with frustrating behavior. I may still not like it, but at least I understand it.
We pretty much live by the theory of trust until proven untrustworthy. I still have parameters, but compromise or even just a real conversation works so much better than just no. We are really trying to use this as we enter the tricky navigation of the teenagers.
February 28th, 2005 at 12:27 am
Man, now where’s MY tag?
February 28th, 2005 at 11:04 am
I’m so with you. I even donated the series to the parenting bookshelf at my childcare center so that other parents could read them too. And the other huge benefit is that they are short enough for busy and frazzled parents to easily read.
February 28th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
Y’know, I just bought one of them (Your Seven year Old) for the first time and it is so comforting to read that he’s “supposed” to be withdrawn and seemingly deaf. I can stop worrying that I’ve messed him up and concentrate on loving him where he’s at. It was also nice to read that he’ll be great with newborn sibs!