Did you know that when your partner is given 15 minutes of alone time with the new baby in the first few hours after birth, they will spend significantly more time with your child in the first three months of life? Sometimes, your partner gets left out of the conversation about transitioning into parenting. Let’s explore a few ways to make a great start to parenting for both of you.
It’s time to talk about potty-training or as I prefer to call it, ‘toilet learning.’ Within the Montessori approach, we call it toilet learning rather than potty-training because we know that toileting is a skill to be learned when your child is ready - not necessarily when you decide you are ready to train your child. Referring to it as a ‘learning experience’ helps frame the whole toilet learning process in a positive light that revolves around the child, instead of adult convenience.
Playing with your baby yields more than sweet smiles, squeals, and coos. According to researchers and child-development experts, simple, everyday games can boost baby’s brain development, fostering growth in language, science, math, and organizational skills (called executive functions) along with social and emotional learning.
Maybe the COVID babies won’t get to coo at new friends on mats while the moms hold warrior pose at mom-and-me yoga, and maybe they won’t get to splash each other and get tossed high above the pool water in soggy diapers as the dads sing, “When you’re up, you’re up…” But what they do have is you. You and books.
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