Babies need comfort from their parents. They need to feel the world is a safe
place. The most important thing a parent can do is respond to their baby figure
out what their baby needs. This will help their baby feel loved and calm them. The
baby will trust their parent. One year olds need to explore to learn about the
world. Your role as a parent is to make sure your baby's environment is safe to
explore. This will help their brain develop and prevent injuries. As your
baby starts to understand words, you can begin to teach them about things that
might hurt them. If babies and young children are slapped or spanked by their
parents, they may become afraid of their parents and not trust them. If they are
yelled at, they may become hesitant to explore and learn. Yelling and insults
encourage violence. What you do and what you say matters to them!
When we're talking about children as young as 1 so really we're looking at
babies at this point. Discipline becomes an issue of providing
consistency to a young child,
and when we do this it helps the child understand what are the expectations of
my world? What are the things that I'm allowed to do and what are the things
I'm not allowed to do? As a parent you want to be right in there with your
child
showing and teaching your child every step of the way it what is appropriate
and what's not appropriate. So when babies are crying what would be the best
way to try and help calm a baby down, and the most important thing for parents to
remember is that they need to respond to that baby's distress with comfort. So
we're really talking about not moving away from a baby physically but actually
moving and scooping that baby up, holding that baby, being close enough
that you can actually try to physically even with words with gestures
calm that baby down. Leaving your baby alone is not going to help your baby to
learn how to manage those feelings and in fact when you respond to your baby's
distress you are beginning to set the foundation for your baby to learn how to
manage his or her own emotions later on. As a baby gets more mobile you may find
that they're getting into things that may not be very safe, just saying no is
at this stage very abstract for a child, so we want to say very clearly you need to
stop pulling on the curtains. Once you've indicated to your baby that we
need to stop this behavior you want to distract your baby with something else
something that's gonna be as engaging and as interesting for them as as
whatever they were doing. Let's take a look at how this mother interacts with
her one-year-old. Could we play? Could we play together? So mom and the kids are playing
together on the floor. I love that this mom is right on the floor
engaged with them so she's right in there with their play.
Honey what do you have in your hand? It's a Lego. We will play with it when we grow up. She is also very aware of safety issues and while
the baby is reaching for toys that are clearly too small
mom is really good at immediately removing the toy. The baby was attracted
to the big beautiful television reaching for the discs, curious about what's there.
Honey, are you trying to stand up her? Mom is very alert and immediately comes over and i think what's really important
here is that, mom very quickly takes away the objects that she doesn't want
the baby touching. And she has in fact replaced them with something else and she has
done it very subtly, very gently in this instance she very quickly redirected the
baby. Mama is right here. Mama is right here. Ok, ok.
So when this little one does get upset, once again mom steps in so quickly and nicely and tries
to redirect her, tries to distract her and literally within a few
seconds this baby calms down and is engaged with mom again in play and
clearly really happy. Sometimes you may find that your baby really get so overwhelmed and
their behavior can be overwhelming for you as a parent and when this happens
it's going to be so important that you try to stay calm because if you start to
get upset your baby is actually going to become more upset by you modeling how
you stay calm and how you actually use that calmness to soothe her to comfort
her
your baby is actually learning how to manage his or her own emotions through
that interaction. The greatest gift we can give a child at the age of one is
that confidence to actually explore their world explore their environment
form relationships and to learn how to manage all the different feelings that
they're having as they do this.
Young children's brains develop when they explore the things around them. You
can encourage them to explore by planning ahead and making their
environment safe. This will also help prevent child injuries and reduce
conflicts between you and your child. By watching and listening to their parents,
young children learn how to behave with others. Help them when they need you.
Understand that they have so much to learn!
Talk to them in a kind and supportive way. This will help them learn how to be
nice to others. With your one-year-old always respond to your baby's cries.
Provide the nutrition and sleep he or she needs for health. Set the environment so
that it's safe for your child to explore. Distract your child away from danger. Use
the word "Stop" and try to avoid saying "No". Explain why certain things are dangerous.
Try to be consistent. And always provide warmth and lots of cuddles.