I really enjoyed the 2,5 years that I wrote constantly here. I had great conversations through comments and emails. Tripping Mom made me look deep inside my parenting experience, but it´s time for me to take a break.

This all has been about traveling and parenting. Traveling alone with a small child is not always easy, and sometimes it is easy, but I don´t want to travel for a good while (though in my mind there´s Costa Rica, New Zealand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka for sometime in the future).

In my current routine there´s the thing I love doing more in the world: surfing. Besides this, I´m learning to dance hip hop with several other mamas, and I am working my flexible hours on different projects, so it´s good to be home.

And just as short on traveling stories I am short on parenting stories. I want to keep the private things more private. Two years of exposure is good enough.

For one thing, my daughter doesn´t like anyone to take pictures of her . Or talk about her. No praise, no criticism, nothing, she hates being judged or qualified in any way. ¨A kid¨ is so far the definition that doesn´t hurt her. If she had any idea of how much of her life I share with the world, she would not like it. And I often wonder: Is it really positive to put it all out there, my experience, my thoughts, my feelings?

I also don´t want to be part of the noise that is so abundant in our virtual world. I´d rather have you go out and play instead. Will it really encourage you to grow your own food if you see a picture of my tomatoes? Will you stop spoiling your kid if I do?

There´s one thing on my blog that you probably don´t find anywhere else, it´s my ability to talk about my failures, like here  and here and here. I hope this was useful stuff, when people could relate to being permissive or aggressive and had no one talking about it anywhere, but here they had and it´s comforting to know you are not alone.

But I don´t feel like writing about my failures anymore, or about the amazing things (like this or this or this). I just want to live them.

I might come back to the blog when I start traveling again, or with random posts when I get inspired, but for now, this is it.

I wanted to write for those of you who keep coming back for more. How lovely to have some loyal readers. It was for you that I kept writting (and for myself too). This blog is not big, and I never cared to have only 10 readers in the begginning (or around 300 now), it is thrilling to know that out there in the world there are people who care about what I write and that somehow they can benefit from my stories. This often made me feel a little famous and useful.

I want to thank all of you for stopping by and giving me your most precious gift which is time.

Once you travel far enough to be away for time enough to feel a big change, it´s just hard to go back home. Especially if you started to feel that the new place was home too and that back home is a weird combination of words.

It´s been 4 months since my 5-year old and I are back in Brazil after spending 1,5 years in Costa Rica, and finally I´m starting to feel more like home again.

I´m slowly thinking less obsesively about traveling again. A month ago, I was still checking flights24.com to go to Costa Rica and Chile and imagining ways to raise the money to leave again.

I kept thinking how from the northeast of Brazil I should get to the Caribbean by sea. And it´s too bad that it´s more expensive to travel by cargo ship  than flying. Basically, I need 1000 dollars a head to fly and would need 1200 dollars (a head) to go by cargo ship and take 12 days more instead.

I found it really hard to adapt back home. Luísa got super attached to me during this transition and I wasn´t having much support to have us appart a few hours a week to have some time for myself. And it was tough to think of not seeing my good friends from Costa Rica anytime soon.

It´s probably having her back at school for 4 hours in the afternoons that made me more relaxed and with time to spend on work and fun on my own.

The problem with going home is that the place we left felt like home too. I miss Costa Rica a lot and still hear once in a while Luísa tell me that she wants to go back there.

I miss her Waldorf kindergarten, but luckly, Luísa has been really enjoying her local kindergarten, always ready to go there without complainning and coming back home singing happily.

I also got used to making new friends on the road and found it difficult to make new friends in a place where I already know a lot of the people, even though I am  close to a few of them. Going back to things as they were is quite strange.

But after a coupple of months feeling torn appart about where to be and live, I decided to put my thoughts and energy in the new-old place of mine. I managed to make new friends and make plans for work in the high season of my touristy town. Luckily we have a new neighboor that has a horse (with Luísa  in the picture in our yard).

I was frustrated that I had to stop the Salsa classes in Costa Rica I found before leaving, but now the dancing gap has been fully replaced with hip hop classes and surf more often.

So, the problem with going home was about not accepting the change I had decided for myself. But now, I am fully commited to make our old place a new place (growing my own food is definitely a big advantage of being in one place still and quit the moving around) and for now, Costa Rica will remain as place to visit when the right time comes.

It´s time I change strategies around my 5-year old. I have to admit to myself that whatever I´m doing in the way I´m parenting, it´s not working to make me an authority  (in the pic you can see her attitude caught on camera when she was 3). I can´t get my daughter to accept sharing my attention with other people, for example.

There are many valid reasons for this to happen: I´m a newbie at taking care of a kid (I only held a baby for the first time when I was pregnant and I simply was never around any kid before), I´m very soft and easy to bend in any relationship (it pisses me off my ability to be submissive), and the strongest one must be the fact that I´m really doing it all by myself (no family nearby, and changing countries twice in five years didn´t help much in the support system department).

So, I do have some excuses to be a lousy, permissive mom, but I´m not going to settle for them. I decided I have a last chance to enhance my influence on this kid right now. I only have 1,5 years till she´s 7, and that´s basically when our influence as parents cease dramatically.

Let me get more specific here. My kid seems much smarter than me when she wants something, like being held. She is so good at bluffing, she knows the right face that will bend me. I caught her a few times doing this: she made this face, I picked her up and then I saw her smiling mischievously behind my shoulder. I even called her on her act and she confirmed what she just did.

She can get my attention so easily. She not only knows how to do it because she is smart, but truth be told, I trained her this way. She is simply used to getting me away from anything to attend her. So, it´s up to me to change this and not blame her for our situation.

I talked to a good friend about this. One that I can ask an opinion that is not to punish my daughter. I specifically asked: ¨What can I do to stop her, that is not punishing her?¨

I asked for an intervention, because sometimes you do need an outside perspective to see what´s going on. It was to a friend, who has 2 single daughters (she had one daughter and after 13 years, she had another one) and thus has know-how in single girls.

She agreed that I had a problem going on, but tough I was a bit desperate thinking that now I have extra work undoing some of the things that I´ve been doing naturally (Shit, do I have to stop being me?), she calmed me down by saying that it´s going to be easier than I think, that my daughter is intelligent enough (what kid isn´t?) to adjust to the change, if I really do change in some details.

The main thing I have to do is to not play a certain situation in the same way every time. You might need to think about mixing up your game too, especially if like me, your game is all about giving what your child wants (and not what she needs, like Jesper Jull talks about in his book Your Competent Child).

It looks like I´ve been using the same old strategy every time (or none, just my natural way that doesn´t work), so my daughter can expect the same behavior coming from me (namely, she knows how far her whining has to go to make me act in the way she wants).

I like to justify myself by saying that I can´t be playful at all times I just need her to do what I need her to do. I´m not the most natural playful parent. So, ok, I won´t become a clown, but I can do it at times, and not be mad and whine myself when she doesn´t do what I expect her to. I can mix that natural reaction of mine with times in which I pretend to not care about what she´s doing to catch my attention and get busy with something else.

More action and less words is what I need. Keep washing the dishes, watering the plants or working instead of dropping anything to see what she wants. It sounds easy, but it takes a lot of focus to do this.

Being firm and sticking to it is one of the most logical parenting advice you can think of, but doing it can be quite hard for me. I hardly realize that I´m putting myself in second place every time, or that I´m spoiling her by not letting her wait enough for me to be ready for her.

If you asked parents of spoiled children what they do to spoil their children, they´d feel offended. No one thinks they are spoiling their children, and yet, many of us are doing exactly that.

Have you ever thought about how you spoil your children and what to do to stop it?

I really like the unschooling path and I want to be there one day. But my reality shows it´s not the best option for now.

After 2 months being back home from Costa Rica, we didn´t make any new steady friends and I realized it was harder than I thought, since all kids are in school.

My 5-year old girl can play with 2 boys that are sons of two of my friends. But it´s not very frequent that we meet them and so Luísa was left without kids for many days in a row.

She seemed perfect fine with this. She never wants to leave my side and wasn´t keen on the idea of going to school.

We live in a house a bit far from downtown and we have no neighbors, so it´s a pity that she can´t go and find kids in our street. Playing with other kids involve my full commitment.

I want her to be with kids every day, or almost every day. So I had to decide fast if I wanted to give it a go at the local private school before the school year ends in December.

I also was having no time for myself, or for work. Before coming back to Brazil, I thought I´d hire someone to watch her a few days a week, but it just doesn´t make any sense to have a babysitter with no kids around.  Plus it would cost more than school. And since all kids are in school, she would be with another adult most of the time.

She was also watching way more videos at home. Too much for me to bear. And it´s always hard to turn it off. Even though I wrote about letting go of control around TV and sweets, I can´t watch her watching TV for hours. I prefer her going to school then.

School as a way to meet kids

She is back to school, with the main motivation of making friends. It will be only for 3 months this year before they have 2 months of summer vacation. And I thought that it´s best that she can hang out with the school kids before the break, so it´s more likely that she can make friends that she will be seeing during school break.

Back in Costa Rica, where we spent one year and half, we made lots of friends. All of them from school. I guess we wouldn´t have made so many friends so quikly if it wasn´t for school.

This is her second week there already. At first she didn´t want to go at all. She was refusing the idea with all her might.

I kept telling her that she was going to make friends and play and do stuff that could be very interesting for her. I said I needed her in school. I was firm about it and when the time came and I said: ¨Let´s go¨, she went straight to her shoes without resisting and her body made a happy move, like a dance. She was actually enjoying the idea and I felt much more relaxed about it all.

I know schools are not for socialization, even though parents love saying so. In the classroom, they are not supposed to be playing freely and talking to their friends, they are supposed to follow the activity. But for a kindergarten, there´s still room for playing.

She started writing the first day she got there

She told me she wrote her name down. The second day, she said she didn´t want to do letters anymore, because it made her tired.

After all that I read on Waldorf education about teaching kids to read and write before the age of 7 being bad and after all the freedom that I saw the kids had in her kinder in Costa Rica, I felt a bit anxious.

I asked the principal to not push this on her, and she talked to the teacher, so for now, Luísa is a bit more free when the class sits to do letters, unless she wants to join them.

The principal was very cool about it all, about me being uncomfortable with the writing and the different structure that Luísa would be in. She made me feel relaxed with the flexibility she offered me (like leaving Luísa for less hours in school, if I wanted).

Luísa still says she doesn´t want to go. But she puts her clothes on quite fast for someone not wanting to go. And she is pretty happy when I pick her up.

I still imagine her in the future staying home and doing what she likes and having friends come over or go to friend´s houses. But for now we are back in school and this is good.

Photo Credit

As I mentioned in The worst apointement at the dentist, my story with helping my 5-year old with bushing teeth is not great. I couldn´t make it fun, or a simple thing we just do or anything pleasant.

After the horror story at the dentist, my daughter was doing it quite frequently twice a day. It helped a lot that at the time, we were sharing a house with another single mom and her 5-year old, because the girls would do it together most of the time.

However, after we took off from Costa Rica and were going from house to house for a month, something happened and Luísa started skipping it the more that she could again.

I navigate between the ways of helping her with it. Sometimes I´m nice, sometimes I´m ugly, meaning I make a big scene over how important it is and how she is not doing it.

Here is a link full of gentle suggestions to try with your kid (my next move is to buy an electric tooth brush, which I did in the past and worked).

Yelling at your kid for it just makes it worse. I know it well. I had my last yelling about it with my daughter. I got so pissed off that she wasn´t brushing and I tried to force it on her.

I yelled, I tried opening her mouth, I squeezed her cheecks so hard that later she told me they still hurt. It didn’t work. My daughter only cried and looked really scared.

Nothing was making her brush her teeth (damn, she could be a spy one day, she would never reveal any secret, not even under torture, I tested her will myself).

I came to my senses, I left the room, then I came back recovered and apologized and told her I was sorry I scared her and I promised I would never try to make her brush her teeth scaring her like that again.

I felt so bad. that I made her a I´m sorry note. She was plased to find this in the morning:

Then I started a new calendar with a 30-day challenge, this time it´s about not committing any kind of aggression (while the first challenge was about not yelling).

I thought about it and decided that the best thing to do would be to drop the subject completely for at least a week. It was hard to make her brush her teeth, but after my anger attack, it was probably harder.

Now we had to heal from this episode and I had to heal from my anxiety about it (lots of reading on this forum helps). A good thing was that in a few days we were going to receive one of my best friends to stay over for 3 weeks and I asked my friend to help me with this and more. I specifically asked her to be the one in charge of tooth brushing while she was here.

The morning after my attack, I went with Luísa to a grocery store and she came to me with this tooth paste asking if we could buy it. It´s been 6 months that we don´t use commercial tooth paste. We either use baking soda or just water because of the things I read about fluoride (go and research it if you are curious).

So I read ¨no fluoride¨, and I said that it was ok to buy that.

To my astonishment, as soon as we entered our house, she ran to brush her teeth with the new tooth paste. Was this a present from above?

The next 3 days she was happily using her new tooth paste by herself. I think that she sensed my sincerity in telling her I wouldn´t bother her anymore. She was happy with her new thing and didn´t have to worry about me (moms can be such a pain).

She even came running after me one morning when I was brushing my teeth and said all cheerful: ¨Me too!¨

Then, my friend came and since then, they have been brushing their teeth together every day. It´s been like a vacation from the topic for me. And it´s been 12 days in my new calendar of no aggression of any kind. It´s sure easier with someone else in the house. I just hope this lasts. I don´t want to regress on how to deal with this.

My kid is 5 years old, so I know it´s somehow ridiculous to call unschooling the fact that she is not attending kindergarten right now.

However, when you think of school as the primary place for kids to spend a part of their day away from the parents, than what we are doing is unschooling, because rigth now, my daughter doesn´t go to any institution or day care.

Why would I want her home?

First, we just left a Waldorf kindergarten in Costa Rica. There´s no way back to traditional schooling and there´s nothing like that in  our small town in Brazil. It was just kindergarten, there was no curriculum involved. And yet, the free play and all the respect for the child´s choices were there. The room for rest was there too. The whole approach to the children was very holistic and personal.

Second, I´ve been reading about unschooling for 2 years now. It looks that play is what matters in childhood and school spoils that. And if I want to give unschooling a try during the school years, once she turns 6-7 and has to be officially enrolled in school (it´s sort of illegal to homeschool in Brazil), I have to figure out how to be with her for most of the time now.

Third is that I want to spend the mornings with my daughter. I enjoy her company in the morning the best. I´m not willing to stay away from her in the freshest most beautiful hours of the day. I want to remember waking up with my 5-year old with no rush.

How can I do it? (economicaly speaking)

Thankfully I own my house, I´ll rent a room soon and I work a bit online. I´ll give some Portuguese lessons and have Luísa stay at a friend´s house when I have to. I spend money minimally and I´m starting my own vegetable garden.

Can I do it? (technically speaking)

It´s frightening to have the only kid in town that doesn’t go to school. I learned to tell people that I´m interested in homeschooling and that I´m trying it out.
Some people get annoyed. A friend asked: ¨But are you doing any homeschooling with her at all?¨ So I said:¨Yes, I sit on the floor and play  with her a lot¨, I replied, ¨She´s only 5.¨

But I learned a better answer, I can talk about my curriculum with Luísa: languages, swimming and growing a vegetable garden.

For socialization, she gets to play with our 5-year old neighbor a lot and other children here and there.

It´s been only one month. I plan month by month (going for another now). I might still enroll her in the local kindergarten if I think it will be the best. But for now, it´s really great that we can spend our time together like this.

Is this the best for my daughter?

I wonder about this ALL THE FREAKING TIME. For now, absolutely yes, it´s the best. We are still transitioning from a life in Costa Rica with the Waldorf kindergarten and lots of girlfriends in her life to our house in Brazil, where it´s like getting to a new place and we need to make new friends.

It´s best that now we find our rythim in this new place together. We start our vegetable garden together, stablish new eating habits, visit friends and develop a new routine.

I´m skeptical about school

After all that I read about the agenda behind schooling and how best it is to have a child led learning  (impossible in a traditional school), I don´t feel comfortable sending her.

Yet, the local school is quite ok. Luísa would be put in a group with around 17 kids (4-5 year olds) that stay for 3 hours in a classroom and 1 hour outside playing. I don´t like this math. If it was the opposite: 3 hours playing and 1 hour in a classroom, I´d like it more.

What if she wants to go?

One day, Luísa was asking to visit two of her friends and I told her they were in school. She ssemed interested, so I offered to bring her for a visit. And we went to check out the afternoon group.

The 4-5 year old kids were sitting in a circle in the class. One wall had a poster with the Alphabet and the teacher had another one with numbers. They were counting till 20.

The teacher and the assistant spent a lot of effort making sure the kids learned the numbers and didn´t start chatting or playing away.

I´m sure that´s not all the teacher teaches there. I know they sing a lot and play games too. In fact, another mom complained that when she saw the class they were ¨just playing with play-doh and not learning anything¨ But 20-30 minutes invested in couting till 20 seemed too much for me. I´m happy Luísa gets to play and do whatever she wants for a while longer (or a lot longer if we stick to unschooling).

Luísa wasn´t keen on staying there. She never mentioned school again.

I´m open to it though. I think unshcooling is the best for now, but I could send her to school (while it´s still kindergarten), even though they teach letters to 4 and 5 year olds.

I´d like her not to learn traditionally to read and write before she is 7. This is coming from our Waldorf background, where reading before the age of 7 (or before teeth start to fall off) is discouraged.

There´s a lot of philosophy  behind this. Very shortly I dare to say that it´s about leaving the children to build their bodies and use all their strength in it, while early reading or early intellectualization can steal the strength of the early years that should be used in growing the physical body.

As for an unschooling inspiration, there are tons of stories on how it´s best to let a child learn to read on her own (or with help) once she is interested in it. You don´t need to teach reading. There´s no need in pushing this, just the same way as there´s no need in pushing a child to learn to walk or talk.

If my daughter is interested in it, than I´ll help her out, but if not, we can just wait. We might wait for the curiosity to hit her or just another coupple of months if staying home with her doesn´t work well. In this case, I´ll put up with the stuffing of knowledge in her mind and send her to school.

We could also use school to make more friends, so we can arrange more playdates. I´m still considering our choices, but right now, having her with me is working just fine.

It´s a real priviledge to spend time with my daughter and I´m really enjoying it (even though sometimes we go through an excess of that ).

Photo Credit

I had two couple of friends coming to visit from Chile.

They were eager to meet my 5-year old, and I could take the chance to meet them first and tell them a little about how to deal with her.

¨She doesn´t like to be called a princess, beautiful, or ugly. She doesn´t like any attention from strangers. She won´t say hello or goodbye, I´m sorry if she looks uneducated at first, she is just really sensible to meeting new people. Don´t even think about touching her¨.

They understood, as they are parents of grown children and had their own stories on the matter.

Then, we picked Luísa up and went for a pizza. As expected, Luísa didn´t talkt to them or look at them much. When she asked for the salt and one of them passed it, she said in a low voice: ¨Mom, I asked YOU for the salt¨.  Usually, she won´t take anything from a stranger´s hand.

My friend apologized: ¨I´m sorry, I won´t bother you anymore.¨

It was a pleasant night, and soon Luísa was sleeping in my lap.

The next day we spent with them, Luísa was already much more friendly. She played with them all, swam with them and then whispered in my ear: ¨Can we invite them to our house?¨

These friends of mine gave her space. They didn´t expect her to behave nicely and say hello. They respected her in a way that not most adults do.

Dealing with people who like to handle children

In Brazil it´s really common that people come to your house when you have a new born and ask to ¨hold it¨. I wasn´t much into that.

My daughter was a very social baby, but now, as she´s five, she simply won´t let anyone touch her. Every time we take the local bus and someone grabs her hand to help her get up or down, she will either yell at them and or stick her tongue out.

I try my best to prevent any of these interactions to happen. And when we are in the street and I talk to someone new to her, I put my hand between her and the stranger trying to touch her head and say ¨She doesn´t like to be touched¨.

If it´s the ¨You are so beautiful¨ approach the stranger tries on her, I learned with this group to say ¨She´s a cat, not a princess¨, this makes the situation get funny (even she can smile) and she´s allowed to growl, because she´s a cat. It´s brilliant.

It´s a good thing that I´m on her side. It´s annoying to have her yell at people and I felt like punishing her for it  because I don´t want to tolerate it. But punishing her would be like getting revenge, it would have no valuable teaching.

The strangers to be avoided from yesterday are the new friends of today:

I try to prevent shocks and I apologize to people if she is rude. I talk to her about how better she could deal with it afterwards. Sometimes I get pissed off, sometimes I´m calm about this.

We have to be even more diligent in protecting our babies boundaries, when they are very young, for as Janet Lansbury puts it in this article:

¨The younger the person, the less able they are to say “no”, glare at us disapprovingly, or push us away. Young children are especially incapable of indicating more subtle discomfort. “That doesn’t feel good. That tickles. Please don’t, I don’t know you yet. You interrupted me.”

Some believe it’s okay for babies and toddlers to be swooped up, “loved up” (as one parent put it), thrown up in the air, tickled, rough-housed, pushed down slides, etc. Yes, they might seem to enjoy those things. When we’re smiling and laughing, our babies want to mirror this, and they are the very best sports we’ll ever find. They’re all about trust.

But don’t we want to ensure their security, self-confidence, respect for their boundaries and those of others? ¨

A while ago, back in Costa Rica, Luísa had to avoid white sugar to get rid of a skin condition.

It was the first time in my life I had to give up sugar as well (as I joined her needed sugar free diet)

We started eating healthy cookies and my 5-year old was ok with it. We would skip the diet once in a while (probably a few times a week).

Since then, we were still eating sweets out of the house, I just thought it was wise not to have it available in the house.

Now that she can have sugar again, we´ve been having it almost daily again (when we are out).

I was always saying no to sweet requests at the grocery store. ¨I know better for her health¨.

But I think I was encouraging her into more craving for sweets by making it scarce.

Some posts on Always Leanring Yahoo Group made me think more about this.This article: Moving Toward Less Control, Concerning Food has some exerpts from the forum. Like this comment:

¨I just can’t feel ok about that….it makes me so angry….I am not willing to subject my children…

If you go back through this [topic] and count the number of posts that are about the mom and how SHE feels vs. those about the kids and any problems they appear to be having, it is difficult to believe that the tv issue is about the the kids.

I used to be a tv controller, diet controller, behavior and thought controller (at least I thought I was). I was trained as a child psychologist….my poor kids *sigh*. I no longer go with that philosophy and have witnessed with my own eyes that limiting is the problem, not the solution.

You don’t even have to have “smart kids” for them to effectively self- regulate. Gee whiz, our dogs do it. We have two dogs that were raised in a suburban back yard. We now live on several acres, still anytime the gate is left open, those dogs take off and are gone for hours. We have two dogs that were raised on our front porch without any fencing. They never leave our yard. If a dog can figure it out, I think a child has a pretty good shot. ¨

My daughter was always after it at others houses and out in the street. It was annoying.

I decided to let the sugar come in the house. And she can have it anytime. It´s just me and her, and I can adjust our big meals in between her snacks…

What I realized instantly is that I have a much bigger issue with sugar than I could think of. It´s me who cannot control myself when a pack of cookies is opened, I´m not satisfied until I see the end of it.

My daughter, as I could observe, will eat a coupple of cookies and be fine with it.

I talk to her about my whole learning about food with her and how we can improve our diet together. She´s keen on it.

Until when is it going to be my house my rules?

We were having dinner. She said she wanted another tomato, she got up and went to the fridge. When she opened it, she saw this yogurt and cheered with happiness. I barked something about her not having any, because of dinner first and no more liquids before bedtime.

She closed the fridge and sat on a carpet. She sais she wasn´t going to eat anything anymore. She looked very upset. I screwed her meal time.

I felt bad, but even worse for thinking about the so many times I controlled her visit to the fridge like a fridge-protector police against expected childish reactions.

Parents often are like an evil police against our children´s wills and most natural desires. If we look more closely to our daily interactions, we can catch ourselves doing it and hopefuly stop it.

The next night, when she opened the fridge and saw the the yogurt, she contained herself. She said; ¨Oh oh, there´s something here that I want but can´t have¨.

I said: ¨It´s ok if you want to have it. You are talking about the yogurt, rigth? I´m sorry for making you feel bad yesterday when you wanted it. I´ll stop controling everything you eat.¨

I realized with some days that she keeps asking me if she can eat this or that, and often I wonder: ¨Why is she asking me that, of course she can eat that.¨

Then I realized that what has been going on is that she asks for permission to eat. I trained her this way. Maybe it´s not as bad as it sounds now, but as little as this oppression has been happening, it´s way passed time to stop it.

I´m stopping it.

TV-Screen Watching – Same as eating sweets

No matter how much I´d love Luísa not to watch TV, or any screen (in our house I call TV the computer with internet connection and DVDs), she likes it.

This is something that was bothering me about being back to Brazil. Most of our friends in Costa Rica didn´t have TVs, so she was way less exposed there. Here, she watches a lot more at our friend´s houses and this makes her want to watch it more at our home too.

But if I make it scarce, I help her crave more for it. Here is an article talking about how ¨restricting tv-watching time causes children to become extremely strongly attracted to it and to value tv-watching above other, nonrestricted, activities¨

So, anytime she asks for it, I let her watch it. If I want to get her out of it, I come up with something cooler to do outside the house and it works out.

Even if you are a liberal parent, or permissive, chances are that in the eyes of your child, you can be pretty hard core mean too.

How many things, details, can you watch and let go of control?

For me, right now, is letting her eat sweets and watch more TV. I still want to control these things, damn, but I think more on invitations to do better stuff, like baking our own cookies and selecting movies I like to watch 100 times as well.

Here is another good article to help you let go of control: How to let go of hyperparenting and learn to relax with your kids.

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I spent 10 days with my family in São Paulo. Besides the bonding with my loved ones, there were some very negative aspects of our immersion in the big city.

The most negative thing is the TV (protagonist thing in most living rooms). In my dad´s house, my 5-year old watched a lot of TV.

One day, my girl was watching TV and my dad and his girlfriend invited us to go to see Madagascar 3 (3D) at the mall. I felt stressed inside. First it was my bad memories of being in a mall on a Saturday night, but also it was a lot of screen watching already that day and now we were off to the movies (her first time) just before bedtime. It was sweet from my dad to take his granddaughter out anyway.

Before the movie started, there was a small clip for 3D effects show. Three characters in a white background were singing while another one was annoying the others. Finally, one of the singing characters punched the annoying one really hard on the head throwing it away. Part of the theater laughed at it. It was supposed to be funny, to see that violence display made for kids (things like this make me believe there´s an evil hidden agenda on what´s on for kids).

Madagascar 3 is improper for young kids. There should be a warning about it. It was too much persecution and too fast action and what shocked me the most was the guns showing up in the first 20 minutes. There were policemen (I can´t remember now if they had guns on them, but I guess so) and the bad guy on this movie is this policewoman that chases the animals with a tranquilizer in hand, but it´s a gun none the less and I don´t think my kid could fathom that it wasn´t a killing gun.

I was horrified at the whole thing, and luckily, my daughter felt scared of the evil character and couldn´t watch any longer (30 minutes was nightmare inspiring enough).

If you let your kid watch TV, you might know that Sponge Bob is improper for preschool-age children. A study on fast paced cartoons done last year  designed to assess what is known as children’s executive function, which underlies attention, working memory, problem-solving and the delay of gratification showed that “the children who watched the cartoon were operating at half the capacity compared to other children,” (this is an invitation to what will be labeled later as ADHD).

I know this, my kid goes through weeks without a single video and still I let her watch it. Once you have the TV on and you are minding your own business, you are not there censuring all the shit that Discovery Kids (my daughter´s favorite) or Cartoon Network or whatever channel has to offer. And even if you avoid Sponge Bob, the same problem happens with other fast-paced cartoons.

Plus there is the advertisement of all kind of silly and useless toys (especially the electronic ones that can play alone). Only after watching the movie, I noticed that McDonalds advertises it´s happy meal with the Madagascar characters as gifts. My girl has never been to McDonalds (yet).

I also learned recently, through friends, that Scooby Doo makes little ones have nightmares and fears at night for weeks, some families start co-sleeping after Scooby Doo was watched a few times.

It´s hard for little kids to process what´s watched on the screen and this triggers a lot of acting out. Many will be punished for their misbehavior.

After leaving the movie theater, we went for food in the mall. My daughter was feeling very upset about the movie experience, and after 5 minutes out of it she wanted to go back there, so then she was frustrated because I wouldn´t take her back in there. There was also the overstimulation a mall can give (too many bright colors, too much noise, too many people and no fresh air), and she was very clingy and annoying.

I could understand the source of that behavior, but my dad was labeling her ¨spoilled¨ for wanting to be held.

I had to deal with her going wild on me for the next one hour and a half. It was freaking hard to not lose my cool, in our room, while in the living room my dad and his girlfriend watched some more TV.

It´s so good to be back to our home, where without a TV, we often go to the roof to watch the stars before going to bed. That´s my favorite channel!

I was in São Paulo, Brazil, where my family lives for 10 days. The very first day I got there, I went to the mall with my sister to look for a coat for my 5-year old. After trying out some clothes and shoes, it was time to go.

My daughter didn´t want to put her shoes on, she wanted to be barefoot. I let her.

My sister tells me horrified: ¨You are not going to let her walk barefoot here, she can´t!¨

¨Why not? The floors here are almost cleaner than in my house¨.

I hope she doesn´t step on something disgusting, I couldn´t see anything on that floor dangerous.

Then my sister said: ¨If she does it, then my daughter will imitate her¨.

Fair enough, her 3-year old could do it and I was afraid of my sister´s reaction, so I took my kid aside and told her: ¨Please, put your shoes on, otherwise your cousin will copy you and her mom doesn´t let her¨. Luckily, she cooperated.

When my daughter was 2,5 years old, I had the same argument with a boyfriend.

We were in Santiago, Chile and it was my daughter´s first time using closed shoes. We went out one morning and she took them off. I tried to make her wear them, we were in the street, but she wouldn´t and so I let her (Santiago’s streets downtown are amazingly clean, not that I was comfortable with it, I just saw there was no point in forbidding it).

My boyfriend went crazy about it. He wanted me to make her use her shoes. He couldn´t imagine a child walking barefoot in the city. We argued and I told him he could try to convince her himself. He didn´t.

We were on our way to a Montessori kindergarten, where my daughter would go for a month and the teacher was fine with it. It wasn´t a problem that Luísa was the only barefoot child in the group and when I picked her up, she was wearing her shoes and didn´t complain about using them anymore.

In both situations, it was cold. I was bothered about the cold. But heck, I know my daughter won´t be feeling cold for long before she herself decides to be warm.

I think that both my sister and my boyfriend were more concerned about what people would think than in any danger of walking barefoot (even though believing it was all about safety and health).

Maybe they were also worried that if I let her do it, then she will feel that she can do anything else (as in any type of breaking rules that she can think of. Is it really a bad thing?)

There are other expected behaviors in our society that I´m more worried about breaking than in following. I wish that more kids were allowed to walk barefoot or to decide on things that concern their own bodies more often.

São Paulo: 20 million people, 7 million cars

¨Put your coat on¨, for instance.

I say that to my daughter, but in more like a hope that she will do what would make me feel good about how she is dressed.

She often says no. And I remind her that I have the coat if she wants it later (wich she takes, later). Lately, I´ve been thinking that reminding her that I have the coat is so silly, because she can see that I have it.

People around me told me to make her have her coat on at times. I felt bad saying what seemed so simple: ¨If she feels cold, she will put her coat on¨.

So many useless fights go on every day with our children around absurd things like guessing that they are cold, when they are not, or doing what everybody else is doing.