The thing started spontaneously. A few times I had committed myself  to ¨not yelling just for today¨, which gives great results. Then a few times, it was: ¨Wow, 3 days in a row without screaming!¨ But then I´d forget about it.

Last week though, I had a quote from A.S. Neill stuck in my head: ¨Compulsive discipline always implies fear¨ (I don´t want my daughter to de afraid of me, so that I get something done or cleaned), plus learning what self-regulation means, when during a 2-days in a row without screaming I read Jennifer´s post: Do you scare your kids? Do you think they deserve it?  which talks basically about self-regulation and the adult´s need to learn it before expecting if from a child.

All the latest readings I had done were simply calling me to action: Self-regulate yourself for Christ-Sake!

And so I had the idea of the 30-days-without-yelling challenge for myself as a way to make the change happen. And then I read this post from Leo Battuta that talks about how when you want to form a new habit you have to tell other people about it and so I decided to make it public, first on Face Book and now here on the blog.

I´m  in my 9th day. It´s unbelievable! I know my routine this month is sort vacation like with minimum work (it´s my last month in the Caribbean of Costa Rica before going back to Brazil), so I get how this might be easier than for a full on working mom.

Staying with your kid every day can also add some challenge to the thing. Being a stay at home mom is not exactly the easiest task.  I only have the kindergarten hours to be by myself, which are great, I know.

Ok, I did slip on the 4th day. I started to yell and Luísa called me on that one and I stopped right then. Maybe I´m cheating, maybe I should start counting again from day 5 and so I´d be only on day 5 again. But I´ll keep in mind the slips, hopefully they´ll be minimum.

Hopefully just that one on day 4, when I realized right away that my reason to yell wasn´t exactly Luísa being slow to get out of the house, it was me being anxious to be on time somewhere, it was then my responsibility to have started getting ready with time. See? It´s quite easy to see what´s really going on when you yell at your kid if you focus on why are you are yelling. You can realize that it´s not really the kid´s behavior, but you that are going off limits.

It´s been really helpful to set the intention in the morning: ¨Today I won´t yell at my kid!¨.  And telling it to other people as well. I am actually quite proud that´s been 9 days and I´m envisioning myself not yelling at all from now on.  It´s starting with this 30-day challenge, but once I reach this goal, I´ll go for way more than 30 days.

I also tell Luísa what I´m doing and it felt fantastic when I was coloring my calendar last night and she asked what I was doing and I said: ¨All the days painted in blue are the ones I didn´t yell at you. Let´s count together: one, two… eight!¨ She did have a smile on her face.

My daughter is already 5 and I guess I started the abusive behavior when she was 2 (hopefully not before that…). I want to make this stop now. She´ll only be this little once and I want to be aware and treat my precious little one the way she deserves: with plenty of kindness.

Anyway, I hope this inspires you to try this too. I´ll update on how this is going here and on Face Book.

If you want to share your own triggers and how you do it here, be my guest. If you want to keep it for yourself, fine too (tell at least one close friend).

Good luck for us!

Photo Credit

Summerhill School in Suffolk, England

The book Summerhill School – A New View to Childhood tells the experience and observations of  A.S. Neill running a free school in Suffolk, England for fifty years. The book was originally written in 1960, when Neill was 88-years old. It´s amazing to see the story of a school that was founded in 1921 on revolutionary principles for today.

When Neil died in 1973, his wife Ena took on the school for 12 years. The school is now run by their daughter Zoe.

The pupils are free to attend classes whenever they want. The kids can play for days, weeks or years. There´s freedom from any indoctrination, whether religious or moral or political and freedom from moulding. And the pupils and staff self govern the school through weekly meetings.

Neill admits some problems the school had too, bullying being the main one. He tells a few times how he would have liked to not take in problem-children that could disrupt the harmony of the younger simply because he knew that the problem-child would have no other better school (that could do him some good) to go to.

Things are different now. Children can only enroll before they are 12.

¨The goal of Summerhill was to use childhood and adolescence to create emotional wholeness and personal strength. Neill thought that once this wholeness had been achieved children would be self-motivated to learn what they needed academically. The key to this growth was to give children freedom to play for as long as they felt the need in an atmosphere ‘of approval and love. The children were given freedom, but not license, they could do as they pleased, as long as it didn´t bother anyone else.¨ (from the editor´s introduction)

It is common that pupils among 10-12 year olds, stay away from classes most of the time. It´s hard to imagine a child not in a class at that age, isn´t? Today, there some free schools in the world, like Sudbury Valley School in the USA but none near anywhere I lived…  I think main idea of a free childhood remains mostly among homeschoolers and unschoolers.

Although there´s something that homeschoolers can´t give to their children which is to live among many other children, like in a very big family.

In the book, Neill talks a lot of how important it is to let children self-regulate themselves, and now I want to leave you with some quotes I selected:

¨Self-regulation implies a belief in human nature, a belief that there is not, and never was, original sin. Self-regulation means the right of a baby to live freely without outside authority. It means the baby feeds when its hungry, that it becomes clean in habits only when it wants to, that it is never stormed at nor spanked, that it shall always be loved and protected. Of course, self-regulation, like any theoretical idea, is dangerous if not combined with common sense¨.

¨Self-regulation means behavior coming from the self, not from outside compulsion¨.

¨There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong, he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his own wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother´s encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother.¨

¨The happiest homes I know are those in which the parents are frankly honest to their children without moralizing. Fear does not enter these homes. Love can thrive. In other homes, love is crushed by fear. Pretentious dignity and demanded respect hold love aloof. Compelled respect always implies fear.¨

¨We do not mould children in any way, we do not try to convert them to anything. If there is such a thing as sin it is the propensity of adults to tell the young how to live, a preposterous propensity seeing that adults do not know themselves how to live¨.

¨I have said it many times and say it again that you cannot teach anything of importance. Maths, English, Science, yes, but no charity, love, sincerity, balance, or tolerance.¨

¨Most of my work seems to consist of correcting parental mistakes. I feel both sympathy and admiration for the parents who honestly see the mistakes they have made in the past and who try to learn how best to treat their child. But other parents, strangely enough, would rather stick to a code that is useless and dangerous than to try to adapt themselves to the child.¨

¨… In heaven´s name what does it matter if Tommy sits down to eat a meal with unwashed hands? It matters in America where the nation is germ mad, it matters in suburbs where cleaningless is considered to be quite a long way ahead of godliness. By continually correcting children we must make them feel inferior and we injure their natural dignity¨.

Talking about Homer Lane, who Neill repeatedly says was the biggest influence on him:

¨That night he showed me the solution that the only way was to be, as he phrased it, ´on the side of the child´. It meant abolishing all punishments and fear and external discipline, it meant trusting children to grow in their own way without any pressure from outside, save that of communal self-government. It meant putting learning in its place – below living. As a schoolmaster I had used knowledge as the criterion of success. Lane showed me that emotions were infinitely more powerful and more vital than intellect¨

Talking about humanity and the world:

¨One evil of humanity is that we persist in telling children how to live. All our educational systems strive to mould them in the image of their elders, and the children in turn mould their children, and one result is a very sick world full of crime and hate and wars. The weight of this tradition is so heavy that only one man in a thousand can ever challenge or even want to challenge the morals and taboos of society. When such a challenger comes along, society will destroy him…¨

¨Our school´s chief function is to kill the life of children. Otherwise the Establishment would be powerless. Would millions of free men allow themselves to be sacrificed to causes they had no interest in and did not understand? Is the future of humanity one of slaves ruled by an élite of powerful masters?¨

¨But now let me be more optimistic. In fifty years of free children I have detected not only an absence of the competitive spirit, but also a total indifference to leaders. One can reason with free children but one cannot lead them. True, my pupils lived their own herd, but not with leadership¨

It´s getting time to go back home in Brazil. Before we leave, however, I still had to go and see a volcano with Luísa. I have a thing about volcanoes. We went to La fortuna to see the Arenal volcano for 3 days.

The secret to traveling nicely with children is to travel slowly. I took the first bus ride of 5 hours to San Jose and another 1-hour bus to a friend´s house for the night. The next morning, another 4,5 bus ride to our destination.

I had a couchsurfing friend to host us. When I was on my way, I called our tico host and he told me he wouldn´t be there till later at night, so there was a key for me.

Yeah, couchsurfing is that cool. Someone you have never met before might leave the keys to his house for you and then you find a room with clean sheets with a view to the volcano.

My host, that I met later at night, also worked at tour agency and I had couchsurfers´s discounted prices on every tour.

The next day, at 7.30, Luísa and I were on our way to see the Blue River (Rio Celeste). It´s where two volcanic rivers meet and they make this beauty happen:

Rio Celeste´s waterfall

Luísa walked 3 hours of our 4-hour hike. And I carried her for 1 hour on a piggy back ride – we are both fit!

The next morning, Luísa just wanted to hang out at our host´s garden. She called it ¨her secret place¨ and she almost didn´t want to leave it.

There was a lot of wisdom in her choice, she was playing in a circle of healing trees (noni, graviola, lime and orange).

Then, she agreed on going on another hike, this time around the Arenal volcano. She walked the whole easy 2-hour hike. For that second trail we went to see another waterfall, watch the sunset with the volcano and lake view and finish at natural hot springs at night.

We made friends in that hiking group too. At first, Luísa was tired and winy and didn´t want to walk, so she accepted when a French guy in our group offered to carry her (usually she won´t let people touch her like that, but it was a nice change).

Then she made friends with a Spanish guy and the rest of the hike, she was running up and down with her new found friend. At night, Luísa went straight to bed and I stayed talking with two other couchsurfers and our sweet host, who told us lots of stories about the tourism in town.

TV – I love you I hate you

On the way back to Puerto Viejo, we stopped for the night at a friend´s house. He had a nice couch with cable TV and WIFI. Him, me and our other friend would connect to our laptops while Luísa had unlimited TV time.

For a while, I was watching the 2012 Tsunami in Japan and recent volcano explosions in Italy with my friend, but then I would look at Luísa and I would watch her watching TV. It´s really spectacular to watch, how she won´t move her body, exept for her fingers. No kidding, that was more interesting to me than the Etna volcano spitting fire two weeks ago.

She watched TV for about 3 hours on Saturday and on Sunday another 4 hours before we took our 4,5 hour bus from San Jose to Puerto Viejo. And maybe I´m seeing what I want to see, but I think those hours in front of the TV made her mentally accelerated during the trip.

It was the first time that she didn´t nap on a bus ride. I, on the other hand, fell asleep a few times and she woke me up every single time, which made me mad at her.

Maybe she was mad at me for being mad at her waking me up, maybe it was the TV time, but she didn´t sit down and relax for more than 2 minutes straight. She was mostly standing up and for 1,5 hours straight she sang the same song that only has 4 verses.

I loved having the TV on for a little while, but still, I couldn´t accept my friend´s invitation to hang out for another night, because I couldn´t handle her watching more TV. She needed to play with kids, it had been one whole week among adults.

TV really sucks. Even if the cartoon or program is nice, like Steve Irvin´s documentaries, than you have all the Barbie butterfly or Barby Mermaid and shitty cereal commercials that the kid will nag about next time at the grocery store.

Thank goodness I live in small towns where we don´t get the Barbie Butterfly.

And the cereal shit… I had to say something about it. ¨Luísa, TV lies to you and gives you nonsense cravings. This cereal is actually really bad for you.¨

No fear of traveling with my young girl anymore

I used to be a bit terrified of being alone with her for too long, on trips or at home, but not now, but especially traveling alone which would make me scared shitless every single time.

The biggest disadvantage of traveling with a small child is never having a conversation with another adult without any pressure of time.

I´m so comfortable with Luísa now. It´s still super tiring to travel alone, I can´t ever read a book or relax for too long (10 minutes could be a high standard mark). Short trips are good like that though, when you are about to regret having taken off (like I had a sore throat the first night and thought it could be hell to go on a hike 10 hours away from home), you are soon back home and imagining how you would have spent another day in that place.

My 4-year old (she´s 5 in 4 days) is a professional traveler by now. She endures long bus rides, hikes, can sleep at anyone´s house and doesn´t miss home.

Before we go back to Brazil, we still want to go and check Poás volcano out. You only hike 1 hour from where the cars stop and it´s 1 hour near San Jose. So, we should do that right before taking our flight sometime during the Summer.

The French dude carrying Luísa.

This trip also made me promise to myself I´ll visit more of Brazil when I´m back there. It´s really crazy that I´ve been almost all over Costa Rica. And now I want to make other short trips like that near my home in Brazil.

What kind of place would you like to take your little one for a short trip, for about 3-5 nights?

My book of the moment is Unconditional Parenting (an affiliate link), by Alfie Kohn. Among so much good stuff, Kohn talks about the fact that to carry on with what he calls unconditional parenting, we are swimming against the tide.

One example of this that I can think of is how most parents make their children say ¨please¨, ¨thank you¨, ¨I`m sorry¨ and ¨good bye¨ and how this doesn´t help at all kids in feeling what´s behind those nice words.

There are actually effective ways to work with empathy with children, and you can find great advice about this on Aha Parenting, Good Job and Other Things and Essential Parenting blogs.

I used to feel embarrassed by not making my daughter say any of that. I never wanted to be a ventriloquist and I always wanted her to say those nice words as long as she feels them.

But it´s a fact that people around expect us to control our kids in ways that are not good for them (the children). Adults want us to make them behave very badly. This is a powerful societal force against mindful parenting, like Konn says:

¨It´s not permissiveness itself, but the fear of permissiveness that causes the most serious problems in our culture¨.

And I can relate to that statement as I acted differently around other adults, responding to their expectation rather than my child´s needs (especially because I´m also always fighting my own permissive pull). So I had my portion of demanding that my girl apologizes or thanks people.

But I quit the conventional wisdom around teaching kids good manners and I keep quiet if it feels the right thing to do. I thank things that are given to my child, for my own sake, I model behavior by doing what´s right and I ask her in her ear (not to embarrass her with out loud requests) if she would like to say something to this or that person, respecting her will.

But I´m actually guilty of trying to control her good manners too. Not only for a while I was saying the disrespectful ¨What do you say?¨, but even though I made myself stop that, I realized that sometimes I might want to model the good manners too much.

The other day when a friend gave my 4-year old a plate of food, I said  ¨thank you¨ in a way that was expecting Luísa to say it too,  like a reminder (and she did). As a reminder is not so bad.

But this left me wondering that if the motivation behind my thankfulness was more about giving Luísa a lesson, then a complete different lesson than I had on my agenda might have been what she got from it.

One could be exactly the one I want to avoid, that it doesn´t matter to feel what you say. And well, it´s also true that I want her to be polite out of pure reflex, but that can wait to happen.

Another lesson learned could be that I decide when she says those words.

I screw this up often. Sometimes I get pissed off at her at home when she doesn´t show me any appreciation for all the things I do for her, all the little favors. So I give her the old ¨I`m not your slave¨ shit that you might be familiar with and I resent her for not being nice to me (even though there are plenty of times that she is nice that I could focus on).

And with kids, what we say matters, but our intent matters way more than words. They can sense our intention, they can see through all our body language, tone of voice and gaze.

They can possibly somehow get our thoughts too. But if you don´t want to be very quantum about this subject, suffice is to say that as Kohn points out:

¨Even when parents don´t say outloud that the child must have acted as he did because he´s stupid or destructive or bad, it matters if they believe this is true. It´s not just the attributions we utter that matter, but the ones we make in our heads. Though we may never speak an unkind word about our children, assumptions about their motives invariably affect the way we treat them. The more negative those assumptions, the more inclined we´ll be to control them unnecessarily.¨

So, in assuming that our kids are not ready to be nice on their own, we feel like controlling them. And if you make your child say nice things to people, you are assuming that she wouldn´t do it otherwise, you are not giving her much chance.

I do this too, I assume bad motives behind my daughter´s acts or lack of kindness at times, and this is very destructive and it has to be stopped or at least diminished as much as possible.

I think we have a hard work to do. It´s about attributing the best motives for our kids not to say something, modeling sincerely how to behave and waiting for the best.

The waiting part is the most challenging, I know. It involves trusting that they´ll learn what they have to learn at their own pace.

And if that wasn´t enough, there´s also the hard core part: watching our own thoughts.

My story about my 4-year old brushing her teeth is bad. I couldn´t get her to brush or let me do it on a regular basis until recently. Given our mainstream diet, DNA and putting her to sleep after breastfeeding for 3 years without brushing teeth – key factors to getting cavities, the result is that she has now dealt with 6 cavities.

As one tooth started to hurt her, I took her to the dentist. She wasn´t keen on the idea, I can only imagine it was media, that made her afraid of the dentist.

There was one Pingu episode that came to my mind (it´s a penguin shivering at the thought of going to the dentist, even though later it all goes well). She saw it far too many times when she was 2-years old. I remember back then how it made me uncomfortable that she was watching it. But back then, when I bought the whole series for her, I needed the electronic babysitter for what I considered ¨just¨ one hour a day.

So I showed her this video (of a 4-year old kid relaxed through a cleaning) and it made her really excited about going. She said it looked like tickling and she wanted to do it.

The local dentist in our town asked me to take Luísa to a specialist – a dentist that works with children – in the city 2 hours away from our town (by bus) and so I did.

I called the specialist and made an appointment. I asked if she could convince 4-year olds to comply to being examined and she said yes.

¨Can you do it with many kids?¨

¨All of them¨.

¨Without force?¨

¨Yes, but you have to cooperate too, if I ask you to wait outside, you do it¨

¨Do you have a TV?¨

¨Yes.¨

I thought that the waiting outside was a bit odd, since I never left Luísa alone with a stranger before, but I wanted to believe it would be all fine.

We went there and the specialist started by bribing Luísa:

¨Luísa, come to watch a movie¨. She had asked me on the phone witch movie Luísa liked. Luísa was happy when she saw Madagascar on the lap top screen. Then Luísa sat on the chair and the specialist said: ¨I´ll give you two gifts if you do as I tell you¨. Luísa agreed.

I wasn´t comfortable with this method at all, but I thought it was ok to bribe her this once. I do it to cut her hair, which happens with a chocolate promise.

The specialist started well, she showed Luísa all the instruments. And she examined Luísa to find 6 cavities. One big one that hurt and 5 tiny.

The specialist told me: ¨Let´s just do the cleaning today¨.

I agreed.

But then, we made a bad decision (our worst decision came at the second appointment), we decided to treat the big cavity, since Luísa was doing so well, even smiling.

So the dentist asked her to close her eyes and then she gave her an injection with the anesthesia. Luísa got scared right away with the pain, but was still cooperating. The specialist gave her another injection that hurt and started working on the tooth. It hurt a lot. Luísa at this point didn´t want to go on, she was crying and scared and wanted to hold me.

I was hating it too. All that was told to Luísa was a painless cleaning and now we were doing the painful work without any warning, just on the assumption that the quickest we did it, the better.

Now the specialist gave Luísa one of the gifts and kept on working.

Things got bad because the anesthesia didn´t work right away. I think she got about 4-5 shots.

Luísa was horrified, didn´t want to be there, wanted to hold me as the specialist started to speak rough to her. The specialist warned me: ¨I´m sorry, I´m going to have to be hard on her¨ and then: ¨We learn this at the university¨ (she meant the coercion practice).

The specialist went on talking about the other gift. Luísa wasn´t having any of it. Luísa said she didn´t want any gift, she just wanted to never see her again.

The specialist asked me to leave the room so she could work. At that point, I knew my presence was making it harder for Luísa to bear everything, but at the thought of me leaving the room, Luísa got REALY scared.

We were in a hurry to make things happen. We had to persuade her, or more accurately intimidate her.

We tried again and nothing. The doctor once again asked me to ¨cooperate¨ by leaving the room and so I did. We went for the full on intimidation tool: taking a child´s mom away.

I felt so crushed. I NEVER left Luísa with a stranger before, (leaving her with someone we recently met for an hour playing at the beach for me to surf is another story). But at that point, I couldn´t do anything else, we had to have that tooth covered.

Once I was out of the room, it only took like 20 seconds for Luísa to ¨cooperate¨ (read: obey).

At the end, she offered Luísa the second gift and Luísa didn´t want it. I took it myself. She asked Luísa what she would like her to bring as a gift next time and Luísa got more pissed off at the idea of receiving any gifts and of being reminded that she would have to be back there.

The second dentist appointment (can things get worse then this?)

The night before our second appointment to the dentist, Luísa complained of pain in that tooth that was half treated.

Bad sign.

It meant the cavity wasn´t completely taken care of. And we wouldn´t just cover it like it was planned, I knew we would have to open it once again.

I told her right away the truth, that it meant the cavity wasn´t all treated and surely she would have to take an anesthesia to get it open again. I told her I´d be there and she could squeeze my hand and let us know when it hurt, but that she would have to do it.

I won´t bribe her for doctor´s appointments

Luísa had been asking for some dancing shoes too. I told her we could buy them when we went to the dentist at the city. I thought about getting the shoes after the appointment and use it to make her comply, but I don´t want to bribe my daughter to do what she has to do, she is smart enough to see the manipulation going on, so I told her:

¨The shoes have nothing to do with the dentist. They are a gift I want to give you. We will buy them first and then we go and do what we have to do at the dentist.¨

When we arrived at the specialist, I liked her more. She was more businesslike. She wasn´t offering a movie or toys, she was just being a plain dentist.

The only wise thing we did was to start off with one of the small cavities that didn´t hurt at all, so Luísa would see that the little ones were easy to take care of.

Then, the specialist went on to work on the big cavity again. Luísa got some shots, started to cry a bit but was taking it all, even though scared after she spat some blood.

But, now I know, working on the big cavity again knowing that it hurt was a bad decision because it was infected. We should have used antibiotics first and treated her later.

This meant that the anesthetic wasn´t doing much effect, Luísa kept feeling the pain when the drill would touch the bottom of the tooth.

Luísa was so scared that at one point she was trembling. She would scream even when the specialist was touching another tooth.

The specialist seemed more humane this time, though. She would say stuff like ¨I know that this hurts¨. She finally said that it was too much for Luísa to bare and she would use the white thing again to cover it up.

There it came the painful thing again. This time, the specialist accessed more Luísa´s feelings, she at least said:

¨I know this hurts a lot. I´m sorry¨.

The specialist knew that we wouldn´t finish the job that day. She prescribed an antibiothic and antiinflamatory.

Later that day, it started to swell and hurt. The next morning, half of Luísa´s face was swollen and it still hurt.

The following morning, it was even more swollen, Luísa´s eye was almost closed, like if stung by a bee.

I was scared of the swollen face, in fact, when I looked at Luísa, I got up and went to cry outside, before she woke up. I even called my sister in Brazil to vent.

I was not happy about Luísa taking antibiotics (this was her first time in her life), but now I just wanted stronger drugs for my girl.

The specialist prescribed a stronger antibiotic, antiinflamatory and corticoid to be taken in 3 shots. It was another little torture session for Luísa, but after that, in two days she was fine.

The specialist decided that we had pull out that tooth on our next appointment.

I told Luísa that right away. We operate on total honesty here.

She mentioned the ¨Raton Perez¨, which is the local tale about kids leaving their teeth under the pillow for the rat to switch it for a coin.

Third time is a charm

To finish the traumatic experience (she will probably fear dentists for ever), we went for the extraction.

This time, when she sat on the chair, she was very much scared and tears were rolling down. She wouldn´t let the specialist touch her so much and she would try to hug and cling on to me.

The specialist told me to leave the room.

Once more, I was crushed at the waiting room, hearing Luísa complain, but definitely, I heard the silence too and could tell that she was letting the dentist do what was needed.

It was quite fast without me being at her side. And this time it was painless (except for 2 anesthetic shots).

Luísa was not happy about it. She kept saying later:

¨I´m not the same anymore, I want to be like before.¨ and ¨Why did she had to pull my tooth out¿¨

Now I lied too

I hate lying. I almost cannot do it. But this time, Luísa told me the story of the Perez rat leaving a coin under the pillow for the tooth, so I went on with it.

I considered spoiling the fun and not playing the rat, because I couldn´t picture her in the future coming home one day, angry because I´ve been lying all these years about the Perez rat.

I really don´t understand why parents come up with the Santa Claus farce, and the rat is just the same shit.

But I prepared myself for that day already. I´ll explain to her that in that moment, the fantasy really served well to alleviate her pain and worries because she was too little to go through so much.

At night, I was the rat, and the next morning, Luísa was thrilled to find a coin.

The fourth visit went smoothly with the specialist taking care of the last 3 small cavities without anesthesia. I could stay by Luísa´s side this time, since she was threatened from the beginning about ¨behaving well, or mama would have to wait outside¨. She decided to ¨behave¨.

We ¨only¨ have to go twice again. One time to put a space maintainer and another to check if it´s alright.

For the parents out there who think pulling out a milk tooth is no big deal, know that it´s not like that. Without the milk tooth in place, the permanent tooth might come down in a wrong position, thus making the child´s teeth bad aligned and probably needing to use braces later on.

And if you read this far (thank you), let me give you two pieces of advice if you haven´t taken your child to the dentist yet:

1. Take your child to do a cleaning way before you can suspect of cavities, so she will have a fun first experience. If she is scared of doing that, try showing you tube videos with small children doing it.

2. If your child needs the dentist and has a dad, let him take her. If not, try another close caregiver that is not the mom. It was clear that my presence was not helping at all. Children can sense the mother´s feelings (and possibly the thoughts too), and I was just as scared or even more scared than Luísa.

Now, just out curiosity, if you see private dentist, could you share here how much you spend on it in dollars? This is a hell of a privileged thing.

In Puerto Viejo de Talamanca – Costa Rica, the dentist charges US$40 per cavity and US$40 per cleaning.

In Limón – Costa Rica, the dentists we saw, charges US$50 per cavity and US$30 per cleaning.

**UPDATE** I forgot to publish right away a link worth looking with this story. Here it goes: How I healed my child´s cavity

Photo Credit

This parenting thing is so damn hard! But I´m determined to change myself in order to make it work.

Since I wrote that post about my own aggressive behavior towards my child, a lot have changed. Analyzing myself, rather than my child, has been really helpful.

In that post, I tell you how Luísa would hide under the bed when she didn´t want to take a shower and I´d be very mean about it. I decided since then to declare under the bed her safe spot - from me.

If she has to hide because I´m about to force her to do something, or because she´s scared about how I´m acting, then she´d better have a hide out.

I can´t pull her out of it anymore. I can wait for her to come out, I can invite her to come out, but I can´t be a total nut out of control and show her that here we do things my way.

I want to learn her boundaries and I want to be able to negotiate the things I expect from her like a diplomat. She deserves my respect, consideration, patience and loving guidance, not anything less. Even though at times I give her a lot less and I´m sorry for that.

This has proven to work amazingly well (respecting her hide out under the bed). When she runs to hide, I no longer feel threatened or disobeyed, I don´t take it personally (the same when she calls me stupid), I take a moment to think about what´s the best thing I could do to get us out of this fight. I practice non-violence and non-action.

Like one time when she wanted to eat peanuts and I don´t remember how harsh I was about not letting her, so she ran with the bag under the bed. I knelled down and calmly said: ¨It´s ok for you to eat the peanuts, I just didn´t want to have the floor dirty with the shells. You can use a plate or you can sweep it after you are done¨. And she said: ¨Ok¨.

Then, she screamed from under the bed: ¨Thank you!¨

I was caught off guard by that authentic appreciation from her, so I had to ask: ¨Thank you for what?¨

¨For letting me.¨

(She did sweep it after she was done and it´s been a while that she doesn´t hide from me)

Talking out loud about my struggle to control my own anger

The other day, she started to give me a hard time and started to hit me. I was keeping myself from getting hit, but I was getting really pissed off about it and I was starting to hold her wrists too tight. I was losing it.

I told her I was getting pissed off and I wanted to walk a block to calm myself down.

I said I was becoming very angry and I felt like hitting her back, but I´m learning to work on my feelings in a different way.

Talking out loud about my own process also helps me to act more consciously.

By the time we were outside the gate, I had my self-control back (If you want them to learn this, learn it yourself first). I didn´t even need the walk anymore, just some deep breathings did the trick. I got us ready for something else in the house and then to leave and no violence occurred. Uhuuu!

No kidding this is something that we have to celebrate when it happens, it´s a big shift for me to be able to humm, well… act like an adult is supposed to.

Readings that changed me

Aha Parenting  is the website I´ve been devouring for the last couple of months. It´s funny that now that I read so much and even reread a lot of the articles there, it all seems simple.

Dr Laura puts it well on this interview : ¨The question most parents ask is ¨How can I get my child to do what I want? How can I get my child to stop biting?¨ But actually there are questions that will help us and our child much more. Start with ¨What is my child signaling to me with her behavior at this moment and what does she need from me?¨

By helping the child with what she needs and not what we want from them, the behavior changes.

And still, responding is not always easy. I guess it´s easier to just yell and get immediate compliance by intimidation (which is what yelling, or threatening or  really is, let´s not call it disciplining) while thinking of a creative way to deal with a situation might seem more difficult.

But who said that parenting was easy? I´m sure that all the effort put into responding in a loving manner will be rewarded with a relationship based on cooperation.

Photo Credit

Every day I wonder how I´m messing up Luísa´s life in one way or another. It can be when I get pissed off at her not sitting still while I comb her hair for lice and I grab her by the neck, the way I would never to anyone else, or it can be in many other moments.

One thing I found out, after at least 1,5 year of blogging about it weekly and other years of reading books (like this one)  is that while I´m trying to be better, I do improve.

And the littlest improvement I make, it´s better than not having moved forward one inch.

I don´t suck as a mom.

And if you are reading this, I guess you don´t either.

Making myself change is what makes me improve as a parent. There´s an interview with Dr. Laura of Aha Parenting (where there´s great practical parenting advice),  where she mentions that ¨for the sake of her child she would do anything, including change herself¨, which is very much how I feel too.

I´m talking about letting go of the old style or parenting we were raised and changing into a new paradigm.

Be reassured that the simple fact that you are seeking for this kind of information, to better parent, shows that you will never stop improving yourself.

It´s not the information we read, but our own will to change that makes us change. Looking for it is just a proof that we are doing it.

Parenting insecurity  just shows that we want to grow.

——

New rhythm for the blog

This blog will be a bit more spontaneous from now on.

I´ll probably keep posting weekly, although I might skip a week sometimes and might publish more often at other times.

I´ll write longer and shorter posts. I´ll try to have less rules, the main one being to keep the blog alive.

I´ll also try harder to being the more authentic as possible, or this whole blog would make no sense at all.

The house is 20 min by bike from Puerto Viejo. We have two rooms and share a bathroom.

For the last 4 weeks and till May, I´m sharing a house with another single mom, her kid is one of my 4 year old´s best friends from kindergarten.

The help you get living with someone else is pretty obvious. And there are also the challenges of putting two single children of single moms living together with now two parents.

Sure enough, both mamas can go out at night more often, which we´ve been doing at least once a week each. The girls are always busy playing together and we can share a lot of living costs. Like the 300 dollars rent: nice.

The house is by a river. The girls are free to come and go to the river at any time, usually naked, since the river is very shallow and not dangerous at all. One might say it´s still dangerous because it´s in the jungle and so all sorts of poisonous animals live nearby, like the eye lash pitviper that was found at their school one of these days, but screw that, the girls have a blast and we can watch and hear them from the house.

Change, if you want the other to do it, do it yourself first

I´ve been learning a lot to adapt myself, more than I expected. First adaptation for me was to put up with all the animals the other duo has: it started with 3 cats and 3 dogs. Now the cats are gone and ¨we¨ have 4 dogs. I like dogs better (here are the 2 we left in Brazil ), although I myself would keep them outside, but since it´s temporary, I don´t want to impose my way of being. I can clean some dog shit every once in a while (like the other morning in my room).

The other mom is very relaxed about time and routine, actually she doesn´t have much of a routine. I´m coming from a more strict meal and bed time with Luísa.

I was very happy when I started using candle light in my house alone with Luísa at bed time. We would light the candles at dinner time (around 6pm) and be in bed before 8pm. If around 7.30 pm Luísa wasn´t into a slower pace for the night, I´d turn off the lights and keep just the candles. I really recommend the candle light at night, it brings instant peace and when I forgot about it, Luísa would remind me.

At the new place I had to say ciao to my lovely candle light routine, I can´t impose that on our extended family. I was very uncomfortable in our first week because we were far from having a set bed time and so in the morning I would be rushing us out of the bed and out of the house on time for kindergarten and my alone time.

This was pissing me off. Having an early bedtime is the key to getting out of bed and the house early.

Then I figured that I was the only one disturbed by this. If I would ask Luísa, if she preferred to cut her sleep in one hour a day but have her friend living in the same house, or if she would prefer to live alone with mommy and have her full needed sleep, I figured she would answer to keep the friend and screw my bed time shit.

And even if sleeping enough is really necessary, it won´t matter that much for only 3 months, given the advantage of having a temporary sister.

So, I let go a bit of my night stress.

I prevent mine and Luísa´s tiredness at the end of the day to turn into bad behavior and bad reactions by making sure we have dinner and showers and pajamas on by a more or less intermediate time between our old routine and the new spontaneous-play flow we found ourselves in.

It´s safer for my kid that we live with more people now

By the end of last year, I was getting pissed off with Luísa a lot. I was getting impatient really quick and it´s not comfortable to say this, but I was reacting very badly to her acting out with me alone. I remember screaming from the top of my lungs and hitting the table with my fist (which the child knows the intention behind is to hit her instead). And I had the clear idea that living alone with my daughter was simply not safe.

Not unsafe as in ¨I can kill her¨, but more as in our relationship was getting damaged from my outbursts. I needed someone else to be around us.

So, when my friend invited me to share a house, something I was thinking already, I thought this would keep me from going off. It´s sad to admit this, but when there´s a witness, I control my angry impulses a lot more.

In our new house-family, I only screamed a couple of times, so far .

Sibling’s rivalry

The girls play a lot and fight a lot too. I´m really happy I only have one child. I can´t imagine watching siblings fight every day for years on end. And I remember an unschooler mom telling me how single children get all their needs met, which is not bad, although people like to label single children as spoiled.

So, for me when they are not getting along for the whole morning, or bedtime, it´s a pain in the ass.

Also, we don´t have clear rules about everything that apply to both kids. For instance, the other girl has a puppy and she sleeps with the puppy in her bed. Luísa has to watch this and deal with her desire to do the same, sometimes acting it out (I´m alert to this now and I´ve been good at preventing violence…).

They always fight over this princess glass the other girl has. If they were real sisters, they would probably have gotten two identical or similar glasses, but since they owned different things before, they have to deal with some unfairness intrinsic to our situation.

When I´m in charge of both girls, I prefer to take them to the beach or to the river and that avoids a lot of fighting. In my personal experience, it looks like stuff is what triggers 99% of the fights, or rather, ownership.

My way to deal with jealousy about stuff is to simply leave the house. And now I´m aware that I also use this as an escape to deal with a problem. For instance, the girls start fighting on Sunday morning and I get ready to take Luísa to the beach and leave, because I don´t want to take the time to conciliate.

Well, when I catch myself doing it, I stop. I wait for a resolution of conflict before we leave the house, so I´m modeling let´s solve things before we move on to something else instead of running away from our problems.

But hey, sometimes I simply cannot do it, I cannot wait and be patient and model the best behavior, so I get out of the house.

Other ups and downs of us living together are:

Italian practice: the other duo is from Italy. The girls speak in Spanish, but the other mom and I speak mostly in Italian in the house and the other mom reads to them in Italian. We also borrow Italian books to read in our room. The other mom happens to also speak some Portuguese and so we sing Brazilian songs and everybody learns a bit of everything.

Food making: my friend cooks more than I do. I guess anyone in the world cooks more than I do. She cooks healthy stuff for us all. We are working together on improving our nutrition.

Cleaning the house: my friend apparently hates doing the dishes (who doesn´t?). She always leaves it for later. Later never being before I want to use the kitchen. I´m the use-and-clean immediately type of freak, but she mops sometimes, I never mop.

I like being part of a family .

I guess the first times Luísa told me I was stupid, I was really offended. I probably used some violence in my reaction. I won´t be specific, I can´t even remember exactly what kind of violence I used (screaming probably, threatening, maybe a combination of that with a more physical input of my state of mind).

I thought that I couldn´t stand her calling me stupid. I thought that I shouldn´t let her do it to me. As in, ¨I can´t accept my daughter telling me this. If I let her call me names, she will not learn to respect me.¨

Luckily, both for me and Luísa, I quit that old way of  reacting and I started to respond more intelligently. Now, I think that taking it personally is really stupid.

I learned to take her ¨You are stupid!¨ as an alarm that something is going on and that I have to devote my full attention to that ( focus on my kid and not on my own misguided feelings). I realize that it´s a sign of anger. And I´ve been reading a lot about how when kids are aggressive, that´s hiding a underneath fear. So I start addressing what can be causing Luísa to be so angry that she will scream ¨You are stupid!¨.

I start by acknowledging what she feels: ¨I see you are very angry. You are so angry, you even say bad things to me¨. I ask her what is making her so angry. Usually she won´t say what it is, but I´m smart enough to guess or get close to the reason. So I ask: ¨Maybe you are angry because I´m not letting you watch a film (or whatever seems to me at the moment).¨

She might agree and keep angry, or she might just keep angry. I let her be angry. I tell her it´s ok to be angry at times. She might even go into a fury, if for instance I have to physically not let her do something (like grab my computer, or whatever). She will try to hit me and bite me. And I just prevent myself from being hurt. I can do that.

On occasions, we can turn the anger into laughter, like when we start screaming together, the louder that we can.

The best thing for me about this process is that I´m keeping my cool. I can see through the misbehavior and work with her, instead of feeling attacked personally or feel that my child is becoming a bully.

I talk to her later about it. I recall the episode, I tell her I don´t like to be called names. I understand that she sometimes has anger about something and we might find other ways to release it. So far, she doesn´t take my suggestions (hit a pillow, spit outside, scream outside). I´m not very creative about it. So I tell her this too (that I can´t find that way by myself). I say that we can think about this again and how to do it differently. Even if we can´t find a good solution now, we can still work on it.

When other people are involved it´s harder for me

When she does it to a friend, I do more or less the same. I feel a bit more self conscious because I expect the other parent to want me to correct Luísa in a traditional way. I don´t know if they want me to, I just feel bad. I´m just learning to deal with these strong emotions myself and I know it´s not the way that people around do it.

I was once having lunch with a friend who is into spanking. I´ve been talking about positive parenting, I even lent her that book I talked about here: Your Competent Child.

Luísa and her boy were playing while we waited for our food. While they were at it (far from our eyes), Luísa hit the boy and he came straight at me, wanting me to retaliate. I took Luísa far from the table, knelled down and talked to her. Then I asked her to just be at the table until we finished (not as a punishment, but so I could prevent anything else). When we came back to the table, the boy asked her mom if I had hit Luísa. His mom replied to him ¨No, she doesn´t spank her¨.

I think we all felt uncomfortable at the table.

One of my favorite blogs is ¨Good Job!¨ and Other Things You Shouldn´t Say or Do. And to my delight, while I´m working with the ¨You are stupid!¨ in my house, Jennifer recently wrote When Your Kid Spits at You which is exactly the same thing. If you need some parenting model and practical advice, go to her blog.

In that article she says that ¨your kid spitting at you is not a pre-meditaded disrespect. But it it a sign of anger.¨

¨Overwhelmed young people literally can’t self-regulate and don’t have the wear-with-all to say, “Excuse me Mom, I’m really angry right now. I feel like no one is caring about what’s going on for me. I don’t want to go to that party. I feel like I haven’t had enough time with you. You’ve been with the baby forever and now I’m supposed to just get in the car and I’m hungry and I want to play with you and I don’t give a shit about some friend turning four.”¨

The spitting itself, Luísa reserves to strange people. She hates strangers to say how beautiful she is, or much worse TOUCH her. I came to hate it too. Why do people think they can pet kid´s heads just like that?

When someone does that mistake while I´m not watching, I realize what happened as soon as Luísa spits at the person (she might scream ¨You are stupid!¨ too).

I usually say ¨I´m sorry she spat at you (or screamed at you), but she really doesn´t like people she doesn´t know to touch her.¨ (I hate how puzzled they look at what happened)

Then I kneel down and I tell Luísa: ¨I´m sorry that woman touched you, she shouldn´t have done that. I know this makes you angry. But spitting on people is not ok. I can´t let you do that either¨.

I don´t know if I´m dealing with this in the right way. I later talk about it and tell her that she might try to spit on the sidewalk instead. ¨It´s ok to be angry when a stranger touches you¨, I say. ¨But some people have no idea how this can be upsetting, they cannot control themselves, we have to deal with it ourselves¨. I tell her about how when I was a child it really pissed me off too and how I also hate that anyone will do this to her.

I´ve held a few hands on air already, no kidding. Someone was about to touch her and I prevented it like if I had a karate reflex.

To be honest, I don´t want to restrain my daughter too much when people touch her. I myself feel like screaming at them ¨Go and touch your mother´s head, leave my kid alone!¨. But I was so trained to please strangers, I still smile at them and feel awkward instead.

I´m pretty sure I had a good old education and I learned to behave. I hope I can help my daughter to express herself in socially acceptable ways, but I don´t want her to swallow her feeling the way I learned to do. I don´t want her to just behave.

Photo Credit

Going to watch the sunset a few days before the episode.

A few days before coming back to Puerto Viejo from our surf trip to Santa Teresa, I went to the ATM and withdrew 200 bucks. After that, I went to have lunch with Luísa and then to the grocery store.

When we arrived at our camping and I looked for my wallet to pay for our stay. It was gone. No 200 bucks, no bank card, nada. I was left with the few bananas and avocados I bought at the grocery store (I was so cheap, I spent only 2 dollars before losing the 200).

As I had just published a post about safety and how if something bad happens you just have to deal with it, I simply dealt with it. I asked Nico, our host, surf student and current family memeber in the place to lend me some money to get back to Puerto Viejo the next day.

Then we went to watch our last sunset on the ocean for the time being. On the way, we met a woman who started playing with Luísa.

We appreciated the sunset and there were other friends of our new found friend next to us. Two of them started to take pictures of Luísa. Not before asking for it and having Luísa engage by first taking pictures of the people herself. Luísa usually doesn´t let anyone take pictures of her, so we were definitely having a good time with these people.

By the time we had to leave, one of them asked for my email to send the pictures (they never send the pictures later, as this one didn´t either) and as I spelled my full name, the woman couldn´t believe it.

I asked: ¨What is it? Did you guys read my blog?¨

¨No, it´s more interesting than that.¨

As it turned out, the guy sitting at the end of our log, the one I haven’t even looked at yet, had found my wallet. He was nervous that he couldn´t find the owner of that wallet. He said that was the only upsetting thing about his day. They looked me up on Face Book and sent me a message (which I never received) and that´s why the woman recognized my name (thanks to my bank card on the wallet).

We went together to their hostel where he gave me my wallet back and we chatted about the magic of all of that.