You’re in the store. You hear, “Mommy, I want that.” You peer down to see your child pointing to a brightly colored stuffed elephant that you know he has more than you can count at home. You whisper, “No, not right now you have some at home.” He urges, begs and pleads. You don’t cave in. You stand your ground. Then to your surprise (or perhaps, not to your surprise) as it’s been boiling you see your 3 year old start to cry. He may scream. He may even throw himself to the floor.
You as the grown up can’t run or hide. What do you do?
During childhood, young children are experiencing a vast array of emotions: big and small, discovering new places and self as they change and grow. As they take in the brand new world around them, they could get easily frustrated especially when they are not able to fully say how they feel or fully articulate their needs. As a result, a child may show this exasperation and big emotions through what grown ups see as challenging behaviors not a bad child but a challenge. Even adults could reach a point or limit of not being able to self-regulate. Imagine how children feel as everything is brand new especially as they grow into themselves.
According to NAEYC, challenging behaviors often emerge in the second year of life. Why? Toddlers are unable to fully label how they are feeling as well as their needs as they are still developing language skills. So, a child will use nonverbal possibly biting or verbal: crying to get their needs met.
Here are some research backed strategies to guide children to more positive outcomes that may prevent leaving the store in gallons of tears and energy.
Avoid common triggers or situations that cause challenging behavior: Prepare in advance for activities or store trips. Observation is key here. If you know when you go to the store, he will see a fluffy bright elephant that he will beg for, and prepare one he already has to take with him. Bonus: let him choose which one he wants to take. In the moment at the store: it may not be the “want” of the toy but the “want” of a comforting item that seeing that bright elephant reminds him of. Identifying patterns in timing, routine, anticipated outcomes or root causes of challenging behaviors can help families better support their child.
Establish predictable and consistent routines and behaviors: Children and grown ups thrive in predictable and consistent routines. It feels safe to know what is coming next. Model kindness and empathy with others and yourself. Your child will notice and show the same. Model how to take care of others, the environment and the self. Keep a consistent and predictable schedule. Have cereal together. Breathe and meditate together. Show and share a calm, supportive, consistent and loving environment. If ever upset, model that you will need a moment to calm down, breathe and return when ready. Children learn by what they observe and experience. If you curse, your child will. If you’re calm, your child will be. Families are successful by being consistent through predictable routines, setting limits and modeling care and compassion through smiles, intentional verbal, nonverbal praise and action.
Notice and talk about positive actions during the day: Every day is a fresh and new day to get it right or learn from mistakes. Families have the potential to promote positive behaviors throughout the day, not just when challenging behaviors emerge. Catch children’s positive actions and comment on them. Notice other people’s actions too and comment out loud in front of your child about them. For example, wow without Kelly, our mailperson we would never get postcards from Grandma or when at a restaurant, comment on the service. For example, our waiter is so kind and without him we would not be able to order food. Notice and comment on the helpers of our world. Without each and every person’s kindness, we would have a mean and disturbed kind of world.
Hopefully, these tips help so that next time you find yourself somewhere such as a store, it goes more smoothly and there are no screams or tantrums. Screaming love instead of frustration. Here’s to pinpointing and solving those challenging behaviors. Cheers! Remember, you got this!
Everybody needs a little love in their lives but you know what else everybody needs? Play.
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. —Plato
While in Vang Vieng, Laos, we happened to catch children playing from a far distance. No grown ups present. They climbed through tree roots, explored water, caught fish and laughed a lot. They waded water in the stream made their way out and found a large paint roller and rolled it all around in the dirt. I smiled and reminisced as my nostalgic childhood materialized.
“That’s what play looks and feels like. That’s honoring childhood.” My partner and I started sharing about our childhoods. How we were fortunate that ours looked like the childhood the children were playing in right before our very eyes. Childhood is finite and infinite at the same time. It lives on.
No fences, no dittos, no rules. Freedom. To feel and play. True play gives us a push into being in our body and mind. Everything is connected: spatial awareness to making connections.
Play gives children practice to what they are learning and observing. It works for grown ups too in life, family and business. Want to learn more about your colleagues in less time? Keep it simple. Kick the typical “meeting” and get out there and play.
Play Opens Doors
No matter where children and grown ups live or what they’re overcoming, play is essential.
It opens doors and shows us what we’re capable of and what we’re passionate about. It shows us who we are and are meant to be. We all are competent, capable and creative human beings. From birth until we die, we have to play in our purpose.
Play Promotes Collaboration
Listening and talking. Everyone plays a part in it. From role play / interacting with others to make believe / symbolic thinking. Even without someone else…being able to collaborate with yourself in your own world is the art of meditation. Play is meditation.
Play Gives Grace to Fail and Try, Try Again
Riding a bike to kicking a ball. You ride, you crash. You kick, you miss. You try again.
What did you love to play as a child? As an adult? Did it change? Why?
Recently, I was inspired by a reading from Plough‘s Daily Dig. An excerpt is below and it’s by Kahlil Gibran, a favorite author of mine who wrote The Prophet. In it Kahlil Gibran ponders joy.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.…When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. Source: The Prophet
What gives you pain gives you joy. I felt like I just caught joy holding hands with pain and it sunk in the pit of my stomach. Imagine you love running really fast, tripping and falling. The running culminated into an eventual trip and fall. However, you don’t stop running because it brings you joy…and sorrow.
Lemons to Lemonade.
Failing. Falling. Rising. People say failure is not an option but in fact, it is. Failure holds hands with success. We fall, we rise. The sun sets and rises.
We live, we die.
We laugh, we cry.
We hurt, we heal.
Life is ugly. Life is beautiful. So what is it? What is your joy? Choose wisely.
Ps. A poem / Almonds and Joy Just Because
Here are some almonds and joy, just because.
They said it is a stork bite.
Where her birthmark is behind her neck.
I smiled.
Tears rolling down like mounds of almonds.
Rolling them up and down a hill like Sisyphus with his rock.
What do I do with this sorrow, this pain, this grief, this hurt, all of this?
A cardinal flies by. Bright ruby red. Butterflies and hummingbirds dance across the sky right before my eyes. Morning doves sing. A quarter on the ground dated 1986. Changed by so many hands. Possibly fell off of an angel’s wings in the path I was meant to stumble upon it. I stand and walk among giants as none of us is as small as we think we are. A paradox of our times. Looking out a plane window, you would think and see just how small and potentially insignificant we really aren’t. Nothing is as it seems. Littles things are big things. Just watch and study ants at work.
Looking out a plane window, you would think and see just how small and potentially insignificant we really aren’t. Nothing is as it seems. Littles things are big things. Just watch and study ants at work.
Life all around us and beyond us. Beautiful, daring and fleeting life. Life in a single blade of grass life. Life in a single fingerprint life. Life in a single sip of coffee life. Life lies even in a pesky and stubborn weed in the garden that keeps reemerging life. It hurts to tug it out of the ground. Everything wants to live. We want to live another day. Another minute.
We emerge no matter the challenge or obstacle in the words of Tupac Shakur even from concrete. We breakthrough like the stars emerging from stardust life that we innately are. Where do we go after life? That question follows me each and everywhere I turn. Where do we go? Will we see each other again?
Life is found in a single minute. One single minute matters more than you think. I stare at the sky throughout the day just to stare at it no need to have a reason. The stars. The constellations. Connecting the dots to what all of this really means. We’re all deeply connected like an infinite constellation more than anyone could possibly ever realize or conceptualize.
You are powerful. We are powerful. Most of all, together our collective voice screams our power and our courage. Where does this kind of powerful energy come from? And, where does it live and manifest itself? I get to see it manifest in the stories of our students from children to grown ups. Who we are and who we are in a process of becoming is just as important as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
By telling our stories we create powerful connections. How do you show and share your story? How is your voice heard? Where does your voice resonate the loudest? The softest? Seriously think and reflect on this. Is it through poetry? Spoken word? Is it in art? Is it found in a conversation? We recognize through our stories and our lives just how connected we are and that we are all in a process of becoming. None of us really know anything and when we think we do, change occurs and to grow we must grow and go with the change. This is how we grow and evolve. This is how we become. This is how we create our real and authentic identities. Tupac Shakur said, “I am coming out 100% real and I’m not compromising anything.”
We are found in a single sentence. We are found in a line drawn and extended magnified or minimized like an MC Escher sketch. “Every line means something,” said Basquait. If every line means something in a drawing, then that also means every curve, every freckle each and every part of us means something too. Every “line” in this life means something. Each action or inaction affects all of us even when we don’t think it does, it does.
What’s your story? Who are you? Why are you here? How do you want to make your vision a reality and your voice resonate and connect? What are you doing right now to make your vision come to fruition? Where are you? When will you share your story — your voice?
We’re all waiting for you to become you and even when you become you, you will still change and grow. You will get growing pains and experience hurts. What will you do with it all? You will change. You will evolve. We are all in a never-ending process of becoming. Over and over and over again.
Leveling up or leveling down and around like a run on sentence or drawn out lines. We never come to a complete end and when we think we have reached the end we are reminded again and again that we are only just beginning.
I walked to my mailbox. I physically opened my quiet and subtle mailbox not my loud and pinging gmail inbox. No need to sign on or even click on anything. I opened my literal real 3D mailbox outside of my home and took out a piece of real mail. Real paper. Real ink. Real love. I am afraid of clowns but as I saw the clown nose with the stethoscope; my heart fluttered like a hummingbird and sang like one too! I screamed and danced love and gratitude. I opened the letter and read the words from none other than Patch Adams himself who deeply inspires and resonates like the same beating of a drum except its the same beating of a heart. I am grateful.
I am deeply moved and inspired by his genius and caring way of being. His message was to catch the sunrises and sunsets. He told me to read poetry by Emily Dickinson. He told me to write and make art. He said many times when we feel low and down that something is missing. That something could be and is the creative arts for our soul.
He listened as he read my letter. He knew what I was deeply missing as I was in the midst and mixture of a rat race not life. When we feel lost or “off”, a feeling of not being ourselves, of not feeling the essence of our being, we miss our core human way of being…our art, our creation, our time, our love…the greatest gift that we give ourselves and emit to the world.
We are merely working to survive not working to thrive. I jumped off the rat wheel, stopped running and racing. Instead I walked into love.
I can’t merely live to work. I work to live. Connection. Love. Life-long learning. L-o-v-e. Real love. Jump, slow down and walk into it. How do you show love to yourself? How do you show love to those around you and your environment?
Where is your happy place? I hope you have a few of them. As a life-long learner and dreamer, I have the opportunity to travel and live out my dreams of connecting with people from all over the world.
I remember sitting in my Junior year Spanish class when our teacher asked us to draw and dream in Spanish. This was difficult for me to dream in another language but I finally did. My dream then and now was to travel all around the world and connect with people. Deep down, I recognized the important impact of connecting cross-culturally. My dream was and still is all about connection: relationships / community. Something that social media or the meta verse just can’t create in real time or in real life. It may socially influence relationships in both negative and positive ways but it could never replace them or even construct a deep rooted one in real life. Human touch, human feeling, and human thought. It is mere cookie cutter from us…it mirrors our universe but could never fully be us.
We all crave connection. Back then I drew my dream and wrote it out in Spanish, it was a vision that I have the rare opportunity of living out today in real life. I love meeting people and creating long lasting connections that challenge our ways of being, our very existence. There was a time I didn’t know what I knew today. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow never came and today is what we’re living the best way we know how with what we know today.
“Quiero viajar por todo el mundo y conectarme con la gente”. More deeply I realize my dream was and still is about loving each other no matter where we’re from as we all are in a process of becoming. We all have pockets full of dreams and are in the process of realizing them little by little. We’re all walking in the dark and in the light. We’re all here doing what we have to do to fulfill our mission.
We’re all connected as we’re crawling, walking, galloping, skipping, running and flying each other home.
It’s not about what’s wrong with you, it’s about what is hurting you. It’s all about what happened to you. I am in the middle of reading an amazing book entitled: What Happened to You? by Oprah and Dr. Perry You can find it here –> https://www.amazon.com/What-Happened-You-Understanding-Resilience/
The book that is changing and affirming lives especially mine 🙂
It is an affirmation that I am exactly where I need to be. Healing wounds not reopening them or simply covering them up with metaphorical bandaids and smiles. I am full of gratitude for giving the gift to myself and most of all giving myself the gift of healing.
As I am reading and reflecting about what had happened in my life as I read both Oprah and Dr. Perry also discuss a lot of what I learned and was gifted as a preschool teacher: the neuroscience behind trauma, it also reminds me a lot of Dr. Becky Bailey’s work with the brain stem, Conscious Discipline how at times we go into fight or flight mode. The Cortex is where we should be when making significant decisions. I love the brain and fell in love with it when I read Jill Bolte Taylor’s work: My Stroke of Insight.
What I am alluding to is the importance of the brain, how early childhood and early sensory experiences play into that and how they are the key to making imprints on us. A simple but not so simple scent can bring us back to remembering experiencing and even stepping through trauma. A mere scent can bring us back to the beautiful and ugly parts of our experiences. Embrace the beautiful, let go of the pain and h e a l. That’s how to help yourself. The early years are the most significant years aka the 0 to 8 years old milestones where a lot of our synapses are connected and made. As you continue to grow breathe, stretch and shake into your human way of being. And special shout out to our chakras! Intuition and Chakras are on fleek as we speak 🙂
Take a moment to think, reflect, draw: What happened to you? What hurt you and how are you healing?
You could tell a lot about a person by how they handle certain things in life like accidents, mistakes, rainy days, spilled milk and so on and so forth. The ultimate and most obvious timeless question to ask is could they laugh at themselves in moments like that?
Throughout the pandemic and especially during the height of it all, a student of mine has been working at McDonalds while also attending college and caring for her young son (who is also doing elementary virtual class).
No matter how tired and exhausted and scary the pandemic was and is — She still rises and goes to work.
Each and everyday she rose and (still rises) at 5:30 am, left and arrived to work at 7:00 am where her manager took her temperature, scanned and looked her over. On this particular morning worth mentioning, he glanced down and pointed at her shoes.
She looked down and when she looked down she saw two completely different colors!
She took another look. She went to work with mismatched shoes. One shoe was a jet matte metallic black and the other one, a silver neon gray slip on.
Her manager told her to go home and change them.
She went home, changed her shoes and went back to work. Again, her manager pointed down to her mismatched shoes. Feeling exhausted and defeated but with a second wind, she said, “I don’t care. I feel like wearing them just like this today. Take me as I am or let me go.”
She said, “I feel so small, I feel like a bug or an ant. Most times — I don’t even want to wake up but on this day I laughed until I cried myself and felt better.”
I told her 2 things. 1. Keep laughing and 2. Keep laughing.
You see, this life is too precious than to worry about matching socks or shoes plus it’s Halloween and second, ants have superhuman strength.
When you “feel” like no one and nobody notices, trust the process and know that you can and literally are carrying a weight 100 times your mass just like the ant. You are rare and your very purpose is to be here. We are somehow chosen and we don’t even know who, what, when, where, why and how our stones will ripple, wreck, melt, shift and shake up the world.
Time is too precious than to spend our precious energy on matching our socks or our shoes or our feelings to match what society thinks we should be or act or feel.
Just be yourself.
Who are you? Who are you in a process of becoming? What’s your reason? How are you getting there?
While at The Genius of the Book Exhibit in DC https://www.folger.edu/exhibitions/form-function-genius-of-the-book something came full circle for me. The exhibition also affirmed why I love and recognize the power of books. Historically, there was and still is a reason why people in power choose to burn books that challenge thinking, status quo and create different and opposing ways of being. Books are powerful.
When selecting books what questions and thoughts materialize in your brain? Many come to my mind each and every time I’m picking out a new book or picking up an old one to read again, especially when choosing literature for children, families and myself. I ask myself what do the illustrations and writing portray? What images are painted in µy mind
For example, look for illustrations of culture, ability and disability, race, gender, identity, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and many more. Are we being portrayed non-stereotypically and in powerful roles?
As noted by an NAEYC article, a list of common and undermining set of stereotypes are when people are portrayed as:
Strong, independent girls and women are “manlike”
Book-loving or nonathletic boys and men are “effeminate”
Latino men talk funny, are lazy, gang members, or wear oversize sombreros
Latina women are earth mothers or subservient
African American men are gang members, oversexed, or underemployed
African American women are too independent, oversexed, or “welfare moms”
LGBTQ people are invisible or sexual predators
Poor people are invisible or depicted as passively needing help from others
American Indians live in teepees, carry bows and arrows, or are half-naked in winter
People with disabilities are not independent or are to be pitied
Arab and/or Muslim men are terrorists
Arab and/or Muslim women are voiceless and passive
All Muslims are Arab
Some of mine I look for:
People are invisible or in a side role not empowering ones
Characters matter: who is the hero?
The storyline and perspectives in it
Gender and are women and men portrayed accurately?
Race, culture, ethnicity: is it an authentic and accurate portrayal?
I am also starting to write letters to publishers.
Another tip: look at the dates and authors. Dates and writers matter. Research and support people in comparing and contrasting. Also ask why is a book written? Books are like people, they serve a purpose. For example, If you got a book entitled: Firemen Fight Fires, time to move on because the term Firefighters include everyone and they do more than ride in firetrucks fighting fires anyway. Just saying.
Books and children’s books continue to be an invaluable transmitter of messages we absorb influencing who we are and how we see each another. Media and books are transmitters of cultures, perspectives and values. Books reflect our personal identities, diversity and varying relationships among different groups of people. Books and media (AND ADVERTISEMENTS) portray who matters and creates a positive or negative self-image and concept. Look at who is advertised/displayed on your outside arena where people perform or play sports. Who is displayed? Are women?
Looking at the Verizon Center, our students did not see women and said, “See, it’s true, we were right, women don’t play basketball.” We walked inside to see the Mystics playing. Talk about a transformative experience.
It is crucial to show and share an eclectic set of books about people like us and different from us (TO CELEBRATE OUR AWESOME DIFFERENCES) and our families. ALL of the books should be non-stereotypical and authentic. *Reminder items to look for: look for dates, portrayal of lifestyles, cultures, social identities, relationships, social change and justice, invisibility and tokenism.*
When discovering new books or reading classic books what questions materialize in your mind?
And speaking of choosing and reading awesome books by amazing authors go to: https://www.loc.gov/bookfest/ to check out when the National Book Festival is to meet your favorite and your children’s favorite authors!
Written with love. Lots of it!
Jill Telford is an artist, advocate, storyteller, educator and creator of children’s books. More of her work can be found athttp://amazon.com/author/jilltelford
From the Playground 