NZ Baby Blog

The most frequently asked question by far, by those with 1 child already especially, after the usual how is the baby, what is it etc etc, is “How is your older child coping?”. Your biggest fear I think how your older child will react to the newbie. Will they be jealous, will they be mean or upset, testing or unfazed or what?

In our case our older boy reacted about as well as we could expect. He was interested & loving towards his younger sister (helps she gave him a bike as present  to sweeten the deal , and a bit more challenging towards his parents.

Obviously YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but I think that if you’re expecting, or thinking about it, then a rough guide to how your own child will react can be taken from how they react to other stressful (although not necesarily negative) occasions.

For example, how does your chiild/family cope with going on holiday for a couple of weeks - and if you don’t know then this is a perfect excuse to find out.   Our child doesn’t sleep so good and doesn’t eat so good so tends to get a bit fragile and prone to getting sick.

And how did they react to starting daycare, or kindy, going to stay with Grandma etc - ie getting a bit less parental attention (Ours got a bit clingy, and wanted mum a lot).
That is about exactly what happened when the baby came along, but with the added tricky of mum spending some time superglued to the bed or couch and obviously completly knackered.

Advice from the experts I read included…

• To not “blame” everything on the baby - ie “mummy is tired” is ok, “mummy is tired because baby kept me up a lot” is not so good, “it’s  the babies fault that I’m tired” really not good.
• To spend time with your older child while the younger one is asleep, although that does fly in the face of the “sleep when baby sleeps” advice so there is a balance that needs to be found there.
• Keep to the older childs routine as much as possible - which is good

My own coping strategy for that tricky “feeding the baby in bed in the morning, please don’t jump all over me I just can’t quite cope with you right now on my 4 hours sleep” time, was to play some special games - in our case “cafes” and “making shopping lists” which involve him with a pad and pen, choosing meals and thinking about what we buy, without me needing to move. And singing action songs (5 big dump trucks was our fave), and him doing little jobs like opening the curtains, putting nappies in the bin/bucket, emptying potty, choosing baby clothes, fetching nappies etc etc so that his energy & running around is channeled.

The “jobs” startegy has the added bonus that if you think of a job that they need to do in their own bedroom (fetch clothes, open curtains), with any luck they’ll get distracted by a toy and you’ll get 10 mins peace as well.

It took about 3 months for us to find something like a new equilibrium, which actually went pretty quick.

Original Post - Clicker Kid Gets Dressed

As is usual with my training, I can be a bit poor on keeping the reinforcement going, as I do tend to try and fade the reward too early/completely.

However, even so, he is much better about getting dressed most of the time. A few “environment” changes have helped - getting dressed before going downstairs for breakfast is usually better than trying to do it afterwards. He is putting on his bottom halves himself, although still with a quite a lot of prompting so that might be the next thing to work on.

Today I finally got sick of the whole “get dressed do your teeth routine” which takes forever and often involves more manhandling of the child than I can do at the moment, and more tears than is pleasant,  and decided to start clicking for what I wanted.

What a difference - I wish I’d done it earlier but [Insert long list of excuses why not] I didn’t.
INGREDIENTS

1 X 3 year old who hates getting dressed & doing teeth

7 x mini Pebbles, Smarties, M&M’s or similar - about 5mm diamater
1 x container to hold treats

1 x clicker (optional)

1 x parent in the right head space

METHOD

1. Make a show of counting out small treats (mini m&m’s) into container so that child knows you’re doing it.
2. Explain that these are treats for getting dressed and doing your teeth.
3. Ignore pang of guilt as imaginary dentist tells you that giving sweets right after doing teeth is counter productive
4. Tell child you’re off to bedroom/bathroom and that they need to come with you if they want them
5. If child normally wouldn’t do that, and this time they do, click and treat when you get to destination or significantly underway. Click marks that they have done what you want - you want to get a click (or OK or similar) in so that you can do less instant treating in the future.
6. Tell child that they will get one treat per item of clothing
7. At this point my child starts messing around, so I left the room as I was making decision not to “play” our usual game of cajolling him into getting dressed.
8. Child is upset that usual game doesn’t work.
9. Explain that today we are doing clicks and treats for getting dressed, would he like another chance.
10. Yes please.
11. Back to room, child is allowed to wear the clicker.
12. Child steps into knickers on count of 3, gets a click and chooses treat
13. Child steps into trousers (no counting required), gets a click and chooses treat
14. Remove shirt, put on t-shirt (usually a big struggle to get night shirt off and clean one on), Child very happy to comply, gets clicker back too, gets click and treat.
15. Put on socks - click and treat
16. Put on shoes - click and treat
17. Child fully dressed in record time! Mum not feeling cross yay!

CLEANING TEETH & WASHING FACE

1. Again show/tell there are treats
2. Count to 3 was needed for child allowing teeth to be brushed
3. Child stands still, opens mouth etc
4. Praise, click, treat
5. Child stands still with face forward for face wash
6. Click & treat

Again, child is happy, mum is happy, all done nice and quickly.

Once I’ve got this one established, so that we have the idea of a non confrontational get ready embedded, then I’ll work up to putting on his clothes himself, and to putting in a “marker” for the treats like a button or a bead so that particularly the teeth treat might get collected later when I won’t feel so guilty.

We had been doing “you can’t have a DVD until you’ve had breakfast & are dressed”, the problem with that though is that when it all takes such a long time, there isn’t time for a DVD before we go out to daycare or other activities anyway. The no DVD until those things are done will still apply, but I think the direct clicking approach will speed the whole proces up and hopefully he’ll get to a point where he is earning “tokens” which he can then use to “buy” DVD time.