Every child loves a birthday celebration. But did you know that birthdays mean different things to kids at different ages? And what a birthday means to your child might affect how you celebrate it.

A fascinating study of about 100 children ages 3 to 9 found that children are differently able to understand the importance of birthdays. Younger children believe that a birthday celebration is necessary for a person to age. If the celebration is skipped, the child believes he remains the same age as before, even though the anniversary of his birth has passed. And if a birthday celebration is repeated, the child may believe he ages a year at each celebration, so he can progress from age 3 to age 4 to age 5 in the span of a few days.

In addition, younger children believe that, in order for a birthday celebration to be “official” and to count in moving the child ahead, age-wise, it must contain all the elements the child has come to associate with birthday parties. This is why, if you have a piñata or a bouncy house one year, your child might insist on repeating those elements the next year.

Younger children believe that a person can grow younger, physically, by naming for herself a younger age. The whole package of growing up, growing older, and assigning a number to an age is mixed up in young children’s minds. By the time children reach the age of 8 or 9, they have sorted everything out. They understand that age progresses even if a birthday celebration is skipped or is somehow untraditional.

What’s the birthday take-away? Especially if your child is younger than 7 or 8, keep in mind these guidelines:

1. Children are likely to be upset if their birthday party doesn’t include what they believe a “real” birthday party should include. This means that you should be careful about what is included in a young child’s party, since you’ll likely be expected to include it again in future years. It also means that you tamper with the birthday party formula at your peril!
2. Take children’s beliefs about aging and birthdays seriously. Avoid making jokes about your child’s age since a child will take jokes at face value and believe them. Wait for your child to grow into middle childhood to play around with the meaning of birthdays.
3. Realize that young children don’t yet understand the whole idea of aging and growing into a different state of maturity. The whole idea of transforming into an adult seems not only impossible but frightening to a young child. Keep birthdays childlike and avoid making them the reason for new responsibilities.

Most of all, don’t skip your child’s birthday! To a young child, a skipped birthday is the same as not growing up at all.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Everyone likes to win and little kids are no exception. But you cannot win them all and losing often throws young children (and older ones) into a tailspin. How can you help your child learn how to lose?

For some parents, the answer is to coach kids harder so they always win.  But this only means that when a child loses – which is inevitable – the parent is as disappointed as the child is. A winners-only mentality signals to a child that she’s only as good as the score. She’s not valued for herself.

Children first become aware of winning at about age 5, when they start to recognize comparisons. They suddenly understand bigger and smaller, taller and shorter, faster and slower, and better and best. This is the age when children begin to evaluate who got the bigger ice cream cone, whose school shoes are better than whose, and who scored the winning goal. There’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s not competition that’s the problem, it’s comparison. The truth is, only one child can be the best at any one thing. Everyone else is not. That’s an awful lot of losers, if children are raised to believe that winning is the only important thing. If children spend their time comparing themselves to others and slotting themselves into a hierarchy, they are certain to be disappointed, discouraged, and sad.

This is exactly what happens by age 9 if not before. As anyone who’s ever endured a one-at-a-time team choosing ritual can tell you, everyone knows who is the best at anything. Everyone knows who is the worst. And everyone knows the relative position of every child in between. Whether it’s spelling, kickball, or math, by third grade the roster is established for every skill and everyone knows his place.

This is what happens when there is a winner, a best score, a highest grade. If one is fated to be the worst on the soccer team, what is the point of trying harder? What’s the point of soccer at all? And if one’s soccer team is the worst in the league, what’s the point of going to practice or trying hard in games? A kid already knows how things will turn out.

The solution is to manage competition by managing comparison. Instead of comparing himself to other children, guide your child in comparing his performance today to his performance before. Aim for achieving a “personal best.” That way, no matter what the score or what your child’s ranking among his classmates or teammates, he has opportunities to win every day.

Now, at the beginning of the school year, is the ideal time to focus on your child’s personal best. Here are some tips.

• With your child, pick an area to focus on and one achievement to measure. This can be your child’s sport and one skill in that (like “softball” and “throwing power”) but it could also be  school skill, a social accomplishment or anything else of value to your child.
• With your child, set a goal. Without making any negative comments at all, record what is the current level of performance. Then help your child set a goal. If the goal seems too ambitious, accept that but also help your child set intermediate goals. Remember that the goal should be in terms of your child’s own performance, not becoming “better” than anyone else.
• With your child, find ways to meet the goal. Start working towards it. Keep track every week or so to record whatever is the new “personal best” or to notice any backsliding.
• Remember that making progress is its own reward. While you and your child can certainly celebrate new levels of competence, avoid trying to motivate your child with bribes or threats.  If your child loses interest in improvement, she might not have chosen the right area to focus on. Help her find another task that really matters to her.

The really nifty thing about seeking one’s personal best is that’s the way a kid can win all the time. Striving to work hard and inch closer to one’s goals feels like winning. Feels like winning because it is.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

How does a baby figure out which mouth movements make what sounds? New research from the University of Washington suggests that baby’s brains are busy with just that task in the months ahead of being able to actually talk. And these necessary brain changes are linked to the conversations babies hear.

Like a lot of complex skills, we adults often forget how many steps are involved and the micro-skills necessary for mastery. We don’t remember that when we learned to walk, we didn’t just learn how to put one foot in front of the other, but learned how to balance our weight, how to shift weight from one side to the other, and how to coordinate our weight with our feet with the movements of our arms. Walking is not so simple as it seems, and neither is talking.

Learning to talk is not just a matter of mastering a few vocabulary words but of figuring out how to move one’s lips and tongue to make the sounds a child hears being said. Without any sort of guide, babies break this code. The babbling infants do is a form of practice. But in order to actually transition from babbling to saying a first word, a child has to hear the word and move his mouth in the right way to duplicate it. This takes a special sort of brain development and that’s where parents come in.

Researchers have found that hearing speech sounds stimulates the areas of the brain that coordinate and plan movements needed for speech.  This is news. It’s not just that hearing words communicates meaning to a child. Hearing words changes the brain’s motor cortex so that a baby can move her mouth in the right way.

This change happens sometime between seven and 11 months of age. According to lead author, Patricia Kuhl, “Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that 7-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words.”

What does this mean for you and your baby?

• Talk, talk, talk with your infant. Don’t wait until your child is clearly trying to talk but talk with your baby from the very start, about anything and everything. Hearing your voice stimulates brain areas needed for learning how to talk.
• Turn off the television and the radio, or at least limit their use. Other studies have shown that too much background talking interferes with language development. Let your baby concentrate on you.
• Talk in baby talk. Researchers in this study believe that the sort of slow, exaggerated way of speaking that parents do with small children,  like saying “Hiiiii! How are youuuuu?” may help with the development of speech abilities. Kuhl said this way of speaking “is very exaggerated, and when infants hear it, their brains may find it easier to model the motor movements necessary to speak.” If you find yourself talking baby talk with your infant, don’t stop. You might be doing something important!

Like most skills, learning to talk is more complicated and takes longer to master than it actually appears. And like most developmental abilities, parents’ attention and care are the keys.

Talk with your baby!

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

If school hasn’t started yet for your children, it will soon. That means it’s time to shift from summer flexibility to a routine that can sustain learning.

Here are eight ideas to get the year off on the right foot.

Early to bed, early to rise. It’s still light late into the evening but getting up in time for a good breakfast, a relaxed send-off, and an unhurried walk to the bus stop requires getting to bed on time. Remember that children need at least 10 hours of sleep every night, so count back from the best time to arise and get kids into bed early enough to fit in 10 hours of shut-eye.

You are what you eat. Summertime lends itself to sugary sodas and lemonades, quick snacks, and sketchy meals. School time demands more. Now is the moment to cut out the junk food and stock the fridge and pantry with nutrient dense foods. Smart kids eat smart.

Sunshine works wonders. One joy of summer should continue straight into the school year: outdoor play. The best way to rejuvenate after a stressful day in the classroom is not to sit still even more in front of the TV or computer. The best way is to get out and play.

Accentuate the positive. Summer’s been a fun and relaxed time and the school year should be as relaxed as you can make it too. Students do better when they are unstressed and confident. So avoid making threats or voicing your own worries about your child’s success. Instead, keep things positive.

Slow down, do less. Starting a new school year is tiring. If a child is also starting a new season of soccer, starting a new class in Spanish, and starting a volunteer project in the community, it’s just too much. Let school be the centerpiece of August and September, not just one responsibility of many. Do less.

Establish strong study habits. Don’t wait for your child to fall behind. Get going right away with a daily review of what needs to be learned, practice time, or homework time. Make studying ordinary – a habit – not a chore.

Make a place for school work. Now is the time to clear off the kitchen table or locate a quiet study table and move the sports stuff off it. Putting summer away is hard, but setting up a space for homework is exciting and motivating. Let your child help you shop for pencils and other tools, a desk lamp, and even a cushion for the chair to make the place for school work special.

Include daily downtime. Make certain that not every moment of your child’s day is scheduled. Downtime is important for creative thinking and even for absorbing material that was learned earlier in the day. Let your child kick back and do nothing without hassle.

The school year kicks off with high hopes. Help those hopes come to reality with a little planning ahead of time.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

You know the old saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” I think this was intended to keep kids from blurting out impolite truths like, “This dinner is terrible, Grandma!” But many of us have taken things a bit too far. In many families, children are forbidden to be angry, unhappy, frustrated, or afraid. Negative emotions have become taboo.

Just listen to the moms and dads around you. They tell a child, “Oh, no, you don’t really hate your brother. Give him a kiss and a hug.” They say, “If you’re going to be in such a temper, go to your room!” They say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a baby.” Children who express the emotions they honestly feel are corrected, if those emotions are negative. It’s as if happy talk is the only talk that’s allowed.

This is silly and it’s also unfair. We grownups feel completely justified in sharing our bad moods with everyone around. We yell, we fume, we stomp around and slam things. We feel justified in our expressions of anger and feel just as justified when we sulk, sigh, and express our unhappiness. Moms and dads are allowed the complete range of emotions and even though we might try to tone things down when we’re near the kids, we certainly don’t keep things bottled up when the children aren’t around.

But children are often restricted to expressing a narrow range of emotions. We don’t want to hear them when they’re angry. We expect kids to be civil and calm much more than we expect of ourselves to be, even though children are far less able to control themselves.

So what do we do? We hate it when children yell, throw tantrums, whine and pout. How can we allow kids to express all the emotional bandwidth they actually have without getting angry ourselves?

1. Lower your expectations. Life isn’t always happy. For children, especially, when events frequently seem out of their control, a serene morning is hard to come by. So avoid being surprised when kids get upset. They don’t always have to be happy.
2. Give up being 100% responsible. You know very well that you can’t make someone else happy. If your child is unhappy right now, that’s not necessarily your fault and it’s not necessarily your responsibility to fix. If there’s something you can do to cheer someone up, fine, but your child’s mood doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent.
3. Avoid emotional contagion. Bad moods can infect everyone around if you let them. You’re not being heartless if you don’t join your child in feeling sad, mad, or bad. By staying calm and unruffled yourself, you keep the entire day from spiraling out of control.
4. Be supportive. Many times a child’s disruptive actions are meant to share feelings that are hard to express another way. So your recognition of your child’s feelings might be exactly what is wanted. Say, “I can see you are upset,” or “You feel really angry right now.” Ask your child to tell you about it. Help your child in alternative ways of expressing what’s going on.

There’s a fine line here. Give your children the freedom to feel and express the full range of emotions without having to join your child in expressing negative feelings too. But watch out that you’re not so uninvolved and cool that children feel ignored and rejected.  Strong, capable people lead emotionally rich lives. Make that happen for your children and for yourself.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Maybe your kid is heading off to college this fall. She might already be there, in fact. Maybe your teen decided against college and is working instead. Maybe your teen is still in high school and you’re both wondering if college is the right next step. No matter what the situation, the question is, “What, really, is college for?”

College costs a whole lot of money. In recent years, college graduates have struggled to find jobs they couldn’t have got without going to college at all. If college is worth all the time and money, what value does it provide? Here are some of the benefits of college, only one of which has anything to do with a kid’s future career.

College gives young adults time to develop into functioning adults. We now know that the adolescent brain isn’t fully developed until about the time kids graduate from with a four-year degree. College provides a structured setting in which this final growth can take place.

College provides young adults with experience with making important choices and managing their own affairs. That last bit of brain development happens in the areas devoted to making decisions and seeing consequences. This means that experience in doing just that is important. Selecting courses, deciding on a major, and managing everyday affairs help make this development happen.

College students earn a credential that demonstrates an ability to complete something substantial. It doesn’t matter what the credential is in. What’s important is that a kid stuck with it, did what was required, and managed to earn a degree or other recognition. College grads are hired in fields different from their majors because the major isn’t so important as the fact that the grad actually earned a degree.

College students experience diverse people and points of view. Even if your child goes to the local community college and lives at home, attending college puts her in a bigger pond than high school did and gives her a window on a broader range of ideas.

College is a chance to create life-long connections to individuals and ideas. The people your teen meets at college are the ones who will become his network going forward. These are the people who will know about job opportunities, provide a place to stay when he moves to a new town, and be his cheerleader and support long into adulthood.

College develops intellectual skills that can be applied to many situations. No matter what major your child decides on and no matter what job she actually takes when she graduates, just going to college teaches ways of thinking and of solving problems that are valuable every day. College students acquire tools for thinking about problems and are equipped to solve them

Finally, college provides a possible entry into a particular career. A degree in education fits a person to become a teacher. A degree in accounting fits a person to become a CPA. Some careers require specific preparation and college provides that. But even if a graduate decides to do something completely different from his college major or if there are no jobs in his field, his college experience puts him ahead of others in the job market.

So, what’s college for? It’s for developing young people into better prepared, better equipped adults. Can your child achieve this without going away to school? Maybe. Can your child achieve this at a community college or technical school? Mostly. Can your child achieve this without going to college at all? Possibly. The decision to go to college and the choice of college depend on the teen and his family and certainly one-size does not fit-all.

But college isn’t just the first step towards a job. It’s much, much more than that. Launching a career in a specific field is not so important as all the personal development college provides.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

It wasn’t very long ago – I’m not that old and this was within my lifetime – that doctors thought children younger than three aren’t affected by disruptive events and don’t remember them anyway. Right up until the 1960s, it was common practice for parents of hospitalized babies and toddlers to be asked to stay away and not visit their children at all. Doctors and hospital staff thought that parents just got in the way and that the children wouldn’t suffer any long-term effects of what was really abandonment.

We’ve wised up. Parents are now allowed to room-in with hospitalized children or certainly are allowed to visit pretty much as often as they can. But in many ways we’re still in the Dark Ages when it comes to infants and toddlers. We still imagine that events we’d recognize as traumatic for older children don’t much matter to babies.

This just isn’t so. We now know that infants and toddlers are indeed affected by frightening events, like a fire or a car crash, the prolonged absence of a parent because of work or illness, incidents of domestic violence, parents’ separation or divorce, and the death of someone near and dear to them. Studies using brain imaging and tracking of stress hormones and heart rate demonstrate that the youngest children are just as deeply affected by stressful events as older children are, with the added stress that they cannot understand what’s going on, can’t talk it over with anyone, and have no idea how the future will be.

Studies as part of the Adverse Childhood Experiences project have demonstrated that childhood stress has long-term effects on a person’s health and life success. Other studies have suggested that early stress interferes with secure attachment and even with brain development. We expect two- and three-year-olds to act out in response to stress. It shouldn’t be so surprising that even babies’ behavior may be affected by traumatic events.

Of course, bad things do happen to good people and no one can keep stressful events away. There’s no way we can protect our children (or ourselves) from trauma. But there are some things we can do to reduce the stress load on little children.

1. Starting now, be there for your baby. Establishing a close, supportive relationship with both parents and with other local adults, like a grandparent, provides your child with insurance against trauma later. The time to become one of the people your child counts on in times of trouble is right now.
2. Starting now, be trustworthy to your baby. Tell your child when something is going to happen that he might find scary, like going to the doctor or being left with a babysitter. Even though your child is too young to understand what you’re saying, he will understand your intent. When you leave your child, say good-bye. Don’t sneak out.
3. Permit your baby to have a security object, if she likes. Many toddlers become attached to a blanket or stuffed toy and need to have it with them everywhere. Fine. Don’t get in the way of this or be embarrassed by the ragged, dirty appearance of this best friend. Let your child find comfort where she can.
4. In the middle of a scary event, stay as calm as you can and let your baby know you’re there to keep him safe. Your quiet, soothing presence can reduce your child’s stress and help him to know he’s not alone.
5. After a trauma, expect your child to react. Watch for sleeplessness, fussiness, rage, and disruptions in eating. Notice if your baby seems to fall into depression. These reactions are possible and can become serious issues. Your baby’s mental health is important, so get help if you think help is needed.

Most of all, remember that your child is a real person, no matter how young she is. Even tiny children are aware of what’s going on and are affected by it. While I hope nothing traumatic ever happens to your family, I also hope you’re there for your even your youngest children if something ever does.

Children love to collect stuff. If left to their own devices, some kids would keep every rock and feather they ever saw. Others need to buy complete sets of some toy and can’t be content until they have it all. If your child has a collection of treasures, what should you know about that and what can you do to help him manage it?

Most children do hang onto things. The urge to collect is not usually a sign of any sort of disorder or compulsion. Kids just are fascinated by things and want to keep what they find. In general, collections seem to fall into three categories: nature stuff, commercial stuff, and self-made treasures. Let’s look at each of these.

Nature stuff. Some children love to collect sticks, stones, feathers, leaves, and other interesting bits from the outdoors. If your child is one of these, take a zip-top bag with you on your walks and trips to the park, so there’s a way to carry things. I draw the line at collecting living creatures. Bugs, butterflies, and snails are best off left where they are.

Living creatures might stowaway among the litter in the bottom of the baggie, though. When you get back home, before taking the bag of nature into the house, help your child do a quick sorting. What can stay outside because it’s no longer all that interesting? What does your child really want to keep? You might agree to keep an old bird’s nest but only if it stays in a sealed bag, so critters living in the nest can’t get out.

Commercial stuff. At some point, many children fall in love with Pokémon cards, My Little Pony toys, Lego figures and other things that come in sets. Manufacturers are well aware of children’s love of collecting, so it’s no accident that toys are offered this way. The exhortation to “collect them all!” has been around for decades.

For most children, an infatuation with a particular toy fades eventually. While it’s at a fever pitch, help your child to organize or box her sets and help her to evaluate the need for a new set before it’s purchased. But understand that sooner or later, the collection you helped her spend many dollars on will be outgrown. At that point, your child can sell her collection to other kids just getting started. There’s no need to preserve it for posterity. When its time is over, let it go.

Self-made treasures. For most children, their own artwork is worthy of being collected for only a short time before it fades from view. When my children were little, art was first stuck on the front of the refrigerator for several days, then moved to the top of the refrigerator, where it lived for a week or two.  Anything that made it to the top of the fridge and wasn’t called for in the time it was up there was quietly moved to the trash.

Extraordinary creations might deserve a bit more longevity. Your child’s volcano model from third grade might hang around the back of the closet all through elementary school. We had a model of the moon that didn’t leave the house until the kid who made it was in college and the house was being sold. For these treasures, negotiating a timeline is respectful.

The bottom line is this: don’t make the mistake of cleaning out a child’s room, removing from it everything that made the room hers. Recognize that even though a collection may seem random and messy or even unhygienic to you, it belongs to your child and deserves some grace.

If there’s a family history of hoarding or obsessive-compulsive tendencies, then keep a close eye on your child’s collecting impulses. Collections that have a theme are typical. Collecting everything that one comes into contact with is not. Get professional help if you feel your child’s collecting is getting out of hand.

But for most children, collecting satisfies an impulse to find order in the world and to appreciate the diversity of all the things in it. According to Howard Gardner, creator of Multiple Intelligences theory, collecting is a special ability shared by scientists and other thinkers whose job it is to see differences and categorize similarities.

Collecting is what kids do. It’s a good thing.

We’ve had lots of out-of-town company at our house these past two weeks, with children and aunts and all engaged in lots of activities. The Number One phrase that seemed to come out of people’s mouths the easiest was “Be careful!” That got me to thinking. Is “be careful!” the best thing to say?

Of course our motives are good. We see the potential for injury or breakage and a warning seems in order. But “be careful!” often doesn’t do what we intend. “Be careful!”  – when it does anything at all – seems confusing. That can’t be good.

First of all, “be careful!” isn’t very specific. If there’s a real danger, it makes sense to spell it out. “Be careful with that knife because it’s very sharp” not only gives a warning but tells what action the warning is about and why. But we often don’t say what a child should be careful about. We aren’t very clear.

Second, “be careful!” isn’t very instructive. It tells that there’s danger ahead but not how to avoid it. It would be better to say, “Be careful with that vase. It would be good to hold it with two hands.” This provides a pause in the action that gives a child time to reconsider the possible outcomes but also suggests a way to avoid disaster.

Third, “be careful!” limits a child’s actions. An active child is a learning child but “be careful!” cuts off learning. When our warning makes a child stop and wait for a grownup to do things for her, or makes a child stop and not try at all, then our warning keeps a child, not just safe, but little. Competence and confidence come from doing things. We have to let kids do.

This is the very reason why our “be careful!” often is ignored. Children want to expand their abilities. They are eager to try new things and become more capable today than they were last week. So even though we whine, “be careful!” kids laugh and do things anyway. “Be careful!” when it’s said over and over about even trivial actions loses its punch.

I’ve said that it helps to add to “be careful!” either what a child should be careful about or how to take care with whatever he’s doing. In addition, it helps to ask a child, “what can you do to stay safe?” or “what can you do to keep that safe?”  Asking a child to stop and consider both the danger inherent in an action and what he can do to be proactive in keeping himself or others safe does two good things: it signals our confidence in his ability to be safe and it inspires him to be responsible about planning for safety. Confidence coupled with responsibility is what we really want, isn’t it?

If you find yourself overusing the phrase “be careful!” try being more supportive of your child’s desire to become responsible and confident. See if your child becomes – instead of more reckless – more safe.