It’s reality-check time! You’re at least four months into your tour of parenting and the complexity of child-training is starting to multiply. As your baby matures, both constant and variable factors influence his or her development and by five-months of age, the babyhood transitions require your attention. How will you respond? Certainly not by abandoning that which has brought you so much success-your baby’s routine. No, you will want to preserve the order and structure that brings security to your baby and stability to your home.
What behaviors can and should you expect from your pretoddler? Feeding time for your pretoddler, for example, is now more than a response controlled by a sucking reflex. For the pretoddler, mealtime is part of a very complex, conscious interaction between what the child does and what his parents expect him to do. Right and wrong conduct will be encouraged, discouraged, and guided when necessary. In fact, right and wrong patterns of behavior will now be part of your baby’s entire day. That’s why feeding time, waketime, and bedtime provide wonderful opportunities for training.
One phrase you will hear us emphasize over and over again is “Begin as you mean to go.” The Babyhood Transition series was designed to assist parents in establishing the right patterns of learning for their child in the critical periods of brain formation and adaptation. Those patterns form learning structures that assist the child throughout his or her early development. Just as cartilage strengthens and turns into bone, so also learning patterns develop and form the basis of future moral and academic learning. Therefore, the first patterns established need to be right patterns. Thus, begin as you mean to go!
This manual goes hand-in-hand with a two-part DVD series by the same title. To keep the book coordinated with the video presentation, we included a series of “Segment Summary Review” sheets. The reviews correspond with specific lessons and summarizes the key points covered by our presenters. While the book can be used apart from the video presentation, we believe your learning experience will be maximized when the two are used together.
Finally, as was the case with Preparation for Parenting, we can give you trustworthy ideas and workable solutions, but not every possible application. As you read through each lesson, it is vital that you think in terms of principle. Understanding a ‘principle’ of parenting, derived from your own hierarchy of beliefs and values, is a greater asset than just having a list of ‘how-to’ answers. Principle parenting is wisdom parenting! We know many rewarding experiences are just around the corner as you move into the next phase of parenting. Enjoy your pretoddler
