Posts Tagged parenting
HUM MUMS Zine February 2010
Posted by Jen in Newsletters on February 1st, 2010
Making Your Partnership a Priority
by Jen Briar-Bonpane
Even without children, long-term partnership can be a bumpy road at times. When we add children to the mix, it indelibly changes our relationship with our partner.
This change is full of amazing, joyful, miraculous aspects. Of course, there are the more challenging shifts as well. With the responsibilities that come with parenting, the upkeep of our relationship with our partner generally gets bumped to the end of a long list of more pressing priorities.
There is less focused time together, less intimacy, more things to negotiate, and less individual time to refill the well to make us patient partners. When we enter the realm of parenthood, we’re no longer only our partner’s spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, or partner – suddenly we’re someone’s mother or father, too. Our bodies are now clung to, climbed on, and not entirely our own. This can really change our interest in and energy for intimacy with a partner. Then there are the pressures of planning for our children’s health care, childcare, schooling, and development….we are loaded with hefty decisions to make.
Ahh… but, “What about us?” we might think in those fleeting moments when our parenting minds get to wander beyond the endless questions of snack, school, discipline, sleep, and potty. “Remember us?”… If you’ve fallen into the easily traveled path of relationship neglect after children, you’re not alone. It’s as if there is a gravitational pull toward the responsibilities and joys of parenting that in turn makes it more difficult to connect with our partners like we used to. Read the rest of this entry »
Hum Mum’s Zine November 2009
Posted by Jen in Newsletters on November 1st, 2009
Relationships
Download November 09 Issue pdf
What is the best “investment” you can make in your child’s life? Among the winning answers seems to be focusing on the quality of your relationship with your child. A highly responsive parenting style called attachment parenting centers around building a loving and secure relationship between parent and child. Research has shown that children who have at least one parent or caregiver who “responds appropriately, promptly and consistently to needs” (also called secure attachment), do better in nearly all areas of development and gain healthy traits that help them throughout their lifespan.
Here are some of the benefits of secure attachment by age as compared to children who did not experience secure attachment (from Attachment 101 By Willemsen and Marcel):
- 0-3 years: more independent and have an easier time separating from parent without anxiety, positive sense of self, increased self-awareness, enhanced sensorimotor skills
- Preschool years, Ages 3-5: better able to play in non-destructive and socially acceptable ways with peers, more readily able to learn from environment, advanced language development
- Middle Childhood: better relationships with teachers and peers, early reading skills, more socially competent, fewer behavior problems
- Adolescence: more likely to be socially well-adjusted, better able to regulate their own emotions, stronger internal sense of what behaviors are appropriate, more able to cope with stress
- Adulthood: higher relationship satisfaction with partners/spouses, more likely to form secure attachment with his/her own child, less likely to abuse his/her child, higher self-esteem, greater job satisfaction
Fostering attachment with your child can start at birth. Dr sears offers what he calls the 7 Baby B’s tools, for promoting healthy attachment in the earliest months in a child’s life:
