My reading again...

This morning, I was reading the book “chong2 tai1 er2 kai1 shi3 de4 yu4 er2 fa3” by Prof Shichida. I was reading about the exercise for infants. Hmm… something like what Glen Doman recommended in “How smart is your baby”. Heng ah… I found this book and had practiced it. Kiasu me hor? Hahaha… nah... I found it very "siong" to practice everything in the book. A lot of time is involved in preparing the materials, and it's not easy to catch baby in the mood for the activities illustrated there. I can only try my best :) Then I browsed through the middle of the book. I zoomed into the discipline section. It illustrates about discipline from birth! Wow! We gotta really understand baby’s / toddler’s emotions, behaviour, and what they like/dislike at a particular stage of development. Let me write about what’s written for a 1 year old toddler. It will remind me of what I should do for Aloysius at this stage.

At 1 year old, Aloysius will start to walk. At this stage, he will be very interested in everything and anything. He’s at the experimental stage. Hence, we should not keep saying “cannot”, but let him try whatever he wants. If we disallow him to do things he wants to experiment, nor things he want to touch, he will have a feeling of dis-satisfaction. We will only end up with a child who lost interests in things and is rebellious. We should give him lots of space to explore and play.

There are advantages and disadvantages of carrying him. Carrying himm too much at this stage when he’s starting to walk, will cause him to lose interests in walking. And also lose the opportunity to nurture independence.

Aloysius, at this stage, will like to do things for himself, such as, feeding himself. It’s advisable to let him self-feed despite the mess. At this time, we can start to train him to feed himself from a spoon. He will only eat and play at this stage. When he’s tired of playing, he will want to be fed. It’s better to feed him small meals, 5 times a day! And not to give him titbits, else he will not want to eat normal meals.

He will imitate me to hold a pen. We can give him a pencil and let him draw. Scribbling is the first step to nurture creativity.

At this stage, he will still love to be carried. However, we should encourage him to walk to nurture his independence.