Lucy discovers that the world is a good place because her parents can be trusted.
Babies seek reassurance from us to manage their natural anxiety. We need to organise our lives so we can be calm and emotionally present, especially in those first six months.
The second six months of life is when your daughter acquires the basis of all her people skills – the rhythm of interaction and how to be peaceful.
Babies also need to be excited, played with and awakened to the fun of life. Luckily that’s not so hard.
Baby-stimulation products and programmes are usually a waste of money and may even just add stress to your relationship. Don’t educate, just enjoy.
Babies don’t fit into your lifestyle, you have to fit into theirs. Prepare to have your life turned on its head. Accept this and you will have a lot more fun and joy.
Chapter 3
One day your baby is on her feet, toddling, then suddenly nothing in your life is ever the same! No cat is safe, no goldfish, and no precious vase on a coffee table. (Though even crawlers could probably have got to those.)
A girl between two and five has one single purpose: to explore. This is the age when Girls Just Want to Have Fun. She does this with huge determination, and her will is strong. Being stopped annoys her greatly. Of course, sometimes she has to be stopped, but hopefully with distraction, or diversion, or sometimes with a cry of ‘hands off’, along with a scowly face. But in the main, exploring is what you want her to do, and giving her lots to explore makes for a happier and smarter girl.
Because she is a girl, there are extra reasons why this stage matters; in fact how you handle it is crucial. This is the time to give her the greatest range of abilities and areas of confidence that you possibly can. From nature to art to athletics, it all gets its start between one and five.
No Limits to Girlhood
Sometimes the limits we put on girls are totally unconscious. Just recently, a remarkable study was carried out into the way we talk to toddlers. It was discovered that without knowing it, parents talk with a different focus, and about different things, depending on the gender of their child.7
If he’s a little boy, they say,
‘Look! There are THREE rabbits in the field over there.’
If she’s a girl, they say,
‘Look at those CUTE rabbits!’
If it’s a boy they say, ‘Wow, you’ve made that tower TEN BLOCKS HIGH!’
If it’s a girl they say, ‘What a BEAUTIFUL tower you’ve made.’
Can you spot the difference? Boys = numbers, girls = feelings. It’s totally unconscious, but it has huge implications. And what else are we changing? Nobody really knows.
Does this matter? Well, it’s long been known that even though girls are equally able at maths, most boys enjoy maths more and go further with this subject at school, and further into those careers that need some maths (which includes a lot of the best-paid jobs). Girls are often quite frightened by maths. (And to be honest, some girls are frightened by scary male maths teachers, of whom there seemed to be a lot, at least when we were kids.)
I am sure that no parent ever sets out to disadvantage their girls around useful number skills, yet we unconsciously start making the boys practical and the girls emotionally focused.
So here’s a suggestion, perhaps we ought to reverse this. Girls are well wired for being emotionally aware; we can encourage that, but we can also spice our chatter to them with lots of number stuff. ‘How many rabbits can you see?’ And our boys are already wired for spatial knowledge, so ‘those rabbits are nervous, look, they’ve stuck their ears up to listen for us’ can get them thinking about feelings. No need to get obsessive about it, I am willing to make a bet that just reading this has already got you thinking about what you say.
Talk to your toddler daughter about numbers, and counting, and praise her for good engineering with her Lego bricks. Don’t ever assume ‘girls don’t …’ anything, because they can, and they will, if we believe and encourage them early on. Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut, dedicated her life after space to getting girls to study science. It creates more opportunities for them and doubles the talent pool of good scientists, which we definitely need.
Enthusiastic Learning
Because learning and fun are the same thing for a happy child, in the years from one to five your daughter will do more self-educating than thousands of pounds in school fees could ever buy for her later on. It’s very sad when parents are too busy earning in the toddler years to have time to play and do things with their littlies. And it’s pretty tragic if when those kids actually get to school, the love of exploring has died inside them.
Kids learn to love life and learning from the adults around them. On top of their natural curiosity, they will also follow ours and catch our enthusiasm. Watch an experienced mother or father on a bus with a toddler and you will see that they point things out to them with feeling. If you are excited (or even pretend to be, just a little) she will catch your mood.
SECURITY LEADS TO EXPLORING
Though your little girl is no longer a baby, that doesn’t mean she is over the ‘Am I loved and safe?’ stuff. In fact this still applies just as much. The reason is that secure toddlers explore the most. The very first experiments in child development, carried out by people like John Bowlby and the amazing explorer/researcher Mary Ainsworth, found that babies who are ‘securely attached’ (i.e. love and trust their mum or dad to be there) are the ones who go further and are more adventurous.8 Toddlers who are not trusting of their parent or carer to be there for them will cling more and be less willing to go and play with a new toy or a new playmate. (Don’t feel bad if your toddler is still clingy, though, as there is also a fair bit of temperament in this, some toddlers just are more cautious than others.)
What makes them most secure is knowing that you are always around for them.
So they can take that as a given, and spend their emotional energies on new excitements. If they are already anxious about life, new things are just too much to handle.
Think for a minute about your attitude to insects, bugs or nature in the raw. If you say ‘Ick, horrible ants, aargh, get away!’ then of course your daughter will be scared of them too. But if you say ‘wow, have a look at this …’ she will catch your attitude. It doesn’t mean she should poke into spider’s nests or pick up death adders, but you can teach her a sensible interest and she will be fascinated for the rest
