I Come to the Garden Alone

As a young mother, I loved mornings. Each one was a new beginning, blotting out the "if only" of yesterday. Perhaps mornings will always mean reaching for the elusive perfect day.

In Garden Graces: The Wisdom in Growing Things, Janice Elsheimer writes about the first flowers to awaken in the morning. They call her to the garden, alone. "As often as not," she reflects, "the music of that old hymn, 'I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses,' comes to mind. And I pray."

The words strike a chord with me. The hymn was the first duet my sister and I sang as children. Oh well, maybe "duet" is fudging a bit. My musically gifted sister sang. I twisted my skirt in my fist, swayed from side to side, and stared at my shiny new patent leather shoes. But to this day, the words, "And He tells me I am His own" go right to my heart where they linger and comfort.

Is that not the message you give your little ones, no matter how imperfect the days? There are no perfect parents anywhere, nor does your child expect you to be one. Young children are forgiving. They also are constant motion, filling the space around them with restless energy that spills over in tears and upsets. But they are yours! No one anywhere in the world can lead and love them like you. The little one who acted out from dawn to dusk today is the child who most needs your attention. Her errant behavior is begging, "No matter how hard I push or how headstrong I am, will you still love me?" And your answer?

Every kissed boo-boo, every tantrum that ends in an understanding embrace, and every good night prayer rewrite the same message: "You are my own. And the joy we share, none other has ever known."

A Colorful Thought: Color your child with gentle words of unconditional love that last a lifetime.

The Emotions of Childhood

"I get it! I finally get it! You taught me in your classes how important the early years are, but today, I really get it!" Carlson, my dentist and long-time friend, was talking to me in his office. "I read in my medical journal about a woman caught in the tangles of Alzheimer's," Carlson explained. "Yet, she wrote a book while it pummeled her back to the painful emotions of her childhood. The emotions were buried, but never resolved. For 80 years! Now they bedevil her mind again." Carlson shook his head and confided, "I finally understand the hurt of my childhood."

Before It's Too Late: Alzheimer's: Return of Childhood Emotions by Jane A. McAllister is Jane's story. A woman of great intelligence despite the disease, Jane writes, "The end of my life story is a painful shadow of the beginning, stored in the haunted halls of memory." The resentment, desperate isolation, and uncontrollable anger and guilt "are the same emotions that colored the earlier years of my life. Vivid and unsettling, they return as raging emotions."

That is why I write Colored with a Positive Crayon. It's a myth that children have no memories of their early years. What you do with your child today echoes for a lifetime. I am passionate that you know developmental stages so you understand acceptable behavior. I'm passionate that you respect your child's feelings. If ignored, feelings bury themselves. But they're alive, and someday explode. Jane tells us that.

A child is the last to know what she needs. That's why your child must have boundaries, and discipline that teaches. She needs endearing bedtimes to help her separate from you, and cheery mornings when you wrap your love around her again. The experiences of your child's early years will be stored forever in her hallowed halls of memory.

A Colored Thought: You color your child early with a positive crayon when you honor and respect her feelings.

A Daddy Marine

We hadn’t seen our cousin and her husband for what seemed like ages. But some friends step right back into your life as steady as the metronome that guided my piano practice as a child. We didn’t miss a beat. Reconnecting with family is like that. Perhaps it’s the pendulum of memories.

Or perhaps reconnecting means sharing a “heart concern” with someone who cares. The highlight of our togetherness was a phone call of hope from their daughter, Kathy. Six months pregnant and remembering her three miscarriages, Kathy was elated with the all-is-well-ultra-sound-images of the tiny infant in her womb. It’s odd how happiness shared, doubles the joy. And on the flip side, how misfortune experienced alone, doubles the sadness. Kathy, caught in the separation of war, will give birth alone. Her marine husband, deployed to the Near East for the fifth time, is due home three months after the birth of their firstborn.

Like most military daddies, Kathy’s man is eager to stay connected. He already knows a father is critical to a daughter’s sense of self. He understands it is a father who holds up the first lens through which a little girl assesses her femininity.

But for now, this marine daddy wants somehow to bridge the miles. I suggested he wear a tee shirt (what’s closer to his heart?) and without laundering, send it to Kathy. And follow that with a Skype video call of him reading aloud a happy, rhythmic bedtime book (already on its way to him). Soon after birth, I picture the infant’s head resting on a crumpled tee shirt on Kathy’s shoulder, rocked to sleep by the rhythm of daddy reading to her from half-way across the world. The little girl will know the sounds and smells and love of her daddy Marine before the first moment he holds her. Sweet.

A Colorful Thought: An infant's sensory learning begins with the sounds, scents, smiles, and touch of those who love her.

Gently into Sleep: A Bedtime Ritual

"Listen up, everyone!" the excited mom cried out as she rushed into our evening workshop. "For the first time in two and a half years, Thomas went to sleep without sobbing!" She was exultant! Just the week before, the class of young parents cried out, in unison, for help.

"Bedtime should be the sweetest part of the day," they lamented. "But it dissolves into tears and tantrums and angry words. It's exhausting!" So we stapled together the pages of a simple, step-by-step bedtime book. That night, Thomas went to sleep without sobbing. Eventually, all gussied up professionally with pocket pages and charming, collage-cut illustrations, the little book became Gently into Sleep: A Bedtime Ritual.

Bedtime begins in the morning. If a child has your focused attention only at bedtime, he will do all he can to prolong your closeness. But a child who is comforted and cuddled during the day is more likely to sleep well at night.

Then, because you are the authority in your home, your child needs you to set the beginning and the ending of bedtime. But all the choices in between are his. Going to sleep becomes his responsibility. Wait! A contradiction? No. Good parenting! When you give a child ownership of a decision, you open the door to his cooperation. I've rarely known a child to say "No!" to a choice he has made. A little guy who sequences the steps of his own bedtime ritual will follow it. Happily. Right into bed. And gently into sleep.

Thomas and his missionary mom took his bedtime book with them to Germany. No matter how strange the sounds of the new language around him, Thomas knew the sounds of these words by heart: "Sleep well. Sweet dreams." And he did.

A Colorful Thought:
A bedtime ritual warmly colored with love is the security blanket of childhood.

Moments of Learning

Many years ago, my artsy friend Val taught me an extraordinary lesson about childhood.

I was leading young moms in a discussion in Val's charming (and child-proofed) family room. Our topic was how a child's confidence, or lack of it, develops between the ages of one and two years. Surprising as it sounds, that is the major developmental task of a one-year-old. A little one's confidence is either built up by loving approval of her impulsive moments of learning, or torn down by endless no-nos and corrections. It is confidence to explore with all her senses that brings explosive new learning into a child's brain.

Val nodded. She stood and reached for a lovely "objet d'art" looking down on us from a shelf above her head. Val placed the ballerina, dressed in gorgeous hues of gold, on her coffee table. Then she called her two toddlers to come and touch! The children's fingers wandered like shy sand crabs over the delicate dancer while Val explained the words "smooth" and "glassy" and "fragile." Satisfied, the girls watched Val return the treasure to a waiting shelf.

"One day, when my children's hands and feet are steadier, I'll put the dancer on the coffee table to stay," Val explained. "The girls will know a friend is joining their play and they'll watch over her. But for now, I'm teaching them to notice and respect beautiful things, like my artist mother taught me. I'm confident (she smiled at her use of the word) that, like me, the children's love of beauty will bring joy to their lives."

In that moment, I was the learner. Val taught me, just as you will teach your children. Don't wait for elusive hours of time that never come. It is in moments – in clumsy, curious moments of discovery – that children gain confidence to be a learner. A vital part of that learning is to "notice and respect beautiful things." Perhaps that is what God intended when He colored His majestic world.

A Colorful Thought: Color your child's confidence with the crayon of approval that lasts a lifetime.

Mae Mobley's Remembering

In The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a wise and loving black maid devotes herself to the seventeenth white child she is raising. Mae Mobley is her Baby Girl! Dismayed that the child's mother demeans her, Aibileen speaks in whispers to Mae Mobley's heart. Her whispers fill the child with good thoughts she can believe about herself, thoughts no one can steal away. When Aibileen is forced to walk out of the child's life, she tells it this way.

"Law, I feel like my heart's gone bleed to death. 'I got to go, baby, you my last little girl,' I say. It just ain't by my own choosing. 'Baby Girl,' I say, 'I need you to remember everything I told you ... about what you are.'

"I look deep into her rich brown eyes and ... I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. She is tall and straight. She is proud. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full-grown woman.

"And then she say it, just like I need her to. 'You is kind,' she say to herself, 'you is smart. You is important.'

"Oh Law, I feel like she done just given me a gift. I cry and say, 'Thank you, Baby Girl.'"

The whispered messages, colored with an indelible crayon, will keep playing on the tape recorder of Mae Mobley's remembering.

In the same way, whatever messages you give your child – with your tone of voice, or body language, or words – record on her internal tape recorder. The erase button on a child's tape recorder is elusive and erratic. The messages of childhood keep playing the whole of a child's life, like unforgettable melodies that linger in our heads.

And your messages? Catch her doing good. Notice when she's kind. Praise her for being helpful. Empathize with her feelings. Draw attention to her very trying to get something right. Smother her with approval.

She believes you! Your messages become the messages in her head that guide her, like an immense magnetic pull, to become the person you tell her she is.

Oh, how I hope they leave the scene of Mae Mobley's remembering, "You is kind. You is important." in the movie adaptation. For all of us to remember.

A Colorful Thought: Color the memory tape of your child's early years with a brilliant, positive crayon that never fades.

"Hey, Mizz Nelsen!"

I trumped the given curriculum for the entire school year with the theme of curiosity. DeShawn, my least-involved kindergartner, hovered for weeks on the sidelines of learning. I don't know what triggered the moment he announced in morning news, "Hey, Mizz Nelsen! I'm curious 'bout what we're gonna be curious 'bout today." Then DeShawn cracked up with pride over his own play on words. And I cracked up with him, delighted that we jumpstarted a child's mind with curiosity.

Crawling babies, toddlers, and preschoolers are the epitome of curious learners. You, too, catapult a little one's mind into learning when you 1) childproof your home and 2) never slap her hands.

Maria Montessori, a front runner in early childhood education, believed a child's hands are her tools for exploring. Maria was adamant that slapping or restraining a child's hands smothers the very curiosity that fuels her fire for learning. Imagine what would happen to the ecstatic face of the little one in the above picture if you slapped her hands for touching the diapers, the very things her hands insist she touch.

Oh, yes, you may have to remove your little one from tempting electronic controls, which draw her like a magnet. But repeated removals and redirection are far better than repeated slaps. Tell her, "You may not play with the television, but you may play with these toys." Redirection, substitution, and diversion are the effective tools of discipline for a small child driven to explore.

One well-meaning father told me, "I'll teach my child to mind on the spot. When I say 'don't touch,' I mean don't even think about it!" It is far easier to put away the lovely pottery you bought in Maine than to exhaust yourself protecting the very things your child's hands want to touch.

Some morning announce, "Hey, little one. I'm curious 'bout what we're gonna be curious 'bout today." Maybe you'll crack up together! (Look for my next blog on mere minutes of learning.)

A Colorful Thought: Color your child's curiosity with the warm reds and yellows of encouragement.