Seriously; that cradle cap just gets everywhere.
It certainly gets my dander up. 
Posted all around my workplace we have bad photocopies of what is obviously a macrame’ sign that says;
“Unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy.”
Well, yes and no–there’s a place for some spoiling and it’s the best part of being a grandparent that you can do this a bit. My grandson visits me and my daughter is perfectly aware that he’s going to veg out watching videos, playing whatever new computer games grandpa has installed and that he’ll probably stay up too late and eat some less than totally nutritious food but the kid is aware that the basic rules are the same even though grandma is quite a bit more lax about some things than mom is. We serve him vegetarian food even though we aren’t veggie, but I sincerely doubt he gets the blueberry pancakes and hot chocolate cut with coffee he usually has for breakfast here when he’s at home. He knows that grandma time is a respite, and we’re all in agreement that as long as he doesn’t try to agitate for grandma rules at home everything’s copacetic. I think it’s good for kids to have a mini-vacation atmosphere at the grandparent’s home and it’s fun for us grands to be harmlessly subversive with tacit parental collusion. He also gets to play with tools a lot more at my house, especially if we go visit my country-living friend–then he gets to play with chainsaws and drive tractors. It makes my daughter a little nervous, but I think kids need to learn how to handle dangerous stuff with competent adults monitoring them.
I had very little experience with kids when I had mine but I’d raised a lot of puppies and I pretty much trained my kids the same way. I believe in training my dogs to respond to very subtle commands and cues and I dislike it when people have to yell and flail at their dogs to get them to mind. So I did the same with the kids, I taught them to watch my face and perfected the “mommy look” and the raised eyebrow and the “nope, uh-uh” headshake.
I don’t really know how to talk to small people so I just talk to them as though they were adults and it seems to work out okay. I think my kids appreciated the fact that I never found it necessary to embarrass them in public and they definitely appreciated the time I took to socialize them and teach them how to behave in a wide variety of settings. To this day you can drop either one of them into a completely foreign environment and they’ll figure it out and adapt quickly because they learned to pay attention to cues and nuances around them. I also fed them a huge variety of foods and didn’t cater to their preferences and dislikes at all so they’ll try anything and have very few hangups about food.
I think my biggest mistake is that I was a more intellectual than emotional parent. Whereas it’s good that I taught them manners and critical thinking and healthy skepticism and gave them a lot of scope to decide for themselves who they wanted to be I don’t think I did nearly as well in bolstering their emotional well being. I wasn’t as physically affectionate then as I find it easier to be with the grandkids now, and I didn’t know how to express my love for them verbally either. If I had it to do over I’d cuddle them a lot more and I’d be a lot more demonstrative than I was. I must’ve done something right though, because my kids turned out to be great adults and they’re my best friends.
My daughter, now, is an amazing parent and I’ve learned a lot from watching how she handles the grandboy as well as my son’s stepdaughter. She has that whole transition thing nailed and can get a cranky three year old to do whatever she wants–all while the kid thinks it’s her own idea! Poetry in motion to watch, really. She’s a person who could use a flock of kids–not that she wants them, but that we’d all be better off for having the kids she raises in our society.
Oh, that used to make me sooooo mad! When my younger daughter was very small (maybe a year old) her doctor suspected she might have a food allergy. Rather than subject her to annoying and expensive tests, we placed her on a very simple diet. The plan was to gradually add a single food at a time to see if the symptoms returned.
Enter the “nice” bank teller, etc., offering her candy and other stuff, which I then had to take away. I’d tell them off. Thanks a lot, now I have to look like the evil one. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know she had allergies.” But it doesn’t matter what the reason is, the parent gets to decide what a child may and may not have.
People should ALWAYS ask the parent first. And I never worried about offending a host. They should worry about offending me!
And then there’s my late mother-in-law, who (no exaggeration) almost killed my first child at the approximate age of two by giving her a caramel. I had told her and told her, don’t give the baby candy. Next thing I know the kid has a sticky caramel stuck in her throat, literally choking to death, unable to draw breath. Luckily my husband was able to get the stuff out.
I like, “unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy”.
Angel, I’m glad things are better, and I feel your pain. I also screwed up sleep very badly by always nursing him down until six months. Sigh. Now he’s a year, and while he’s still a pretty crappy sleeper, he’s miles better than he was.
This is why my other brother and I decided we couldn’t develop the joke of our pretend choking the baby and his pretending to gag and flail like Bart Simpson. You just know eventually he’ll try the other part on a kid at school and cause real harm, get in trouble, or both.
Then there’s the trick of “Yayyyy!!” when then fall down so they don’t get the idea that everything is the end of the world and worthy of a crying jag. If it actually hurts, they’ll cry no matter what. They don’t need encouragement to do that.
This is a great thread. As ours is just 3 months. we haven’t learned anything yet. 
Great to hear from others with more experience.
I’ll just add some advice from my sister. Make sure to follow through. If you tell a child to do or not do something, then make sure that your instructions get followed. You see that, where parent yell at their kids to stop doing something, then turn their back and the kid goes right back to what they were doing.
There’s things in which The Nephew responds better to me than to his parents, but I think that’s in great part due to the fact that, well, I’m not his Mom. If he gets stubborn and starts running around with his Mom (he runs away staying exactly outside of reach), eventually she starts whinning and gives up; me, I can afford to say “I’m not your Mom and you’re not more stubborn than I am,” then I give him a raised-eyebrow kind’a look and he sighs and more-or-less complies. This would be terribly tiresome if I happened to get him for more than a few hours at a time. My mother’s version is “I’m not your Mom, I don’t have the energy to run after you, and I’m not going to run after you,” then she sits down.
Someone mentioned “don’t let the kids run around during meals.” I’d like to add “there’s no need to finish everything in the plate, but if you’re done eating you’re done eating.”
The couple times that I’ve been giving the kid a meal without his parents present, once he stopped being interested I asked “OK, so you’d rather go paint than finish the steak? If you don’t finish the steak now, your next meal is midafternoon snack” He thinks about it, decides which is which and either eats a bit more until he thinks it will hold him up till his next meal or, indeed, starts painting. Actions have consequences, he’s not allowed to have any snacks or sweets or suddenly decide he wants dessert: the next meal is the one we said. His parents approach is that the plate (which usually contains more food than his mother’s) must be cleaned entirely, at least two pieces of fruit must be eaten at the end of lunch, and if that means running after the kid all through the house so be it. The mere idea of running like that after a 3yo makes me tired…
When my grandmother got fed up with her kids, she’d say “my grandchildren shall avenge me!”
Recently Mom egged the Nephew on some bad behaviour and Bro said “hey, Mom, they’re supposed to avenge you but you’re not supposed to use them as a revenge tool, ok?” Mom apologized and said she won’t do it again in the kind of way that means she really won’t.
I’m late with this, and also not a parent, but I would like to chime in that forcing your child to eat healthy food in no way guarantees that they will do so in the future. My parents were very, very firmly anti-junk food. Our bread was always whole-wheat multi-grain stuff, we never had candy, only the natural, sugar-free peanut butter, and so on.
It did not work; I’m a total junk-food addict who generally thinks that the more artificial preservatives and sugar in something, the better. In my (wholly uneducated) opinion, it’s about moderation: expose the wee ones to the good, hearty stuff regularly, but also let the kids have their horrid peanut butter and PopTarts sometimes.
So true. I think it’s important to offer mostly healthy choices at dinner, but there’s nothing wrong with occasional dessert or a little treat in the lunch box or dinner consisting of tater tots and burgers sometimes.
Kids will pick up some of their taste in food from their parents, but not all. There are junk-food junkies like NinjaChick whose parents were health nuts, and there are people like me who love Thai (and other ethnic) food whose parents would be afraid to try it. Kids come with their own personalities, and those personalities will color their tastes in food.
I knew people who ate a lot of sugary cereals when they got to college. Their parents had never let them have those, which gave them a “forbidden fruit” air of mystery and excitement.
Oh, I did this. Sugary cereal and non-healthy breakfast foods were a huge treat at home*. Then I went away to college and kind of went on a multi-year binge of chocolate pop-tarts and Lucky Charms. I’ve eased off a bit, but still eat it all the time.
*Really rare. The only time I recall ever actually getting a box of marshmallow-having cereal when I asked for it was when I needed to have surgery on my eye when I was six. My parents took the ‘give her whatever she asks for to make ourselves feel less guilty’ approach to that.
I think the whole “clean your plate” thing is a mistake. It’s teaching the kid to keep eating, even though he is full.The American Dietetic Association says “clean your plate” is quite likely to lead to problems, possibly a food aversion or a weight problem later in life. IANADoctor or Dietician, but if he’s eating more food than is on his mom’s plate, it sounds like it’s likely to make him overweight sooner rather than later.
And that brings up one mistake I see parents make all the time. Putting more food on a child’s plate than he can eat. Little tummies are little. They don’t need adult size portions, and they can always have more if they need it. So don’t give them large amounts to start with. Not only do you run the risk of teaching them to see large portions as normal, but sometimes you just overwhelm them and they don’t want to eat at all.
This is what happens with our son - you put too much in front of him, even too much variety, and he is completely uninterested in the food. So what we do now is put food out in just ones or twos. In other words, a small serving of meat, a small serving of vegetable. If one of those dishes is something he’s not familiar with, always pair it with something he knows and likes. And don’t push or hover because he’ll push right back.
If he likes that, he can have more. Or he can try the starch of the day or have fruit for dessert. And when he says he’s done, he’s done and there is no power on this earth that will induce him to eat if he doesn’t want to. That’s actually something I appreciate and envy. I wish I listened to my body as keenly as he does.
If you want to see me go ballistic, just tell your child who is obviously finished eating to “just eat a little bit more.” Why do people do that?
I tell children eating when you are not hungry is like having to go to the bathroom when you don’t really have to go–something they can all identify with. Nobody should even force food on a child. When they are hungry, they will eat; when they are not hungry, they will stop eating.
My mom did the opposite. In an attempt to keep me from getting overweight like she was, she’d constantly stop me from eating when she felt I’d had enough. Her common and most hated phrase for me was “You don’t need that.” Didn’t matter if I was really hungry or not, she wouldn’t let me have something if she felt I had eaten enough already. Boy oh boy did that backfire Can we say food hoarding?