Good day to you, friends! Ekaterina Kes is with you. I am a clinical, child and family psychologist. Over 20 years of practice, I have conducted over 5,000 consultations with children and adults. Therefore, I have something to tell you and share when it comes to education.
Quite often, when parents come to meet me, they start the conversation like this:
“When our baby was first born, we thought we should just wait out the first year. All this colic, teething, etc. Then it will be easier. But it turned out that everything was completely wrong.
Now we have much more problems, because the child began to be capricious not only when something hurts. Tantrums start from scratch and continue until the child gets what he demands.
The child controls us through constant whining and whims. We don’t want to punish him and quarrel, because this makes us very uncomfortable in our souls, but we don’t know what to use other than an angle, shouting or threats.
We know that this difficult period must end someday, but now we are even more tired than when caring for the baby. Help!"
And I understand these moms and dads. With the advent of a child, our lives change forever. It is clear that the first months or even one or two years of his life we completely devote ourselves to caring for the baby.
But this does not mean that we now do not have other social roles. We need to go to work and earn money, we want to keep fit and exercise, find time to read, draw, play guitar and other hobbies. For myself!
In the end, parents need to spend time together and maintain tender feelings for each other. This is also incredibly important for a child. He himself does not yet fully understand how much he needs a strong family.
However, what career, sport, hobbies or recreation can you talk about when you are stuck in “Groundhog Day”, where whims are replaced by whining, and whining by hysterics? And even in shops, clinics and other crowded places.
Mom spends the whole day trying to simultaneously take care of the child, do a bunch of household chores, go to the store and somehow cope with a couple of whims, three bouts of whining and one major tantrum.
Of course, her nerves are already on edge. In the evening, a tired dad comes home from work and finds himself in a “vice” between an irritated wife and a capricious child. As a result, no one has strength, energy and a good mood.
Method No. 5. Take a bath or shower
We actively use water to relieve stress. And we passively use water to relieve tension. For example, if at 6 or 7 in the morning in winter in Moscow the baby got me up to do his big “business”, and after that he gets worried and doesn’t fall asleep: he spins around and neither here nor there and his chest doesn’t calm him down and it’s just not normal to stay awake maybe, but I want to sleep (for the life of me), then I take him in my arms and quietly crawl into the hot bath. I light a candle or a small lamp in it, draw some nice water and lie in it with the baby (he is on my stomach or on my back, his legs are partially lowered into the water). I'm dozing. I wait until he knocks with his arms and legs in half an hour, finishes big or small things (I drain the water, of course, if “big ones” happen) and crawl into bed, where I give out my breasts. After this, I am provided with another 1-2 hours of deep sleep. If the baby did the same thing in the morning of a warm spring day at sea, I have breakfast (even at 6 in the morning) and go for a walk with him so that I can go to bed early in the evening and synchronize our rhythms. That is, it’s about my comfort, which I will pass on to the baby in any case.
If I don’t want to sleep myself and am ready to exercise physically, and the baby is nervous, then I don’t get into the bath with him, but simply fill it with comfortable water (30-36 degrees) and bathe him with procedures like “bathing the baby in a large bathtub” . This gives him distraction and exercise, followed by sound sleep. In this case, the baby rarely poops in the water, so you can not drain the water for several hours, but simply top it up with hot water and bathe him again if his nervousness returns. Cry - if feeding and disembarkation does not go well - go to the bath - rest - go to the bath, etc. This is for long winter Moscow days, when walking does not take up the central part of the day.
