Babywise II

by Gary Ezzo and Dr. Robert Bucknam

Synopsis: On Becoming Babywise II: This series teaches the practical side of introducing solid foods, managing mealtimes, nap transitions, traveling with your infant, setting reasonable limits while encouraging healthy exploration and much more. You will learn how to teach your child to use sign language for basic needs, a tool proven to help stim-ulates cognitive growth and advance communication. Apply the principles and your friends and relatives will be amazed at the contentedness, alertness, and happy disposition of your toddler.

Introduction: It’s reality-check time! You are at least five months into your tour of parenting duty by now. The complexity of child-training has begun to come into focus. You have learned that as your baby matures, both constant and variable factors continually influence her development. But now, as the baby moves into the pretoddler phase, the variables of growth begin to play a more dominant role. How will you respond to those variables? Certainly not by abandoning that which has brought you so much success-your baby’s routine. No, you will want to preserve the order and structure that brings security to your baby and stability to your home.

You must now become principle-minded, learning how to rightly respond to the emerging variables of your pretoddler’s life. You need to know what to expect, when to expect it, and at what ages different patterns of behavior will normally emerge. Knowing the progressive nature of growth and development enables you as a parent to set standards of expected behavior, and provides the guidance needed to help your child reach your behavioral goals.

What behaviors can and should you expect from your pretoddler? Feeding time for your pretoddler, for example, is now more than a response controlled by a sucking reflex. For the pretoddler, mealtime is part of a very complex, conscious interaction between what the child does and what his parents expect him to do. Right and wrong conduct will be encouraged, discouraged, and guided when necessary. In fact, right and wrong patterns of behavior will now be part of your baby’s entire day. That’s why feeding time, waketime, and bedtime provide wonderful opportunities for training.

This book will emphasize the importance of establishing learning patterns-right learning patterns. Those patterns form learning structures that assist the child throughout his or her early development. Just as cartilage strengthens and turns into bone, so also learning patterns develop and form the basis of future moral and academic learning. Therefore, the first patterns established need to be right patterns. Researchers and educators agree that growth and development take place in stages, with new experiences building upon previous ones. Babywise II is designed to assist parents in establishing the right patterns of learning for their child, providing the necessary framework for the development, over time, of many crucial life skills.

The practical nature of Babywise II allows any parent of a pretoddler to take advantage of the information provided. But those best served are the graduates of our first book, Babywise. In Babywise, we introduced the foundational principles that Babywise II is built upon, including routine feedings, naps, and the establishment of healthy nighttime sleep. (A baby usually can learn to sleep through the night within the first six to eight weeks of life.) We encourage parents not familiar with the concepts of Babywise to first become acquainted with them before moving forward with Babywise II.

As is true with Babywise, we can give you trustworthy principles, but not every possible application. As you read, it is vital that you think in terms of principle. Once armed with a principle, you can apply that principle in a way that makes sense in your baby’s specific situation.

The next ten months are critical. The stakes are high. From this point forward, you are going after the heart of your child. Many parents place a greater emphasis on a child’s psychological health than on his or her moral health. Parental preoccupation with psychological nurturing is not the medicine for the problem; too often, such preoccupation is the problem itself, producing emotionally fragile children. Moral health, with an emphasis on heart training, is the medicine preventing emotional deficiencies. Babywise II will advance that cause for you.

In the back of this book we have added three appendices: Appendix A-”Child Language Development”; Appendix B-”Teach Your Child to Sign”; and Appendix C-”Thoughts on Potty Training.” There is much helpful, totally practical information in these appendices; read them at your leisure. Many rewarding experiences are ahead for you. Happy pretoddler parenting!

Gary Ezzo