To Promote Good Sound Sleep for Your Child:

1. Eat mainly organic/biodynamic foods and a balanced diet. Avoid processed foods and pharmaceutical drugs. Eat healthy fats, such as coconut, olive oil and butter from grass fed animals.
2. Provide a beautiful environment, natural materials and simplicity.
3. Avoid electronics when you can and too many modern devices. Turn out the lights.
4. Spend time outdoors, enjoying Nature.
5. Practice positive values, thankfulness, reverence, awe and wonder.
6. Cultivate your Spiritual life with prayers, blessings, contemplation, arts and meditation. Acting as a Role Model is the best teacher for young children.
7. Provide protection. Choose outings in the world carefully.
8. Keep your child warm with natural fibers.
9. Touch and hug a great deal.
10. Rock, sing and soothe on a regular basis.
11. Give images of angels who guide and protect, soothe and nurture.
12. Discover the essentials and discard/ avoid the rest.
13. Review the day, simply forwards or backwards. Tell meaningful stories.
14. Create a ritual which honors sleep as a holy activity spent in our Spiritual homeland receiving rejuvenation and inspiration.
15. Value the threshold times of sleeping and waking as holy times when you can deeply connect with your child.
16. Create an inner picture of the next day for your child every evening. Angels will then give you input in your sleep.
17. Cultivate quiet listening.
18. Allow your child to imitate what you want them to do rather than give them instructions. This is called non- verbal education. Take care not to overintellectualize with your child.
19. Observe your child, reflect on this and ask the Angels for guidance.
20. Establish a rhythmic daily practice of sleeping, eating and daily. This supports the organs and the production of hormones and melatonin which promotes sleep and health.

                       Things Which Act Against Good Sound Sleep:

1. Poor quality of food. It does not support the Life Force and Sense of Life necessary for sleep.
2. Media such as television, movies, computers, pads, etc. creates doubt, worry and fear through characterizations which are untruthful, ugly and fabrications. The quality of the tones are not life enhancing.
3. Movement deprivation has a damaging effect on the nervous system.
4. Pollution negatively impacts the body and sensory experience.
5. Negative thoughts alienate the self from the Spiritual World.
6. Overintellectualization overstimulates the nervous system in a negative way.
7. Hardened overly materialistic thoughts incarnates the human being too deeply into the body.
8. An arrhythmic life does not guide the organs into a healthy function.
9. Overstimulation locks the self into the physical body and does not promote the soul and spirit entering the spiritual realities of the night.
10. An overly electric and technological environment overstimulates the nerves which interferes with sleep.

While very young children may appear to use logic, their primary modes of learning are imitation and movement; that is the willing soul. Before you begin to speak begin the movement you wish them to imitate and make a general statement, not command, such as we are putting our shoes on now.” Better yet, sing it! This strengthens their willing soul. Young children respond more positively to statements, because questions illicit thinking, which is a part of the brain that needs the underpinning of sound movement skills to function more efficiently. Stories of similar situations from your childhood captivate children as they begin to form inner pictures of your words. Picture forming appeals to their sense of life.

Use gestures and begin the movement of putting on shoes as you tell the story.  Appeal to your child’s imagination.  If he/she likes trains, the engineer is putting on boots, because he/she has a big load to haul. Most choices should be made by the adult.  For example: in the winter, spring shoes are put away and the child is offered the tall snow boots or the blue ones. When a child makes choices their life force is used for mental activity, rather than to grow a healthy body. Then their sense of well being suffers & cooperation becomes difficult. Create the activity ahead of time. The shoes, jackets, etc., can be set out the night before. The form carries the function. Doing these activities the same time every day will help. The organs become healthier, thus the child’s sense of well being is nurtured. They are more cooperative when they experience rhythm.

 Your child is able to be cheerful and cooperative when they experience a bodily sense of well being. Think of yourself as the conductor. Children respond to a self confident parent by imitating confidence. Prepare yourself ahead of time by visualizing and planning how you will conduct the activity. Order, predictability and repetition cultivate confidence and well being. When your child feels a strong sense of life and self they will be  more respectful. Allow and encourage your child to do all they can do for themselves, gradually increasing their skill. Song and verses, which portray what they are doing help. Mastery also builds confidence. Activities can become games, time for fun and laughter. How high can the shoes jump once they are on? Use humor, change the subject or sing when a child becomes fixated. This helps switch to a different brain center, which allows the focus to shift from them being stuck on what they don’t want to getting the shoes on.

Tips:

• Focus on what you would like them to do, not what they should stop.  The positive focus creates neural pathways which are the basis for more positive behavior.
• Also, use positive reinforcement judiciously so they feel good about their accomplishment, but aren’t trying to people please.
• Occasionally raise the bar.  For example: wow, you can put your shoes on!  One of these days you’ll be able to tie them too.
• Be clear and consistent with boundaries. Be a great role model and forgive yourself.
• If things don’t go well, at the end of the day tell your child a story with a happy ending of the shoes being put on and going on a great adventure.  Thank the angels for the day and for the night.  Set the mood for the next day.
• Spend time with yourself considering what didn’t go well.  Maybe your child was hungry or overly tired.  Ponder how you could do it differently.  Plan and visualize your next day.

1.  Practice self-development and self-discipline.

2.  Develop observation, contemplation, and meditation skills to nurture your relationship to guiding Spiritual Beings.  Observe your child (hair, eyes, features, limbs, color, movements, smells, sounds, for example.)  The percepts that you notice become spiritual food for Angels and Higher Beings to give you intuition and inspiration about your child.

3.  You are your child’s destiny guide, they are your teacher.  What issues do they bring up from your childhood?  What family patterns?

4.  Practice presence of mind to be able to do what needs to be done. Presence models,  ” I love you enough to be here in relationship to you.”

5.  Allows your child to live in their stream of consciousness. Slow down.

6.  Create rhythm that allows stream to flow.

7.  Pay attention to the rhythms of sleeping and eating.  These have a great and lasting    effect on the child’s bodily constitution and sense of well being.

8. Allow for downtime and slow flow time, that allows family members to digest soul experiences.  Hang out together doing nothing but enjoy each other.

9. Nurture awareness of imitation so that you do what they can appropriately imitate. Allow them to participate in your daily life of tending the hearth and home.

10.  Do not do for them what they can do.

11.  Be active with your child in daily chores, nature, games, tumbling, gardening, and care for the hearth and home.  Allow them to participate in your life.  For a portion of the day do in their presence what they can do with you.  This fosters for the child a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose.

12. Cultivate the virtues of gratitude, wonder, awe and respect.  This nurtures health and wellbeing and supports a mood of self discipline.

13. Pay attention to the environment which affects their physical organism in building their physical body.  Simple and beautiful surroundings provide the most healthy influence.  Limit technology and media.

14.  Develop a strong visual imagination of your day with positivity, firmness and love.  Nurture joy and happiness in simplicity.  Review with yourself at the end of the day what did and did not work.

15.  Visualize challenging situations with your children and how you will react in the future.

16.  Consistency and predictability creates security.  Use “No” 10% of the time and modeling and redirection the other 90% of the time.  Realize that model imperative means that they will do what you do, not what you say, as they imitate who you are.

17.  Cultivate good habits and a strong will in the early years through imitation, repetition, delay of gratification and  not too many choices.

18.  Use simple communication with phrases and gestures.  Show and tell them what to do, and avoid dwelling on what not to do.  Make statements and minimize questions and choices, which tend to be confusing to the consciousness of a young child.  Their consciousness better relates to “ we” as they do not yet feel the awareness of separateness, of I and you.  Stories have a deep effect on the child and reasoning is confusing.  To cultivate reasonable children, model reasonable behavior that reflects well reasoned choices that are in alignment with your values and feelings.

19.  Minimize adult activities such as movies, museums, lectures, concerts, tours, etc.

20.  Examine your boundaries.  Boundaries are an expression of how your higher Ego establishes values and integrates thinking, feeling and willing.  Children need a firm, purposeful, kind and benevolent leader.  They need a sense that you are in charge, the captain of the ship.

21.  Children thrive in a flock where they can learn politeness, kindness, compassion, sharing, and helpfulness, harmonizing their will and tempering the self in relationship to others needs and desires.

22.  Children can become challenging when they learn new skills.  Time for you to evaluate your relationship with them.

23. At challenging times pick up clutter, clean, change the environment.  Go outside with them.

24.  Avoid bribery, such as if you do this then you will get….  Instead the carrot and motivation  are more helpful, for example, I’m hungry.  Let’s go get something to eat.”

25.  Make a heart/physical connection daily and your child will cooperate more willingly.  Use praise sparingly, but acknowledge and express gratitude for their help, thoughtfulness and abilities.

26.  Remember, you are their destiny guide on earth and they bring important new spiritual capacities and insights from their recent sojourn in the spiritual world.

27.  Hold the highest and best thoughts of your child and that is mainly what they will manifest.

Here’s a fun and informative talk I did titled Parental Guidance and Boundaries. Running time is 37:52.

Hello, Hello Moms!

Well, we noticed a bit of hitting today, a wonderful opportunity for our community to grow together. I would like to share my insights from the many years of working with this.

The very first thing I would say is do not worry and don’t be embarrassed, and do begin to apply your observational skills and intuition and form a long lasting relationship to your Angel and your child’s Angel to determine what would be the best approach for you and your child. The first reason I say not to worry is because it feeds what can become a pattern by creating a negative visualization, the so called ,”self fulfilling prophecy.” Your child will be best supported by holding a very positive picture of who your child is and what they will become, according to the values and ethics which are important to you. I am not advising going into denial about what your child has done, but taking a more positive approach to the issue.

The other reason I say not to worry is that hitting is a “normal,” behavior for 2-3 year olds, however it is unacceptable; normal for many reasons and mainly age related. They still live in the consciousness that the world is them and they have challenges sharing. They don’t understand the difference between animate and inanimate objects. They do not have the neurological development for impulse control nor for understanding cause and effect. They are toddlers, learning how to socialize. (Perhaps our culture is like toddlers learning how to socialize with the need to give up the bully complex.) They also do not have the necessary neural development to understand boundaries and to communicate their needs.

They can however, learn socially acceptable behavior, which I would describe as kind, considerate and caring with the ability to compromise and participate harmoniously.

Now, in the instance of your child, try to understand and empathize with what underlies their  behavior. You can apply this to other behaviors as well. A few of the reasons I would suggest off the top of my head are:

1. not feeling well, hungry, tired, teething, allergies, coming down with a seasonal illness.

2. need for nutritional support. At this age their nutritional needs begin to shift a great deal.

3. young impulse control capacity, often with an underlying developmental reason for such behavior

4. not aware of boundaries and feeling threatened.

5. inability to communicate

6. unfamiliar with the space and guidelines

Whether you come to some insight into who they are and what makes them tick, ask the Angels to assist, as you put them to bed at night, mainly as a silent interaction, and to have the answer upon awakening.

Regardless of what comes to you a helpful approach after your child has hit is to say, as you shake your head back and forth calmly and caringly, “ We do not hit.” You can add, if you need a stronger statement, “Mommy doesn’t hit, Daddy doesn’t hit, We don’t hit. Our hands are strong and helpful and kind,” demonstrating on your self the gesture. Gesture is one of the most important tools you can use, since often the visual pathway is stronger than the auditory pathway. It can also be helpful to model for them caring for the child who was hit or asking to have a turn, mainly demonstrating the appropriate action, since they learn mainly from imitation.If your child is unable to verbalize, I’m sorry, say it for them as a role model. When they are a bit older, which varies from child to child, you can expect them to say the words.

It is beyond your child’s ability to state why they did something. How often do we know truly why we do what we do, or even think of it? The reasons they do so are mainly developmental and not because they are mean, cruel, or any other morally challenged reason. They just need help from us by  understanding the underlying reason and providing the help they need developmentally or providing the nutrition, sleep,etc. that they need. It helps, too, if it is all done with a lot of love in your heart. Children are most aware of what you think and feel about them.

I was so happy to see that all Mom’s were alert and guiding their child, caring for others children and not being judgmental of the other’s child. It says a great deal about what fine parents you are and what wonderful role models. I look forward to our year.

Love, Ms. Vicki

I am very happy to have people forward these blog articles on to other parents and request that you acknowledge where they originated and/or link to my website.☺