I had just deposited our 22-month-old son’s breakfast pancake on his high chair tray one morning, when he started singing “Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky...”

I was astonished. Our baby knew the words to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star!”

Our baby can sing!

Matt’s vocabulary was exploding, but I had no idea that he could carry a tune. Or that he could repeat a whole phrase from a song.

At the time our two other children were 7 and 4. Like most children their ages, Erik and Jessica were fascinated with musical instruments. Whenever I sat down to play the piano, they stopped whatever they were doing, dashed to the piano bench and begged me to play one of their songs.

So, for a few years, I gave up working on my own pieces and learned arrangements to folk songs and children’s songs. I also bought a couple of good song books with pictures on every page so the children could find their favorites themselves. I played and we all sang. They often danced, marched or made up actions to some of the tunes as well. And the baby always included himself in these song sessions.

How many songs does Baby know?

After hearing him sing at breakfast, I started wondering how much Matt had picked up while I was concentrating on his brother and sister’s love of music. So I ran an experiment. I sat him next to me on the piano bench, and over several days I played all the songs we’d come to enjoy together. At some point in each song, I quit singing for a line and listened carefully. If Matt carried on without me, filling in the blanks with the right words, I counted that song as one he knew.

It turned out our baby knew over 50 songs!

Sharing music with kids

Parents don’t have to be professional musicians to share the fun of music making with children, to develop a youngster’s appetite for good music or to uncover a child’s natural talent. In fact, parents don’t even have to play an instrument themselves to expose their children to the delights of music. They only have to begin wherever they are themselves and learn along with their children.

Here are some ways to encourage the family’s appreciation of good music:

Sing. Sing in the shower, and sing as you do chores around the house. Buy albums of children’s songs and your own favorite songs, and then sing along, around the house or in the car driving. As children grow older, teach them to sing rounds. This provides a foundation for learning to sing harmony later. Include songs in your children’s bedtime routine. Break through whiny, fussy times with singing or listening to music.

Introduce your children to music making. Take advantage of children’s natural tendency to enjoy blowing whistles and banging drums. Show them how to clap in rhythm first, and then how to keep time using rhythm instruments. Haul out any instruments you play yourself and learn to play the melodies your children like.

If they ask for music lessons, take them seriously, especially if they are showing other active signs of interest, like picking out tunes on a keyboard. Even if a child only takes lessons for two or three years, the experience will give him a basic understanding that can provide a foundation for a lifelong appreciation of music.

Expose children to a wide variety of music of different forms, styles and cultures. To get an idea what different kinds of music the family likes before buying albums, listen to a broad range of music on youtube.

Listen actively to music with children. Before you introduce a folk song to a preschooler, for example, familiarize yourself with it first, and then prepare him by telling him a little bit about the song. (Example: “This is a silly song about a goat who ate somebody’s shirts. It’s called ‘Bill Grogan’s Goat.’ We’re going to find out what happened to that silly goat.”) Next, listen to the song with him, and then talk about it. This will not only develop his ability to appreciate music, it will also help him develop good listening skills he will need later in school.

Good beginning classical pieces to introduce to children are those that tell a story, like “The Nutcracker Suite,” and those that have special sound effects.

I was unfamiliar with Saint-Saens’ “The Carnival of Animals” until my mom gave me a record of Whittemore and Lowe’s performance with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Each of this composition’s 14 movements represents a different animal. We played the record, I told the children which animal each movement represented, and we mimicked the beast, miming and dancing around the living room. It was great fun—and great exercise. It became one of the children’s favorites, and one of mine, too.

Music enriches all of life. When parents introduce their children to the joys of good music, they are passing along a lifetime treasure.

When we were raising our children back in the early 1980s, we had a neighbor, Mary, who was a good mother to her preschoolers. She fed them balanced meals and established a healthy routine of playtime, nap time, meal time, and bedtime. She kissed their "owies" and dispensed Band Aids with sympathy. She read them stories daily, she limited their TV viewing, she encouraged them to help her dust and cook, and she talked with them throughout the day while she worked, answering their questions and chatting about whatever intrigued them.

Mary taught her children to share their toys with preschool friends who came to visit. She taught her 4-year-old daughter how to cut paper with a pair of blunt scissors and let her 2-year-old son paste, color and paint alongside his sister.

Today Mary would be eligible to send her 4-year-old to Head Start, but back then everyone had to pay for preschool. And although Mary's children seemed to be bright, secure and well behaved, her friends and relatives convinced her she wasn't a good parent because she couldn't afford to send them to preschool.

To fend off the social pressure, Mary found a job to pay preschool tuition. She had no education beyond high school, which meant she had to work more hours for less money. Once she began working, she found she had to earn enough money to cover not only preschool fees, but extra expenses of work -- wear and tear on the car, more taxes, a wardrobe for work...(It takes $3 earned to equal $1 not spent -- so she had to earn $600, for example, to make a $200 tuition payment.)

Sadly I watched this young family's stress level soar. And for what? Mary was not getting a job to meet personal emotional needs or to make it possible for her family to survive financially. She was wearing herself out and complicating her family's life in order to fend off social pressure. Then she paid other people to do something she already did well herself. And liked doing.

That was nearly 40 years ago. Soon afterwards our family joined the homeschooling movement, and I learned about many good home school preschool programs available for parents who, like Mary, lack confidence in their own abilities or prefer a structured plan.

Today, during the COVID 19 crisis, preschoolers have to be at home. But what home schoolers have learned about children and education is available to all parents through a rich variety of educational resources, not only for school age children, but for preschoolers as well. Buying a program is unnecessary, though, as long as these basic elements are present:

A warmly responsive, loving parent.

If a parent is unavailable, a grandparent or other adult can provide what is needed, as long as the adult is committed to the child long term and is there every day. This person is key to the child's sense of security and intellectual development. Nothing stimulates a child's intellect or builds good social behavior like a warmly responsive, consistently caring adult who talks to her throughout the day, responds to her needs, encourages creative efforts, sets healthy limits, provides calm order and is available for conversation almost all the time.

Healthy routines in a healthy environment. Preschoolers need reasonably predictable routines to feel secure. Someone must be sure they eat balanced meals, take naps, do their simple chores, go to bed at a set time, and get plenty of fresh air and several hours of physical exercise daily. If there is no safe yard available to run and play, (and playgrounds are off limits during the COVID-19 lockdown) they need someone to go with them on long walks and play “Tire’Em Out” games. (More on that next week.)

Materials and encouragement to create. Preschoolers need lots of materials available for spontaneous construction or dramatic projects -- a sheet to drape over a table for a tent, boxes, rocks, sand, dress up clothes, scrap lumber. When preschoolers are encouraged to use their own ingenuity to produce their activities, any item in the house can become a toy.

As much as possible, preschoolers need ready access to toys and creative materials. Toddlers will “read” more if there are a lot of hard-to-destroy children’s books around, for example. Preschoolers will draw more if the paper and crayons are kept on a shelf they can reach.

Daily reading. One school district made a bumper sticker: CHILDREN WHO READ WERE READ TO. The best way to encourage children to become readers one day is to read to them when they are small and keep on reading books aloud as a special shared activity after they begin reading themselves.

Rest and solitude.  

According to child development researcher Raymond Moore, 3- and 4-year-olds who do not take a nap or have at least an hour of rest daily become overtired and then are unable to sleep well at night. They can then become chronically irritable and hard to handle.

Children at this age not only need a regular rest time, Moore says, they also need a period of solitude, playing alone with blocks or making roads in the sandbox. "This seems to provide the opportunity he needs to work out certain problems and fantasies," Moore said.

“Genius has been shown to thrive with a great deal of parental warmth combined with ample opportunity for solitude,” Moore says.

Positive social modeling and guidance. Children learn through observation and imitation. When they are surrounded by a lot of other children (whose social behavior is naturally immature), they imitate them. Preschoolers learn sharing and other social tasks best when they have only one or two other children to relate to at a time, and when the group is supervised by an adult who is a good model.

Involvement in homemaking activities. Preschoolers develop a sense of accomplishment and positive self worth by working alongside a warmly responsive parent in cooking, dusting, sweeping, kitchen cleanup, gardening, sorting laundry, etc.

Field trips and nature experiences. Preschoolers collect a lot of essential information about things they will study formally later on when they plant seeds and watch them grow and discuss what they see and sense on nature hikes and field trips.  A nature hike can be as simple as a stroll through a garden, and field trips can be as simple as a trip to the store or a walk down the block to look at a house under construction.

Freedom from academic pressures. Preschoolers need to collect and make sense out of a lot of information before they are ready to begin formal learning. Too much academic pressure at this stage can result in unnecessary learning problems later.

© Becky Cerling Power 2020

Kids and spills go together. That was my mother’s commonsense attitude. In our family of six children and two adults, Mom told whoever set the table to pour each glass of milk only half full. “Then if it spills,” Mom said, “it’s easier to mop up half a glass of milk than a whole glass.”

And she taught us to handle spilled milk responsibly and calmly. We all knew where the rag drawer was. If someone spilled, he or she fetched a rag and mopped up while the rest of the family continued their conversation.

How do you clean a mess?

Parents can find many books that list practical cleaning tips for the many kinds of messes that go with raising children. But those books won’t tell them that the physical aspect of cleaning up a mess is less important than their attitude about it. For although parents can remove crayon damage to their sofa in half an hour, it may take a year or a lifetime to remove the emotional damage done to a child by the words that came out of Mom or Dad’s mouth while they were cleaning up the mess. 

Messes and dirt are a natural part of family life. Anyone can see that. Yet we get irritated by frequent spills, urine-soaked sheets and multiplying clutter.

Messy attitudes

Sometimes we rebel. We throw temper tantrums. Or we try to push the mess off on our mate. Or else we approach the work in a cloud of self-pity, nourishing resentment. We make the mess go away, but we do it at the expense of healthy family relationships.

Why?

The answer differs from person to person. But whatever our reaction, that reaction reveals a lot about us.

Attitude check

If I look at a colored plastic glass from a distance, I can’t see what’s inside – at least, I can’t unless someone bumps the glass hard enough to spill it. Then I can tell that the glass holds milk or water or something else.

People can’t really tell what’s inside me either just by looking – that is, they can’t unless someone or some circumstance bumps me hard enough to see what spills out. Explosive anger? Tears of exhaustion? Good humor?

Children’s messes give us a good bump. What spills out then shows our real condition and our real attitudes.

Dealing with the mess itself is usually simple.  Just mop up the milk. Facing up to our attitudes is hard.  Straightening out our attitudes is even harder.

I don’t like messes, and I don’t like picking up. I’ve come to recognize, though, that coping with dirt and disaster is part of my job description as a parent. I’m less apt to feel sorry for myself when Junior throws up on the carpet halfway to the bathroom if I remind myself that this is ordinary parenting, not personal injustice.

It’s just my job.

It’s not only “just my job” to clean up children’s messes, it’s also “just my job” to encourage them to do things that will require me to clean up even more messes.

Children need to be encouraged to paste, sculpt, and build if they are going to develop creatively. Those activities are messy.

Children need to learn survival skills like cooking and cleaning up after meals if they are going to be prepared one day for adult life. Inexperienced dish washers break dishes. Novice cooks burn pans. These activities are messy, too.

One of the redeeming features of children’s messes is that cleaning a mess is just as much a survival skill as cooking. Preparing children adequately for adult life means teaching them to clean up many kinds of messes. Thus, many of the messes children make conveniently provide them with practice for learning how to do something they will have to do all their adult lives -- clean up messes.

If my goal in life, consciously or unconsciously, is to maintain a convenient, annoyance free existence, then I am in for a world of frustration. That’s not real. Nobody gets that, not even childless single people

Kids or Convenience?

Personally, I decided I wanted the challenge and the blessing of raising children more than I wanted a convenient life. Messes came with the package.

A young farmer pointed that out to me once by quoting King Solomon’s words in Proverbs 14:4. “Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty, but from the strength of the ox comes an abundant harvest.”

In other words, if an ancient farmer had no oxen, he didn’t have the bother of cleaning out the oxen’s messy stalls or the expense of feeding his animals. But then neither did he have much or anything at harvest time.

Thanks for the mess? Yes!!

So children’s messes are really blessings in disguise. We have friends who lost their 10-year-old daughter to cancer. They’d be thrilled to scrub a gooey oven or mop up a gallon of spilled syrup if that meant they had their daughter back – and in good enough health to make that kind of a mess.

Messes remind us that our children are alive and here. And because they are here, we need to use our heads and change our focus, thanking God for our children and giving him permission to deal with all the family messes, whether inside our houses or inside ourselves.

© 1997, 2020 Becky Cerling Powers

Reprint with attribution only

www.beckypowers.com