Gentle Parenting Month 3

Halloween Bonus!  Here’s a quick, fun, and easy treat for your child or for offering as a treat to the little goblins that show up at your door on Halloween.  Your child will enjoy making these sweet treats with you.  Don’t worry what his ends up looking like.  It will taste good and he will have had fun helping make it AND eating his masterpiece.

SPOOKY SPIDERS! 

What you will need:

Small chocolate covered donuts

Pretzel sticks

White icing

For each spider, break four pretzel sticks in half.  Poke each broken stick into the outside edge of a donut, four on each side.  Drop a small dollop of icing on the front-top of the donut as eyes.  Voila!  A chocolate spider.  (To offer as a treat to trick-or-treaters, place the completed spider into a small plastic treat bag and add a twist tie, or black and orange ribbons.)  NOTE:  You may also use large donuts.  Just use 8 pretzels unbroken.

I’m excited that you are now beginning the third month of your gentle parenting effort.  I trust that you have been successful with step 1 (slowing down) and with step 2 (listening).  If you have not, please don’t give up.  Go back to the step you had trouble with and start again.  That’s the beauty of this effort.  It’s all about the effort and the outcome, not so much about how long it takes for it to become habit.

This month we consider “Living It.”  You have probably heard the saying, “Children learn what they live.”  It’s so very true.  And I promise you that adults who work around your child see your behaviors in your child.  L.R. Knost, who writes about the theory of Gentle Parenting, says that you should consciously, intentionally, and consistently live out how you want your children to turn out because it is the most powerful and effective character training there is*.

If you want your little darling to be kind, you must be kind.  If you want him to be respectful, you must respect him.  If you want him to learn self-control, you must model that for him (even if you didn’t have that modeled for you as a child).  If you want him to be compassionate, treat him with compassion.  (Hold and reassure him when he become frightened of scary costumes.)  If you want him to feel joy, enjoy him.  If you want him to feel valuable, treasure him.

Your child is always watching and learning.  Make sure what he sees in you is what you want to see in him.  You want your child to drink his milk from a glass and you tell him that often.  However, he sees his daddy drinking from the jug.  Which of these behaviors do you suppose he is more likely to adopt?

* Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages by L.R. Knost  Available on Amazon.  Happy Gentle Parenting, everyone!

©2014 Brenda Holland-Robinson