Your children and you (1946) Taster

The lodger's baby again. Middle of the night as usual. What a life. As soon as you're a parent, you have troubles you didn't have before. The baby also has his troubles. In fact, you've all three got to learn to give and take. At present, it's all give, give, give by you and take, take, take by him because he hasn't begun to find out how to live as a member of the family. In many ways, he's the tyrant and you're just his slave. This takes hours and hours of your time, completely altering your life, and never a thank you. But the slave has got to start right away to teach the young tyrant that family life has sensible rules. If you do let him master you completely, he won't learn to live properly and your life won't be worth living. You ought to start weaning your baby at about 5 months. This is a shock for his Lordship. All babies resent strange tastes at first, but he soon will get used to solid food. Whereas if you wait until a child is 9 months old, he'll fight much harder and take far longer to get used to the odd taste and the rough texture. So, don't put off weaning just because it's messy. The sooner you start, the less trouble you'll have. If he has a woolly ball dangling in front of him, he's happy for a time because it moves and the colors seem to keep changing. It feels nice, too. Much better than a rattle, which is always slipping out of reach. But when he wakes up to this uninteresting view, he soon gets tired of it. Sometimes that funny thing sticks to the ceiling. But he can't touch it. So, after a few moments, it's only tantalizing. This ceiling is better, especially when these shapes move across. He gets quite sleepy trying to make out what they really look like. His point of view is very different from yours. Even when later on he sits up and takes notice, he doesn't want to keep staring at this. He twists and looks sideways, but even then, it's all out of reach and confusing. Much more fun to get one's hands into something. Unfortunately, such delights generally don't last long. Other discoveries soon get whisked away, too. And why, when you ask for a thing to play with, does mother smile and look at it and then, instead of getting it for you, go wheeling on so you lose it? Infuriating. The world is full of toys, wonderful toys, which you can't have. Of course, what you don't see, you don't ask for. And there's no doubt that some toys aren't as nice as they look. Rescue. It always comes. Mother or Daddy is always there to save you. They are all you can rely on. Even though they aren't quite such slaves as you once thought, they'll always bring you something that tastes nice to help you forget your troubles. And they know what looks nice and what seems exciting. Of course, outdoors or in, any one thing soon gets boring. So, Daddy's got to weigh in now and then with some new plaything or Mother must bring an old one to life. If they do, most of the time, life's grand. By the time your child is a year old, clean habits may begin to form. The purpose of the pot begins to become clear. There is something to be done and he feels more comfortable afterwards. Before this, the pot only saved an occasional nappy. But now, if you praise him when he goes on it and give it him regularly, he'll begin to catch on. The wrong way to go about it is to scold a child for being dirty. To him, this seems quite unreasonable. It may prolong dirty habits and most certainly won't cure them. It's too soon yet for complete cleanliness, anyway. As soon as knees or feet can be controlled at all, that owner starts off on tours of exploration. The room is as full of mystery as darkest Africa. Livingstone discovering Victoria Falls is nothing to Diana discovering the tablecloth. Housework can't be abandoned while Richard finds out what's on the end of a piece of string. One answer is a playpen. But um what does this feel like? Yes, it can be like a prison, especially if you leave him there too long and don't keep him busy exploring. Bricks are interesting for a bit. No, almost at once he's looking for something better. All the time he's discovering different shapes, different feels, different colors, different movements, different noises. He's a dynamo of energy, but he never works for long at any one thing. He'll be all right for a time, tumbling from toy to toy, but you'll have to come in now and then to give him fresh work to do.