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Gardening with Small Children

Gardening With Small ChildrenGardening is not only a soothing and relaxing hobby for you, it’s also a great way to stimulate your baby’s or toddler’s senses and instill in them the love for growing things.

Gardening with your children doesn’t have to be a large or long and drawn out process – in fact, this can lead to a feeling of overwhelm for both of you. Starting with a small garden, maybe only a few pots on your porch or if you live in an apartment where space is limited, a few plants under a grow light works too. In order to keep your young and up and coming gardeners interested and excited about their budding new hobby, choose plants that are colorful, flavorful and fragrant. Use plants that come from large seeds so that little hands are able to easily sow them into the soil and choose plants that you will be able to harvest quickly so that your child doesn’t lose interest.

Children like to imitate what mommy and daddy or grandma and grandpa are doing so be sure to include them in the garden, even if it’s just a small corner in the garden rather than the pots on your porch. You can give them jobs like weeding small areas, give them a spray bottle with water to spray plants that aren’t to be completely saturated. Your older children can even go slug collecting in their new garden.

Keep in mind that when you are teaching your children about gardening and they become much more regular at it, you’ll want to make sure that there are no poisonous or other harmful plants in the general facility of the plants you are allowing them to “tend” to. Teach your children right from the beginning that it never ok to put any plant into their mouths – even organic gardening can have harmful plants.

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Finding the Right Parenting Style

Finding the Right Parenting StyleWhen we become parents or if we’re planning to become parents, we develop our own concept of what the “right thing” is when it comes to parenting. We may opt to be the strict disciplinarian or maybe we’ll opt for being more relaxed and even care free and still others may opt for something more in the middle of both styles.

Two children raised by the same parents will likely give very different answers when they are asked about how they feel about their parents because they perceive things differently. While one may believe they were disciplined enough or appropriately, the other may feel that they were over-disciplined or not disciplined enough. When we become adults, many of the decisions we make when it comes to parenting are based on our own experiences and upbringing. We may choose to follow our parents’ style or go in the opposite direction.

Here are a few things to consider when you are trying to decide on the right style of you:

  • Remember that your choices will affect your children’s future happiness, outlook on life and even their future relationships. We all want what’s best for our children but sometimes we don’t always make the best choices or decisions. Evaluate what you are doing and how you are communicating with your children; if you don’t like the results it’s time to change.
  • How much time have you spent reading information on different parenting styles? Obviously not every book is right and not every “expert” is really an expert. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be said for learning something from others – especially when it comes to things like potty training advice or dealing with a biter. If there is legitimate advice at your fingertips, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel.
  • It’s a good idea to communicate your parenting style with the teachers at your child’s daycare.  This way they can adopt the same techniques you use with your child and there will always be consistency in discipline and rewards.  Premier Academy teachers will be happy to meet with you to discuss different parenting techniques that seem to be working for you at home or that work for us here at the center.

In the end it all comes down to: if you like the way you parent, then you’ve picked the right style of parenting for you. You will never find two parents that agree on everything and you will never find a child who agrees with his or her parents about the way they are disciplined. In a nutshell – when it comes to parenting, one size does not fit all.

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