October 1, 2021 by Christopher Hooker

Why Playing With Costumes Is Good For Children

Halloween conjures images of children running through the streets as October arrives, going door-to-door in small groups. It’s uncertain if this year will produce much of a “Spooky Season” turnout, but we’ll bet that kids will still be dressing up in costumes, watching child-friendly monster movies, and enjoying candy and a few good scares.

The spooky season is fundamentally good for kids. It’s a staging ground for dealing with fear and anxiety only once a year so that kids have time to process what they learned (fear is survivable, and I’m going to be okay) and feel braver the following year. Kids learn to trust their community, but they also learn to look for outliers and inappropriate people within their community too.

Sometimes, your child will hang on to their spooky season costume just a little longer than expected. They’ll want to play in their costume deep into November. We encourage you to let them enjoy their costumes! Here’s why:

Costumes spark the imagination. A playworld surrounding a superhero costume can help a child develop problem-solving skills. The stories we learn as children generally involve a challenge to our happiness; kids will put on an outfit and invent their own challenges, only to defeat them.
Costumes help with skills development. Our children develop many different skills when they play in costume together. To play cooperatively and make a storyline that makes narrative sense, they must learn creative thinking and social skills. As given characters come with behavioral rules, they learn self-regulation skills, communication skills, language development, teamwork, cooperation, and sharing.
Costumes help children develop motor skills. The putting on and taking off of outfits can be somewhat hard to do, and children who play in costumes learn to work with velcro, buttons, and zippers.
Costumes allow children to examine themselves differently. Even very young children understand that a Fireman dresses differently than a soldier, and both are responsible for different things. Putting on the costume allows a child to imagine themselves in a different role. In this way, it inspires empathy, too.

Ultimately, there will come a time when the kids have to give up costume play or restrict it to certain portions of the day– in part to preserve the work it can create for you, and in part to maintain their costume if they truly love wearing it. But try to let them hold on a little longer if there’s something on their mind; perhaps they are working out a mystery in their mind we can’t yet understand!

If you’d like to discuss a place at Creekside Kids for your kids, we’d like to invite you to click this embedded link to schedule an appointment. Let’s get to know each other! We’re located at 1201 W Cheyenne Road, Colorado Springs, CO 80906, and we can be reached at (719) 635-9111. Our regular hours of operation are 6:30 am until 5:45 pm, Monday through Friday; however, we have a shortened schedule during COVID of 7:00 am to 5:30 pm.

September 1, 2021 by Christopher Hooker

No Pressure Potty Training

Toilet training is an essential step in a child’s development. However, it’s easy for a child to acquire complex emotions about their bladder and bowel control. Potty training can be fraught with anxiety or come naturally as daybreak, depending on the child and the approach.

Potty training can begin when a child is between 18 and 24 months but can take longer in children with special developmental needs. Most children start closer to age 2. Before you should introduce a child to potty training, there are some benchmarks that they must reach in their progress:

Sitting still. When your child is go-go-go in the early stages of walking and mobility, they may not be ready to learn the process of perching on a potty for longer than a minute. A child eager to get up again isn’t ready for potty training.
Saying “No”. While the idea of hearing loud NOs seems counter-intuitive to potty training, this is a good sign. A child that can assert themselves is beginning to develop a sense of self-control.
Putting things back. If your child has begun to grasp the idea that X belongs in Y around their environment, congratulations– that’s a necessary step to your child’s understanding of where waste goes and why. If they are still throwing away toys and then crying that they can’t get them, they haven’t grasped the permanency of the potty yet.

The key to successful potty training is to have the patience to let the child show you when they are ready, instead of anxiously promoting potty training before the time is right. Here are some of the signs that your child may be ready for potty training:

Retaining. A child with a dry diaper may be associating shame or discomfort with voiding and have begun trying to keep it from you. Awakening dry from a nap may also be a sign that they are retaining.
Pooping in secret. Sometimes children pick up on our disgust for the waste itself and worry about our reaction to seeing more poop. They will find a dark corner to void their bowels to avoid upsetting us, compounding the child’s mental discomfort. It’s usually an indication that a parent needs to lighten up a bit, and the child needs assurance and positivity.
Copying. It’s a good clue that when you see your child sitting down to poop the way they’ve seen you or siblings do, they may be ready for some assistance in how to use a potty.
Pulling down a wet or dirty diaper. Trying to remove their own diapers might indicate that your child is independently trying to manage their waste, although it can just be skin irritation.
The direct approach. If your child tells you they are about to go, are going, or have gone, then they are absolutely ready to begin potty training.

At Creekside Kids, we recommend using the Braselton Toilet Training Method. It’s a gentle, natural way to bring a child into potty training. The trick of the Braselton Method is to associate pooing with the toilet and let the child think it was their own idea.

It begins when you see enough signs to convince you that your child is seriously ready to start. Take your child to select their potty from the store so that it is something good and just for them. Choosing their own toilet is as much about identity as it is an introduction to the concept of privacy. Over time, the child will sit on the potty entirely independently without any prompting from you.

There’s no need to stress the need to take down a diaper in your child’s first few attempts. It’s a moment for celebration! The act of your child sitting down on the toilet means they correctly associate the potty with voiding and that they’ve graduated to pulldown diapers. Once they adjust to pulldowns, you can show them how to pull their pants down. When your child eventually voids, they will do it by making the association and thinking it’s their idea, their own choice.

We want to thank Autism Community Training and Huggies Pull-Ups for some of the great ideas in this article. If you’d like to discuss a place at Creekside Kids for your kids, we’d like to invite you to click this embedded link to schedule an appointment. Let’s get to know each other! We’re located at 1201 W Cheyenne Road, Colorado Springs, CO 80906, and we can be reached at (719) 635-9111. Our regular hours of operation are 6:30 am until 5:45 pm, Monday through Friday; however, we have a shortened schedule during COVID of 7:00 am to 5:30 pm.

June 30, 2021 by Christopher Hooker

How To Choose A Pre-School

In this month’s blog, we’re looking into how to choose a preschool for your child. Choosing a preschool should be a process involving research and then interviews and tours. The work begins with finding a list of local preschools. We do not weigh in on Colorado Springs’ assortment of preschools today, nor are we providing a complete list, as this is something parents should do for themselves. Our purpose here is to help you make a good choice for your child– not to make that choice for you!

Google and Yelp may contain reviews, but bear in mind that of all the reviews of businesses, the bitterest ones are likely to be schools and preschools. Take praise and contempt with a grain of salt. The critical part of a review is not the emotion behind it but the details left in the dialogue. Those details can inform you of what you need to look out for when you arrive for a tour!

When interviewing and choosing your child’s preschool, it’s important to remember, as a parent, that preschools know how to market to you. They know that parents will often get over-excited seeing new, pretty classrooms or brand new materials. Typically, everything you see on a preschool tour is planned to win your affection and trust.

But that’s not what you want or need from a preschool. What you want is to know that your child will be loved and protected, accepted and encouraged for who they are, and given the strength to see that they can figure things out for themselves with the right encouragement.

The reality is that, although they might get excited by a new playground or toys in the background, kids don’t care about new, bright, and shiny preschools. What they want is to be loved and accepted for who they are by caring adults. Even very young children want to feel emotionally secure when outside of their family. So parents need to pay attention to the children in the preschool center they are considering for their child.

Take a look at children’s faces and body language while they’re doing the tour. Watch the children walk through the hallway. Do the children have to be perfectly lined up and silent in the hallways? Or are the children allowed to walk in a relatively loose line or groups and are allowed to talk, laugh or even sing in a reasonable voice?

Children cut through illusions quickly. Parents need to observe the way children and adult supervisors interact to determine just what kind of bonds they form with their charges. It’s important to know whether there are loving and kind interactions, or are the teachers just too formal or rigid? Are the teachers engaging and asking questions, or do they spend most of their time simply giving kids directions or passing them off unsupervised in activities?

Look at the walls, at the art projects that the kids have worked on throughout their time at the center. Are you seeing examples of open-ended art projects versus crafts in which all the children’s art looks exactly the same? Is there a sense of every child’s specialness being discovered and cultivated?

May 31, 2021 by Christopher Hooker

Gardening with Children

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Welcome to Creekside Kids’ June Blog! Today, we’re talking about summer gardening with the kids: what we can teach them, what we can learn from them, and the things we should avoid doing.

Gardening is a great way to bond with your preschoolers for many reasons. Gardening can teach kids some valuable lessons about life cycles, growth and development, patience, reliance, nutrition, and science, too. By working together and talking as you work, you will be creating strong bonds with your child and you will be improving their vocabulary and background knowledge. Consider reading books about gardening, plants, and insects.

Although kids naturally love digging in the dirt and exploring the world of plants and bugs, we can’t expect kids to know how to tend a garden. For instance, it’s important to understand that a child may have difficulty distinguishing a weed from a plant. If you’re weeding, they may watch you working and then proceed to unroot plants. We must be patient with our kids and teach them the difference… and accept that they might get it wrong even when they kill a plant you’ve been growing.

Similarly, some kids might have an issue with working in the dirt due to a fear of bugs and insects. It’s not unusual for a 3 to 4-year-old child to develop an irrational fear of something. One of our former students developed an irrational fear of ants at age 4 which made playground time interesting, to say the least. Another developed a fear of flowers (mostly dandelions) which prevented her from enjoying time out on our west field and her own yard. A pair of fancy rain boots helped “protect” her feet and partially fixed the problem. Both girls are teens now and are over their old irrational fears! If a child has an irrational fear of something, it’s best to just help them avoid it until the child matures. Later, consider a terrarium with bugs to expose them to the insects and let them get used to touching bugs at their own pace.

In Colorado Springs, we have a short growing season. Here some of the delicious, natural goodness you can plant and grow with your children:

June: Tomatoes, peppers, and leafy greens
July: Beans, cauliflower, corn, cucumber, and yellow squash
August: Beets, carrots, and more leafy greens

February 1, 2021 by Christopher Hooker

Guiding your child through superhero movies

Welcome to February! This month, we continue our November discussion about superhero play and how kids can potentially misuse it without proper guidance. It also tells us about a child’s emotional state.

So much of what happens in a superhero movie is mythic iconography. Subliminally, these elements work to move adults into the story and play on their emotional hotspots. However, kids can also pick up on these messages but are not fully able to understand the nuance. As a result, stories written mostly for adults are also resonating with children in very limited ways. And as writers elevate the material, the line between hero and villain becomes blurred and difficult to understand. As an example: do kids who love Venom, the Spider-Man villain-turned-hero, know and understand that heroes are not supposed to eat enemies? Children can more easily grasp a character like Batman who is consistently the good guy but characters who change from bad to good or vacillate between the two are confusing to young children.

Our kids will have the most trouble understanding superheroes: what is real and what is fantasy. A narrator does not step out into AVENGERS: ENDGAME and explain that there are no absolute heroes and no major villain to worry about in real life. That’s where parents and caregivers can be guides. Beginning at around age 4, children become far more aware of the dangers in the world around them and begin to worry about them. At 4 years, children often act out stories in which their mommy has died and the child has to cope without a mommy. They begin playing chase with the new elements of superheroes or good guy/bad guy themes because they have gained a new awareness that there are dangers in the world and they worry about these dangers.

Being the Narrator Our Kids Need

As parents and caregivers, we know a superhero story is a story that makes us feel secure about our chances of survival, about the importance of our best values, and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. For our children, we have to be that narrator and explain that there is no Joker and no Batman, but there are a few people in the world that may want to harm people, as well as lots of people that will try to protect us from harm. We can focus on the real heroes in our world (police, fire fighters, doctors and nurses, etc.) to help ease their vague and only partially understood fears and feelings of powerlessness. They have only recently left toddlerhood and they are recognizing that the world is a very big place and that they are very small. They need to know they are safe and that they have a security net.

What about those kids that consistently choose to play the bad guy? Some kids will find themselves gravitating exclusively to the villain’s role, and while it can be upsetting to a parent to realize that your child is a bit too drawn to the darker characters and the violent play, we can think of it as the child acting out some of his/her fears and stressors in order to process them. It is a sign that the child is processing deeper thoughts about power and control, safety and security, and their awareness that the world holds dangers. If your child is constantly playing the bad guy it is time to explore the role of bad guy and why your child is identifying so strongly with it.

We all have a light and dark side. It’s very normal for a child to play both good and bad guys and it’s normal to go through a mild bad guy phase. A big part of understanding a child’s choice is to watch how he/she plays. Does the child use his/her play to scare other children or make them feel threatened or uncomfortable? This is a sign that a child has social/emotional needs that are not being met and need attention. It could be just a simple misunderstanding of what it means to play the villain. Children understand rules, and they understand roles. Without guidance, they are quick to parrot the mythic structure of comic book stories, which, as we mentioned in November, is in part based on the tropes of wrestling and it’s easy for kids to get carried away.

However, it is also possible that they may be latching onto the violent narrative of an adult comic book to process their unrecognized feelings and fears and are harming or scaring classmates as a result. If the child likes playing the Batman villain Bane and tries to wrestle another child against their will, it is time to stop the “play” and explain the importance of the role and how it harms other people. It’s important that children understand that villains are villains, that they are selfish characters taking unfair advantage in society, and not heroes in their own right.

As a villain, their ultimate place in the narrative is to be defeated, but they still have to play by the school rules: no touching and no aggressive ‘near-missing’ (which can turn into accidents). To perfect a villain’s role, they must learn to understand why villains almost always nearly win, only to lose. While they may be attracted to a particular villain’s iconography, a villain’s role is to be defeated by the heroes and heroines, and they have to find a way to present a play-threat (not a real threat) and to be surprised and ultimately defeated by the heroes.

If a parent or caregiver has concerns, the best thing to do is talk to their child about their play. Ask your child what he/she likes about the character and why he/she likes to play it. They may feel pressured into a role and take it too far out of frustration that they cannot be the hero they most like because another child has already claimed that role. It may be that they are processing fears and insecurities by trying to be controlling and powerful. Play along with them using action figures or dolls, and help them work out how to make their performance safe but fun for others, and how to insist on playing a hero when they want to be the hero.

Remember, there are thousands of superhero characters available– and for every Marvel icon, there is a corresponding DC icon. If Supergirl was already claimed, the child could always be Power Girl, or Captain Marvel, or Atom Eve. If the child wants to be Batman and someone has already claimed Batman, there’s Captain America, or Moon Knight, or The Question. There is room for every child to pick an iconic role that expresses their heroic alter-ego.

With Great Play Comes Great Responsibility

The most important element for kids to know in order to enjoy superhero play are the rules of the playground they are in and the structure of what a superhero story is. Heroes stand up for what is right, protect the weak and the strong, and tell the truth. Villains threaten the weak, exploit advantage, and lie. Actual violence, or the threat of violence, is unacceptable in play. For the adults, the number one concern is the physical safety of the children while allowing them to explore the world of good guy/bad guy play but it’s very important to understand the social/emotional function of this type of play and to be responsive to it.

Why Playing With Costumes Is Good For Children

No Pressure Potty Training

How To Choose A Pre-School

Gardening with Children

Guiding your child through superhero movies

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