access@mattered.com

It’s okay to not be grateful for every moment. It’s really hard and I felt bad for not being “in the moment” or “enjoying my baby while they are little” every second of postpartum. I needed to hear it during pregnancy too. I had an ultrasound tech share that with me when I was having a hard hormone day during an appointment. It really helped.

It feels hard because it IS hard, not because you’re doing something wrong.

I also needed to hear, and tell this to First time pregnant friends – maternity leave can be hard. You are going from a job where you are around other adults all day, having conversations, and knowing what you’re doing in your job, to being at home, probably by yourself, no adult conversations, and having generally no clue what you’re doing. That was a HUGE mental hurdle for me.

I was under the impression that there was one right way to make your baby a good sleeper and became a slave to the nap schedule. I wish someone had told me that some babies are just lower sleep needs than others or that with time, he’d consolidate his short naps into one longer one, so that a 30 minute nap didn’t completely ruin my day.

This! I remember being asked the questions by a cold med assistant who didn’t make eye contact and rushed through them, loudly clicking on the computer. I didn’t even know how to begin to answer them.

I needed to hear “sit your butt down, I’m taking out the trash/doing laundry/cooking dinner/tidying up.” Without me asking, and then the person to actually do that task to completion. Basically, I needed someone to come over and take over.

That every single timeline given to you — you’re healed at 6 weeks, you can return to work at 3 months — is false. That you will be healed at 7 months, that you will return to work at 15 months, and anything sooner is insane. They’re crazy, not you ❤️

You don’t actually have to breastfeed! This may even be enjoyable if you formula feed!!

LOVED the post from 1/25/24 on boundaries and consequences! Love the reframing of “punishment” as “consequence”, and the difference between natural and logical consequences. Thanks for sharing this!!

On the sibling question, what I really what to know is if there’s any data indicating what drives different sibling relationship outcomes? So it seems it’s not age gap from other of Emily’s writings. To what extent do socioeconomic factors, parental focus on those relationships, family meals, idk eating broccoli? etc etc influence how close your kids are when they grow up. Because if we accept there’s a range of possible adult sibling relationships, and some of them are world changingly intimate and a true gift to our children vs others that are less so, then we need to know how much we can influence – if at all – which of those outcomes our kids will get. Without this, it’s incomplete to just say “eh, you could get anything, don’t worry about it.” If all I have to do is make sure my kids eat broccoli and then they’ll have a beautiful sibling relationship like I do (or more realistically, if we see these strong relationships are heavily correlated with high parent SES which I’m lucky enough to have), then we are in a different situation closer to “an additional sibling is very likely to be a precious gift to your child and you should consider it” vs the answer given.

Our daycare was a little like this, but our elementary school (and school district) do not allow any food to be brought into the classrooms at all. So all our “rewards” are the plastic toy/junk as mentioned above. The idea of a “store” or “whole class vote for reward” has a lot of merit and learning other aspects of culture and life, so generally the rewards systems we’ve seen have been implemented well.

I cried the first time I got demarked from the “good kid” chart. I think part of it was that I wasn’t positive what I had done, so there was a bit of injustice in there. But I got over it quickly.

I’ve heard that any negative effects which come from reward systems are easily overcome by occasionally randomly rewarding children.

I’m mostly just here to say thank you for making me laugh out loud this Monday morning with the line “Very few high school students are still demanding an M&M every time they poop in the toilet.” My daughter is in 5th grade at our neighborhood elementary school, which has students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds as well as a high number of students with behavioral and learning differences. I’ve seen her in a class with a fairly high level of behavioral chaos (her teacher is a 30 year veteran but was out for an extended time for health issues and the class essentially went off the rails when they had a sub – this was also the year after covid disruption). Many teachers at this school use incentive based programs. I agree in 1st grade there was some heartbreak over kids missing “points” parties, but I tend to support the teachers at this school who are knowledgeable of this student population and are committed to helping them succeed in their overall school experience. In 5th grade the teachers have a “money system’ where all the students are earning/losing money for both individual and collective behavior and saving for a class goal (pizza party of course!) and the kids seem really into it. It seems like a good way for them to learn some budgeting and financial skills as well. The only potential downside that has recently come to my attention is that the students are betting each other using their classroom money – ie one student owes another $10 for betting on whether it would snow or not! I can’t imagine it will impact my daughter’s love of learning since that seems intrinsic to me (in her case), and it does seem to be improving the overall class behavior (and thus making more time for learning) compared to some years in a class without the incentive system.

Oh! And I almost forgot about the Ecology Center of Michigan. I would be cautious about data overload, but they are an extremely dedicated team of nonprofit environmentalists doing research on different products for their environmental health implications. And they do have an advocacy component to translate their research into change.