All My Children

Getting organized in a town

As contact is being made with the children by the street animator, three to four committed people willing to get something off the ground need to get together. Their first step is to identify the possible resources within the community and to communicate with these people and organisations with a view to calling a first meeting of concerned citizens. It should be made clear that the meeting is exploratory and that people do not commit themselves in any way by attending. Such resources could include the following:

• Child Welfare in the town and township;
• Two priests/ministers of religion (preferably belonging to a ministers’ fraternal) one in the town and the other in the township;
• A lower and higher primary school principal/teacher in the township;

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There is no set of rules of how to talk to a child that can even approach what you unconsciously know.

Brown is responding above to the question ‘How can a child’s learning of language be facilitated?’ In thinking of the ways in which teachers can help children communicate we have, like Brown, taken as our starting point the skills and strategies of the natural and spontaneous parent. A great deal of what we have to say is either an enhancement or clarification of what adults normally do. Continue Reading »

For those parents who don’t want to wait twelve weeks, there are two basic, but quite different, approaches to helping this baby—or, for that matter, any baby— fall asleep. Each approach has advocates who tend to view their ideas as vital to a happy, stable life for both parent and child, while seeing the other as producing troubled, insecure babies. In reality, both have something to offer, and neither will work for every baby-parent combination.

One method calls for parents to be intimately and directly involved in all phases of their baby’s sleep. Proponents of this approach recommend that she be nursed, cuddled, rocked, and held continuously until she has fallen asleep for at least twenty minutes. She can then be put down in her customary sleeping place, which may be Mom and Dad’s bed. Continue Reading »