View Poll Results: What gender is (are) your child(ren)?

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  • Boy(s)

    15 40.54%
  • Girl(s)

    6 16.22%
  • Both (even)

    10 27.03%
  • More boys

    3 8.11%
  • More girls

    3 8.11%
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Thread: The Parenting Thread

  1. #241
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    Tonight Yuki was delightfully surprised to discover that there can be words in different languages that sound the same (or similar)!

    I held up three fingers and asked her...
    Me>「これは日本語で何と言う?」("What's this in Japanese?")
    Yuki> 「さん!」("San!")
    Me>「中国語ではなんと言うの?」("What's it called in Chinese?")
    Yuki> 「知らない。」("I dunno.")
    Me>「えぇ~?数えてみて・・・」("Huh? Count and see...")
    Yuki>「イー、アー」("Ii, aa...")
    <pauses as it slowly dawns on her>
    Yuki>「サン!」("San!")
    <laughs so hard she could hardly breath>

    Earlier today she was also talking about how the word for 'bread' is the same in both Spanish and Japanese (Pan; from the Latin word "pānis"; the English word "pantry" is related to this) -- and that wasn't the first time she's spoken about that, but for some reason, until tonight, she hadn't quite made that "zOMG! They're different languages with the same sounding word for the same thing!" connection until tonight! lol

  2. #242
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    So, as you are aware I recently became a dad. One of the benefits of this is that I that now officially a member of this thread

    So what advice for dealing with newborns? He's pretty good so far, sleeps between 3 and 6 hours at night between feeds and is generally happy.

    So what can you people that have been there already offer in wisdom?
    Dovie'andi se tovya sagain

  3. #243
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    It would appear that I, no doubt along with many before me, have underestimated just how muc work a newborn is. And I've got a good one! Your life is lived in 3.5 hour time slots (inbetween feeds) with the occasional extra suprise thrown in for good measure. Wanna have a hot meal? They can sense it and will ensure they awake screaming as you sit down. Expect a simple midnight feed and put back to bed? They will make sure they get wind pains which mean its a solid hour to get a burp out of them.

    Apart from all that though he is the cutest and funniest little thing ever

    We are off for our first family outing today to the doctor. Little fella got an infection in the navel from the leftover bit of cord taking so long to fall off. He hasn't been happy the last 36 hours
    Dovie'andi se tovya sagain

  4. #244
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    Quote Originally Posted by Trent View Post
    So, as you are aware I recently became a dad. One of the benefits of this is that I that now officially a member of this thread

    So what advice for dealing with newborns? He's pretty good so far, sleeps between 3 and 6 hours at night between feeds and is generally happy.

    So what can you people that have been there already offer in wisdom?

    It gets better, then worse, then better, then worse, then a lot better, then worse, then awesome, then.... etc

    *Best piece of advice? Like the Hitchhikers Guide, babies should come with big reassuring letters on the front saying DONT PANIC

    *Be prepared for lack of sleep for the first few years and especially in these first few months, you are gonna live by their timetable for a good long while. I found (and still find) sleep dep to be one of the worst things you go through when having a new kid

    *Put food in one end, clean up what come out the other and you and the missus really try your best to be supportive of each other because there will be some tough times ahead.

    *Second best piece of advice? When your kid gets old enough to interact and react to you, you are going to fall that stupidly in love that everything else in your life will take a back seat FOREVER. It's a love unlike any other. Orion is a bit over 20 months old now and I live for that kid, when I come home and he does his happy dance and breaks into a huge giggling smile because he sees his Dad, it's like being filled with the purest energon straight from the cup of Primus served by a scantily armored Arcee - it's just pure happiness x10 and makes every sleepless night, trip to the doctors and lack of time and money just totally worth it

  5. #245
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    Quote Originally Posted by BigTransformerTrev View Post

    *Second best piece of advice? When your kid gets old enough to interact and react to you, you are going to fall that stupidly in love that everything else in your life will take a back seat FOREVER. It's a love unlike any other. Orion is a bit over 20 months old now and I live for that kid, when I come home and he does his happy dance and breaks into a huge giggling smile because he sees his Dad, it's like being filled with the purest energon straight from the cup of Primus served by a scantily armored Arcee - it's just pure happiness x10 and makes every sleepless night, trip to the doctors and lack of time and money just totally worth it
    Totally agree with this. I wasn't too thrilled at the sacrifices I had to make when I first became a parent but now I would walk over hot coals for my kids.

    Another tip is listen to other parents, especially when it comes to illness. My oldest son went 3 months with "silent reflux" it was completely misdiagnosed as us being young parents and my wife not being able to breast feed properly. That 3 months was torture. We went on about 2 hours sleep a night (on a good night) and he screamed constantly because he was in constant pain. When it finally got diagnosed correctly we couldn't believe how "easy" it was being a parent. Although we suffered for 3 months I was able to use this experience to help a friend who went through the exact same thing. Thankfully because of what we had been through I suggested go to the doctor and ask them to see if it's silent reflux and it was. They were able to treat their child a lot quicker then what we did. Not discrediting doctors because it is hard to diagnose baby illness (since they can't explain what is wrong) but talking to other parents is always a great help.
    HATRED FOR JAMES VAN DER BEEK RISING!

    Still have some stuff for sale. Free pickup at Parra Fair
    http://www.otca.com.au/boards/showthread.php?t=8503

  6. #246
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    Quote Originally Posted by Trent View Post
    So what can you people that have been there already offer in wisdom?
    First up, a big congrats on joining the parents club. When my daughter was born, I would show her with endless cuddles and kisses and lose count of how many times in a day that I tell her that I love her. I thought that there would come a time when I would stop going all goo-goo-gah-gah over her, but 5 years later it hasn't abated.

    My advice can be summed up in one word: consistency. Whatever way you and your wife choose to raise your son, I would highly recommend that you do it consistently. It sounds simple and... well... actually it is simple, really (it ain't rocket science!) -- but for some reason I find a lot of people just find it hard to stick to their guns and be consistent with their kids! The highly predictable end result is that the child simply fails to live up to the parents' expectations. And the consistency can apply to virtually everything when it comes to child rearing. If you haven't done so already, I would advise sitting down with your wife and just having a conversation about what expectations the two of you have for your son. Imparting these expectations become a lot easier when the two of you are on the same page. It also ensures that one of you is not undermining the authority of the other.

    Here's an interesting article: When Does Discipline Begin? An age-by-age guide to setting limits. You don't need to worry about behaviour management for newborns, but it's something to think about when they're about 6 months old (give or take a few months ).
    "In general, you can't spoil a child in the early months..... Infants need to feel safe and secure, and meeting their every need actually helps them become independent later on. When they develop a sense of security in their own little world, they're able to venture outside of it, knowing they won't get hurt. Dr. Karp puts it in perspective: "Holding him for 18 hours a day may seem like a lot from your perspective, but to a baby who was being held 24/7 in the womb, it's still a 25 percent rip-off.""


    ------------------------------------------------

    P.S.: Perhaps consider taking a photo of your newborn next to your biggest Transformer! I find it's a neat memento to look back at later to remind you of just how small they were as newborns... because they don't stay that small for nearly long enough!


    ^Newborn vs preschooler
    Last edited by GoktimusPrime; 8th September 2014 at 09:53 PM.

  7. #247
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    I occasionally come across spelling/grammar mistakes in my daughter's children books (especially Disney*... grrr!), but last night I came across a mistake in one of her home reading books from school! The sentence read:
    "Pluto is the furthest planet from the Sun."

    Okay, forget the whole planet/planetoid classification/declassification thing, which my 5 year old wouldn't understand... but furthest?!

    I had to resist the urge to grab a pen and correct it to "farthest."**
    Yuki also didn't know how to pronounce the names of all the planets, and I elected to teach her the Classical Latin pronunciation for 'Uranus' ("ooh-rrah-noos") rather than the standard English pronunciation, as the English pronunciation bums me out.

    -------------------------------------------------------------
    * In English anyway. I haven't detected any mistakes in her Japanese Disney books, but a lot of her English Disney books are littered with errors!
    ** 'Further' and 'furthest' refer to an immeasurable abstract or figurative distance, whereas 'farther' and 'farthest' refer to a measurable or quantifiable distance.
    e.g. "The further I walk, the farther I get."

  8. #248
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    Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
    Yuki also didn't know how to pronounce the names of all the planets, and I elected to teach her the Classical Latin pronunciation for 'Uranus' ("ooh-rrah-noos") rather than the standard English pronunciation, as the English pronunciation bums me out.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-uzfpgjV_M

    Yesterday I received the awesome news that my son will receive the academic award for his year and the final assembly... 2 years in a row!!!! Warning, proud parent over here
    HATRED FOR JAMES VAN DER BEEK RISING!

    Still have some stuff for sale. Free pickup at Parra Fair
    http://www.otca.com.au/boards/showthread.php?t=8503

  9. #249
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  10. #250
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    Two recent neurolinguistic studies present evidence that learning languages sharpens the brain.

    A personal reflection on our progress of raising a trilingual child

    What seems to be working

    Since my wife and I conceived, we decided that we would be using the une personne une langue method of raising our daughter multilingually, where each one of us would exclusively speak in the target language to the child and also elicit her to exclusively respond in the target language. The continual challenge is that Yuki constantly attempts to speak in English, and she would easily be a mono-lingual English speaker if we didn't remain consistent and insistent on our rules every day. It may be easier with parents who don't speak English (or at least, don't speak it at home) to enforce multilingualism at home, but because both my wife and I do speak English, and we speak English to each other, Yuki knows that we can understand her if she speaks in English. So we're still always telling her to repeat statements or questions again in the target language if she says it in English. Sometimes she will speak in English if she's addressing both parents, which is acceptable. But it's the insistence on code switching between the languages, depending on who her target audience is. Most of the time she's able to code switch pretty well, because she's learnt that she won't get what she wants, or the conversation simply will grind to a halt, if she doesn't use the correct language.

    I've noticed with some other parents that we hang around with, that their children will often reply to them in English. The parent then either also converses with the child in English, or the parent speaks to them in the target language but allows the child to participate in the conversation in English. So the conversation either becomes completely monolingual, or receiving-bilingual, as opposed to fully bilingual. In my observation, I've noticed that parents who insist on having fully multilingual conversations with their children (i.e. child must also participate in the same language that the parent is speaking) are the ones whose children are operating more closely to proper multilingualism. Parents who allow the child to speak English are producing either monolingual or receiving-bilingual children.

    I'm also glad that we made this decision before Yuki was born, because even speaking to multilingual parents of monolingual pre-school age children, they tell me that they're too set in their ways to change their habits. i.e. parents and children are all just too used to exclusively speaking to each other in English and would find it difficult to change now. I've heard some parents tell me that they're planning on enrolling their children in community language school in hope that this will remedy the situation, but IMHO this won't work --- because that's precisely what my parents did with me, and it didn't work! I attended Chinese school for a few years as a child, and I hated it. I couldn't understand anything that was being spoken in the classroom because we predominantly spoke English at home. Other children who spoke Chinese at home were able to interact in the class, but I was utterly lost. Consequently I soon came to just hate Chinese school (and the language) and didn't learn anything. Chinese school for me was just a massive waste of time/money, and I've advised parents that unless they're willing to speak the language(s) to their children at home, sending them to community language schools will equally be a waste of time and money. Yuki attends two community language schools per week, and she's able to understand and participate to varying degrees.

    What we could be doing better

    Learning from other people's mistakes can be better than learning from your own, so here are some things that we've done which, in hind sight, could've been done better. Hopefully this advice might help any parents of younger children or anyone considering becoming parents in future from avoiding some pitfalls.

    Although we've done reasonably okay in terms of building Yuki's spoken trilingualism, we haven't been as diligent with her multilingual literacy skills. With Yuki starting school this year, most of the focus has been on building her literacy in English -- and her English reading/writing has grown in incredible leaps and bounds. She started off this year being virtually illiterate to now being able to sight read most English words and sentences; her main difficulties are with less phonetically spelt words, which is understandable. Her teacher has allowed her to even skip a few reading levels, which is quite impressive considering that she's one of the youngest members in her class (she'll be 5.5 y.o. next month). However her literacy skills in the other languages aren't nearly as developed as her English reading/writing skills. In the past few weeks I've been drilling Yuki in her Japanese reading, and she's now able to sight-read about 80% of Seion Hiragana characters. She is aware of Dakuon and Handakuon Hiragana characters and can deduce how to write some of them if she thinks about it, but it's not as intuitive to her as the Seion characters; but that's fine -- her Japanese school is just focusing on the Seion characters for this year. Last Saturday I took my family out for Karaoke and I let Yuki sing some Japanese songs from Frozen. I find that Karaoke/sing-alongs are a fun way for kids to practice their sight reading. I initially let Yuki use a 'cheat sheet' where all the lyrics are written entirely in Hiragana (whereas the Karaoke lyrics has Katakana and Kanji, even though the Kanji has Hiragana on top of it, it wasn't as intuitively easy for her to read as just straight Hiragana); although to her credit, she later stopped using the cheat sheet and tried singing by reading straight off the TV screen lyrics. So yeah, I was initially slack with pushing Yuki's Japanese literacy skills (I thought that ensuring that she completed her Japanese homework and reading at least one Japanese book to her every week was enough), but she is catching up remarkably well. But I basically just used similar techniques that we used with her English -- flash cards, reading practice with children's books etc.

    Unfortunately, Yuki's Chinese literacy is... well... pretty much non-existent. She can recognise just a handful of characters, but not nearly enough to read sentences or books. This is pretty much because there hasn't been a consistent/diligent focus in doing all the things that one needs to do to maintain literacy in a child. Yuki's Chinese language maintenance is essentially just spoken --- Yuki can speak Chinese fine, but she cannot functionally read or write. Due to extentuating personal circumstances, we just haven't had the time to properly build Chinese literacy for Yuki; but we do intend to start building Yuki's Chinese literacy skills soon.

    However the immediate result is that Yuki is really not enjoying Chinese school. She loves primary school and she likes Japanese school, but she's really not liking Chinese school. Hopefully Yuki will begin to enjoy Chinese school once we implement more stringent literacy practices for her at home.

    P.S.: Just spoke with a colleague of mine who is also raising her daughter trilingually (English/Greek/Italian), and she said that her Greek/Italian literacy is pretty good, but they also hire private tutors. Also, her daughter is their third child, so they've had experience with raising multilingual parenting w/ their first two kids. One thing she learnt was not to push the children too hard and potentially burn them out and make them resent learning the language. I try to make all the learning activities fun for Yuki (which works especially best for early Stage 1 children), which she has been responding pretty well to so far.
    Last edited by GoktimusPrime; 17th November 2014 at 01:01 PM.

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