Siblings Without Rivalry - Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish

Another collection of mostly sensible-sounding advice from the authors of "How to Talk..." As with that one, I'll try to capture the gist here based mainly on the reminder sections:

Brothers and sisters need to have their feelings about each other acknowledged:
- with words that identify the feeling ("you sound furious!")
- or with wishes (give to children in fantasy: "you wish he'd ask before using your things")
- or with symbolic or creative activity ("how would you feel about making a 'Private Property' sign?")
Children need to have their hurtful actions stopped ("Hold it! People are not for hurting!") and to be shown how to discharge angry feelings acceptably ("Tell him with words how angry you are. Tell him, 'I don't want my skates used without my permission!'")
"Insisting on good feelings between the children led to bad feelings. Allowing for bad feelings between the children led to good feelings."

Resist the urge to compare, speak only about the behaviour that pleases / displeases you:
- Describe what you see / what you feel / what needs to be done

Children don't need to be treated equally, they need to be treated uniquely:
- Instead of giving equal amounts, give according to individual need (also applies to time!)
- Instead of showing equal love, show the child he or she is loved uniquely ("You are the only 'you' in the whole wide world. No one could ever take your place").

Let no one lock a child into a role (bully/victim, the naughty one, the clever one etc):
- Parents can take opportunities to show/remind children they can act differently (e.g. ask in a friendly way or tell someone no) & provide counter examples when siblings (or the child) uses labels.
- Don't give your attention to the aggressor, attend to the injured party instead (possibly including "x needs to learn to ..." statements).
- Children with problems do not need to be viewed as problem children; they do need acknowledgement of their frustration, appreciation for what they have accomplished, however imperfect, and help in focusing on solutions.

Handling fighting:
- Ignore normal bickering, give them space to work on their conflict resolution skills...
- When things start to escalate:
1. Acknowledge their anger. ("You two sound cross!")
2. Reflect each child's point of view. ("X wants..., and Y feels...")
3. Describe the problem with respect. ("That's a tough one: two children and only one puppy.")
4. Express confidence in their ability to work it out ("I'm confident that you two can work out a solution that's fair to each of you... and fair to the puppy.")
5. Leave the room.
- If things might be getting dangerous:
1. Inquire: "Is this a play fight or a real fight?" (Only play fights allowed.)
2. Let the children know: "Play fighting by mutual consent only." (If it's not fun for both, it's got to stop.)
3. Respect your feelings: "You may be playing, but it's too rough for me. You need to find another activity."
- In dangerous situations:
1. Describe what you see: "I see two very angry children who are about to hurt each other."
2. Separate the children: "It's not safe for each other. We need a cooling-off period. Quick, you to your room, and you to yours!"

When children can't work out a problem by themselves:
1. Call a meeting, explaining the purpose (to try to find a solution to problem x) & the ground rules (e.g. listening to each in turn without interruptions).
2. Write down each child's feelings and concerns, and read them aloud.
3. Allow each child time for rebuttal.
4. Invite everyone to come up with solutions. Write down all ideas without evaluating.
5. Decide upon solutions you can all live with.
6. Follow-up (e.g. agree a time to discuss whether things have improved).

Support a child who asks you to intervene, without taking sides:
1. State each child's case.
2. State the value or rule, e.g. "Homework assignments get top priority".
3. Leave room for negotiation. ("But if you want to work something out with your sister, that's up to you.")
4. Leave.

Further ideas for encouraging good feelings:
- Make sure that each child gets some time alone with you several times a week.
- When spending time with one child, don't talk about the other.
- Don't withhold attention or affection from a favoured child out of guilt.
- Don't lock children into birth order roles; give them opportunities to experience different roles (e.g. giving a youngest child responsibilities, letting an oldest child spend time being 'babied' by older cousins).
- Don't get trapped by 'togetherness'. (Give them breathing space from each other sometimes!)
- Let each child know what their siblings like or admire about them.
- Schedule family meetings.

MaddAddam - Margaret Atwood

The final part of this dystopian trilogy is another gloriously readable novel featuring appealing characters and believable human behaviour in extreme but horribly plausible scenarios. This one has a more optimistic feel to it than the first two though, with a touching love story, impressive inter-species co-operation, and a growing - if still comically partial - understanding between the remaining humans and the new-formed Crakers. As before, the combination of suspenseful plotting and bite-sized chapters made it hard to stick to a reasonable bedtime while reading this...

Playful Parenting – Lawrence J. Cohen

“Playful Parenting” is described in this book as “a way of filling children’s needs for attachment, love, security, confidence, and closeness”. Cohen argues that since children’s play serves three purposes – building confidence through trying on adult roles, providing opportunities for closeness, and aiding recovery from emotional distress – parenting in a playful way, even in challenging situations, is the best way to assist with these processes.  He asserts that children’s difficult behaviour typically stems from feelings of either isolation or powerlessness, and that it makes more sense to address the root of the problem (by playing with these themes while providing affection, secure loving connections, and attention) than to attempt to change behaviour through punitive discipline.  Cohen notes that the times that we feel least like playing are when we don’t feel a strong connection with our children, or their play is ‘stuck’, aggressive, repetitive or boring, or our families are experiencing stressful transitions – all times that our playful input is most strongly required.  His approach to play asks us to make a conscious effort to “follow the giggles, build connections, foster self-confidence, and try to love the games we used to hate”, taking time to play and being willing to set aside adult ideas of dignity and act the clown if required (since “it takes a village idiot to raise a child”).

The chapter on ‘roughhousing’ initially made the biggest impression on me, as it was furthest removed from my previous idea of myself as a parent.  After reading Cohen’s account of the benefits of active physical play, I was convinced that I needed to give it a go.  He describes play fighting as a way to practise restraint and control as well as aggression, and as a tool for building confidence and assertiveness in less physically active children.  He also states that children learn to self-soothe through the close contact that this kind of play involves and the opportunities it provides to practise settling down afterwards, and that this can also help improve children’s focus and concentration.  He provides the following ground rules for getting started with wrestling with your child:

• Provide basic safety (e.g. ground rules such as pushing not hitting)
• Find every opportunity for connection (lots of cuddle breaks, eye contact)
•  Look for opportunities to increase their confidence and sense of power
• Play through old hurts (“it must remind the child of the initial incident, but not so much that she is paralyzed with fear or powerlessness”)
• Provide the right level of resistance (this might mean humorously not noticing when the child has escaped…)
• Pay close attention (look for good signs: giggling or exertion)
• (Usually) let the child win
• Stop when someone is hurt (or take a break, regroup and continue)
• No tickling allowed (holding them down makes them feel out of control)
• Don’t let your own feelings get in the way (exaggerate them comically)

I was also very interested in Cohen’s ideas on discipline, which he is careful to define as “the teaching of our values and principles”.  He advocates approaching discipline through closeness, playfulness and emotional understanding.  His first suggestion is to take a break to calm down, perhaps by phoning someone, before responding to a challenging situation (this has worked well for me).  He then recommends focusing on connecting with the child, in the belief that punishments increase children’s sense of isolation and powerlessness, whereas re-establishing a connection can repair underlying problems.  A ‘meeting on the couch’ to reconnect is presented as a positive alternative to a ‘time-out’, since “when discipline is presented to children as a joint problem requiring a joint solution, things go much better”.  Unsurprisingly, play is a major theme in Cohen’s approach to discipline: playing with the issues causing conflict, such as making silly rules and pretending to break them; using a playful tone; making mock threats and ‘acting’ upset; and recognizing when bad behaviour is a form of social ‘experiment’.  Cohen’s opinion is that “parents avoid playfulness in difficult parenting situations because they are afraid of rewarding bad behaviour… but being playful is not about rewards or punishments, it is about restoring the missing ingredient – connection – that caused the problems in the first place”.  Rather than applying techniques to create obedience in specific situations, he thinks we should be aiming to instil good judgement, by brainstorming handling situations, discussing moral dilemmas, discussing feelings – ours and theirs – after a conflict, modelling our values, and fostering cognitive organization through providing a quiet cosy place to calm down, a structured schedule, creative projects, and safe physical play.  He emphasizes the need to look under the surface, at the child’s feelings and needs, by viewing challenging behaviour as a coded message and trying to respond positively to that. (This one has also worked for me, e.g. responding to a push with “I missed you too & I’d love to have a big cuddle”.)  We are also reminded to use our knowledge of our child and accept – or at least manage, or try to prevent, rather than punish – behaviour that is normal for their developmental stage or temperament.  Finally (in case all of this is sounding too ‘soft’) he concludes that “children need limits, guidance and structure… applied lovingly and in a relaxed manner, not in anger or revenge”, urging parents never to give in against our better judgement or because of fear of an emotional reaction, but instead to set a limit calmly and then stay engaged, listening to their feelings and accepting tears if they come.

There is also some useful material on sibling relationships.  Cohen states that “at the heart of sibling rivalry is a set of profound and universal questions: Am I loved? Truly, absolutely loved? Am I wanted? Am I special? Am I powerful? Will my parents stop loving me if they start to love that other kid? Can I make the world bend to my will? Why can’t I do what I see that person doing? Why can’t I get what I see that person getting?”  He recommends experimenting with some or all of the following options to smooth sibling conflicts: offer a solution; give encouragement and inspire their confidence (support them while they figure it out); flood (both) children with love and affection (e.g. a mum who said she’d fill up the older siblings with love, kissing them from toes to head, then cracking a ‘love egg’ on their heads); protect (intervene when needed, and teach children that “they have the right to be safe, others have the right to be safe with them, there is nothing so terrible that you can’t tell someone about it, and you can keep searching until someone listens”); provide perspective (calmly listen and reflect back); promote win-win outcomes; be playful (try a comic commentary?); and give up the search for perfect equality (acknowledging when things are not fair).

There are some specific suggestions in this book that I’d like to spend more time exploring, particularly those around playing out difficult situations to let children practice gaining control over their impulses (“Let’s play getting dressed and ready”) and using play “to recover from a traumatic incident, large or small”, often using role reversal – “the purpose is to go through the incident again, but this time letting the scary feelings out – usually through giggles. That’s why a child likes to play this kind of game over and over and over.”  The observations on communication are also convincing, for example the suggestion to tell children a story from your day (which they may respond to) rather than bombarding them with questions about theirs, and to honour the way they choose to communicate by paying attention when they talk about “unimportant” things or repeat themselves.  There are lots of play ideas for specific purposes too, such as for self-soothing (teaching three long breaths, with emphasis on the exhale, and encouraging games of soothing and comforting dolls), self-regulation (calling out frequent, rapid directions while children run, jump or dance), and motor planning / sequencing (obstacle courses & treasure hunts).  On the subject of connection building, one story struck me as particularly moving: when the author’s daughter was two, she used to ignore her mother when she came home after working a night shift, at one point even refusing to admit that it was mummy and not daddy who was holding her.   They turned the question of “who is that holding you?” into a family ritual, which always led to cuddles and closeness, but often with extremes of tears and giggling along the way.

I first read this book when my daughter was an impeccably behaved toddling only child, and found it only mildly interesting – I liked some of the ideas but was a little irritated by some of the self-conscious attempts to create new terminology (“PlayTime” for dedicated child-led playtime, “filling their cup” for meeting attachment needs, and the “towers” of isolation and powerlessness).  After re-reading it while she’s a more challenging three year old with a sometimes-turbulent relationship with her little brother, I became somewhat obsessed by it.  In the few weeks that followed I found that playful parenting – joining in with children’s play enthusiastically, retaining a sense of humour about your role as a parent, and looking for a playful response to difficult situations – can indeed make a huge positive difference to family life.  Since then, as the energy and momentum of my initial enthusiasm have faded, I have also been struck by how true the observations in the final chapter are: that when parents are feeling tired and isolated ourselves we will struggle to maintain the open and playful attitude needed to make this approach work, and that we first need to apply the same principles to ourselves and how we deal with our own feelings, in particular by talking openly about our experiences of parenting.

The Shock of the Fall - Nathan Filer

This excellent and enjoyable novel manages, in a similar way to "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" (to which it has often been compared), to draw the reader into the inner world of someone with an unusual mental state by creating an engaging character with a convincing voice. In this case, as well as shedding light on the experience of living with schizophrenia and navigating the mental health care system, the book provides a moving and insightful portrayal of a family crippled by grief after a tragic accident.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert

I picked this up from the library after reading an enthusiastic review, but by the time I got home I was wondering when I'd find the time and energy to read it. I needn't have worried - I found this as absorbing and hard to put down as a good novel, probably because of Kolbert's personal and engaging writing style and the fascinating examples she uses to introduce the wider themes of the book. Each chapter uses a specific extinct or endangered species as a window on to our understanding of extinctions, or some aspect of the "Sixth Extinction", the mass extinction caused by the impact of humans on the natural world:

- Atelopus zeteki, the Panamanian golden frog, now extinct in the wild due to chytrid fungi, believed to have been spread recently by humans moving other species of frog between continents;

- Mammut americanum, the American mastodon, which disappeared in the 'megafauna extinction' that coincided(!) with the spread of modern humans, and whose bones led the French naturalist Cuvier to propose the concept of extinction in 1796;

- Pinguinus impennis, the great awk, slaughtered wholesale over a few hundred years by seamen who found their breeding colony off the coast of Newfoundland a source of easy food. (I found this chapter particularly sad.) Kolbert cites this as an example of a contemporary 'cataclysmic' extinction that challenged Darwin's view that gradual natural selection could account for all historic extinctions;

- Discoscaphites jerseyensis, an example of an ammonite, a type of marine invertebrate that was wiped out (along with the dinosaurs) in the end-Cretaceous extinction, now widely believed to have been caused by the aftermath of an asteroid's impact;

- Dicranograptus ziczac, a tiny marine organism or 'graptolite' that disappeared, along with most graptolites, at the end of the Ordovician period, probably due to glaciation, illustrating the point that the cataclysms that cause mass extinctions are varied. This chapter also describes the proposal to officially declare a new 'Anthropocene' geological epoch to recognise the recent human transformation of the Earth's geology through activities such as deforestation, damming rivers, and burning fossil fuels;

- Patella caerulea, a limpet threatened (like all shell-creating 'calcifiers') by "global warming's equally evil twin" ocean acidification, another major effect of the rising carbon dioxide levels produced by burning fossil fuels;

- Acropora millepora, a type of coral, another calcifier which is severely threatened by (amongst other things) ocean acidification, with some experts predicting that all reefs will have begun to dissolve within the next fifty years;

- Alzatea verticillata, a tree that in a study of a series of plots at different elevations (and therefore temperatures) in Peru does not appear to 'migrate' by dispersing seeds up the mountain as temperatures rise, and therefore appears to lack resilience to climate change;

- Eciton burchellii, an army ant, whose complex system of followers (such as birds that eat the insects they disturb, and butterflies that eat the birds' droppings) find it hard to survive in reduced 'forest fragments' in the Amazon, showing the disproportionately disruptive effect that deforestation can have;

- Myotis lucifugus, a bat under threat from 'white-nose syndrome', a cold-loving fungus recently imported to the US, where it is proving deadly to the bat population (an example of how "we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent - what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea");

- Dicerorhinus sumatrensis, one of only around a hundred remaining Sumatran rhinos, used to introduce a discussion of "oversized" animals whose lack of natural predators more than compensated for their slow reproductive cycles - until humans came along. According to this account of the megafauna extinction, "though it might be nice to imagine there was once a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did";

- Homo neanderthalensis, the Neanderthal, probably wiped out by us through a process of 'leaky replacement' that means that "all non-Africans ... carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA". In attempting to describe the unique qualities of humans that make us so powerful and therefore deadly, she describes a project to study Neanderthal DNA in search of "the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome";

- Homo sapiens: since we too depend on the biological and geochemical systems that we are so disruptive to...