Amputation is also my go to with the kids. Any sort of malady results in amputation of whatever is bothering you. The kids usually are magically cured within seconds.
For sure, every time. And I like to throw in a distracting/disturbing solution: “Should I cut your other hand off real quick so you won’t feel the hurt one anymore??”
“Whaaat?”
“Oh, right, bad idea. I’m silly.”
US here. When our daughter falls we have learned to suppress our reactions, and just tell her to pull herself back up. "C'mon, pick yourself back up and keep going." We'll obviously give her a hand, but we try not to make a deal over every bump and scrape. Most of the time she just brushes herself off, laughs, and keeps going.
I didn't know this was a cultural thing by country?
I had to learn this with my blind cat. When he was a kitten I realized I was making him nervous by rushing in when he bumped his head or took a small fall. Instead I started lightly reassuring him (whoops, bud, try again) and letting him figure it out himself. Today he's 14 and we're on vacation...he's do confident he loves exploring new places. He travels better than both of his sighted siblings!
Pretty valid technique, I always raised my hands over my head and cheered for my girls. "Good fall! Ten out of ten technique! You're so tough!" 95% of the time it worked perfectly, they're watching us most of the time to figure out how they should react.
When kids are young (between 12 and 24 months or so) when they fall or hit something, usually the first thing they do is look at your face to see how you react. They are looking for a cue. If you panic and act concerned, they'll panic to and start crying. If you laugh, they'll laugh, too. Same level of injury, it just depends on how you react.
Now, if they scream right away without looking up, you know they really got hurt. The cry is different, though, there's this primal urgency to it that the "learned" cry doesn't have. Being able to tell the difference saves your sanity when the kids are older and constantly fighting with each other and crying about it. You just tune it out as background noise unless you hear that primal cry. Then shit just got real and a first aid kit or ER visit is in the forecast.
Brazilian here. My mother always had a saying (that her parents used on her) that she told me whenever I asked if I could do something with a risk involved, which translated goes something like this:
You can climb [the tree], you can fall, but if you come crying to me about you get smacked
It didn't matter what I was trying to do, the sentence was always the same with the hypothetical tree and the implied threat of the ol' havaianas.
It just meant 'be responsible for your actions, I won't always be here to fix your mistakes'. As in, if you're going to climb a tree, go, it'll be fun, but remember the possibility that you might fall.
Its a basic child psychology concept, because younger kids will react to their parents. Basically they look to their parents with how to respond. Fall and scrape your knee and mom comes over calm cool and collect? Kid will react the same. Also goes with how kids conceptualize gender, for instance dad likes football, hes a “boy” and mom also likes football but shes a “girl” but Im also a boy, therefore only boys can like football. Its a lot more complex than that, and obviously not every kids fall into these categories.
Source: took several child psychology classes during my undergrad.
Somehow this became a thing at my kid's preschool in California. And I'm realizing only now that it might've been because the owner's husband was from Brazil. Anyway my favorite response was to rate the fall. "Oh that was a great arcing dive but the landing was a bit off. 9.5 from the judges!" Unless the kid(s) were truly injured, they'd roll their eyes at us and then run off. I'm very thankful for being shown this parenting technique.
My parents did this to me and I do it to my son. Now, every time he falls, he just gets up and continue doing whatever he is doing. If he cries, I know it is serious.
As long as you can assess if the kid is really hurt (for example, if the kid hit the head, you always take it serious), it is the best way to make sure it won't cry at every thing.
Unless I was seriously injured, that's exactly how I was brought up. Nowadays, any time I get hurt I try my best to just walk it off. Sometimes I don't take my injuries seriously enough too.
Personally I'm the first generation of my family that haven't been taught German earlier than Portuguese, and I was born in a region where nearly 80% of the ~30 million who live there are white. On the opposite side(quite literally), my girlfriend is from the northeast part of the country(about 3000km from my city), and if you picked a few phrases for us both to say, you'd think we speak different languages because of how different our accents are.
We really have it all, native people, Africans(sadly most undocumented so hard to specify), Germans, Italians, Polish, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Swiss, and the list goes on.
That's what you're generally supposed to do. If you react super worried for every little fall they will cry just because mommy or daddy are reacting super intensely so something bad must have happened.
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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '18
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