Kids' Health Blog

By Jeri Kayser

We all know drinking water is important. After air, it is pretty much what we need to survive. We mostly consist of water and everything in our bodies work better with an adequate amount of water in them. Try explaining this to a toddler. Try explaining this to a toddler who is sick or has just had their tonsils out. Now try explaining this to a toddler who has discovered they can clamp their mouth shut and no one can make them drink, not even Mom. And whoa, this is so cool to have power over Mom!

This daunting task is universal throughout time and cultures and is more easily dealt with when you plan ahead rather than try to persuade your child to drink when they’re at risk of getting dehydrated. Also, dehydration can cause irritability and a killer headache, which brings out the best in absolutely no one. So, I’ve prepared a few tips for parents:

Drink water: Your child watches you closely. They’re going to be more inclined to drink if they see you drink, and they will be more inclined to drink water if they see you drink water. Plus, your body will appreciate it!

Serve it up cold: Water tastes better cold. Add some ice cubes because they’re fun. You can also add a little juice to the water in the ice cube tray to make the cubes even more fun with a splash of color.

Add slices of fruit: if it’s age appropriate, fruit adds just a touch of freshness and may also encourage more exploration of different fruits.

Find a fun water bottle: There are tons of water containers to choose from. Letting your child pick out a water bottle will help encourage their water intake. They might be inclined to pick one with a fun character, something “pretty,” or, if they’re older, something that fits best in their backpack or clips easiest on their sports bag.

Start early: Habits are best developed and maintained when started early. Have your child’s first beverages be milk or water so they begin to associate water with the way to quench thirst.

If your physician has directed you to encourage your child to drink because they are at risk of being dehydrated, here are some additional tips:

Encourage them to talk: When you say a few words, you swallow your saliva without thinking about it to be better understood. This is especially helpful if they are choosing not to swallow because of pain from a sore throat.

Licking feels less overwhelming than drinking: This is partially why Popsicles work so well. Frozen Popsicles are frozen liquids.

Use sibling rivalry: If there are other children in the household, let them have the popsicles as well. No kid wants a sibling to get something they aren’t getting.

Blenders are a giant toy: They have buttons, smash stuff and make a lot of noise—a really awesome toy! Experiment with smoothies.

Schedule tea party time: Drink out of novel containers, tea party dishes, syringes–whatever is appropriate and fun.

Use sticker charts: For kids, it is hard to understand why they need to drink, especially when they don’t feel well, so sticker charts can work great. We are all well motivated when we can easily see how we will benefit from our choices. Make a chart with your child and give them a sticker for whatever amount a fluid swallowed seems reasonable. Create a “sticker store” where they can “buy” things with various amounts of stickers. These items could be something like a coloring book or maybe an activity like choosing a book to be read to, whatever works best in your family.

Communicate with your doctor: They need to know how much your child is drinking so they can best care for your child. They will also be helpful on letting you know what the goals should be for the amount of fluids your child needs.

Communicate with your child: Don’t underestimate your child’s capacity to understand that drinking is important. Even at a very young age children are actively involved in taking care of their bodies: baths and brushing teeth are good examples. They are able to understand that drinking is one more thing they can do for themselves to feel their best.

Jeri Kayser has been a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota since 1985. Her educational background is in child development and psychology. She has three children who have been a great source of anecdotes to help illustrate developmental perspective. They’re good sports about it.

By Jeri Kayser 

The holiday season is upon us, full of celebrations and gatherings with family and friends. There are plenty of cookies, leftover turkey and fortunately (or unfortunately) unlimited parenting advice.

• The advice can be fun when Grandma recounts the temper tantrum your mother threw in the grocery store when she was little and how it was handled.
• The advice can be helpful when your sister-in-law tells you about a website with deeply discounted baby supplies.
• The advice can feel judgmental, overwhelming or misinformed when a bunch of aunts declare your baby must be cold because they are. “Why don’t you put a sweater on that child? He’s going to catch pneumonia!”

On the flip side, when you’ve lived life and raised kids, you do have some worthwhile advice to share. It’s hard to watch others struggle when you have good parenting tricks up your sleeve. So, how do we maintain family harmony and actually make this advice business work?  Some thoughts….

Unsolicited advice is rarely valuable. To be motivated to follow advice, it’s best if we actually sought it. As a Child Life Specialist, my day is filled with offering advice to parents on how they can help their child cope with their medical care experience. If the advice is going to be valuable, it has to be given with respect to the individual child and families’ needs, as well as their ability and desire to hear the information. Letting someone know what you have to offer and then respecting their decision as to whether they’d like the advice will encourage a dialogue that’s supportive.

No two situations are the same.  We’re unique individuals. A parenting technique that worked with one child might not work with another. Plus, every parent has their own set of skills and challenges that they work with when parenting. My mother-in-law gave me one of the greatest gifts possible (not counting her incredible, perfect son!). She told me when we had our first child that she wouldn’t tell me how to raise him if I didn’t tell her how to raise her kids. She recognized and respected the fact that we would each have our own style and would be more supportive of each other when we removed judgment.

Is now the right moment? In the midst of a huge toddler meltdown, no one is going to hear anything clearly. During the middle of a challenge is when you feel the most vulnerable as a parent. If you’re the advice giver, find a time later to reflect on what happened. If you’re the recipient of advice at an inopportune moment, be ready to redirect, “I would love to hear your perspective later Aunt Bertha, but I need to deal with this right now.”

Be open to the possibilities of great ideas in the sea of advice. When you’re pregnant, you’re a magnet for advice. People feel compelled to give it. During each of my pregnancies, parents at the hospital would offer me advice. Some of the hints I politely listened to and discarded because it wasn’t right for me, but most of the advice proved to be phenomenally helpful.

When people love us they want to help. They want to know the knowledge they have acquired in life is valuable. We also want to forge our own unique paths. When we are respectful in giving and getting advice, it can be priceless in the tremendous challenge of parenting.

This is a post by Jeri Kayser, who’s been a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota since 1985. Her educational background is in child development and psychology. She has three children who have been a great source of anecdotes to help illustrate developmental perspective. They’re wonderful at being good sports about it.

This is a post by Jeri Kayser, who’s been a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota since 1985. Her educational background is in child development and psychology. She has three children who have been a great source of anecdotes to help illustrate developmental perspective. They’re wonderful at being good sports about it.

Something needs to happen; something that was not your child’s choice, and it’s going to require some cooperation on their part. Maybe it’s a trip to the dentist, a haircut, a move to a new school or dinner with some overbearing relative at a restaurant with cloth napkins. Like all successful endeavors, a little planning can go a long way.

Working with children about to have surgery gives me a pretty unique vantage point as to what helps when preparing a child for something new and challenging. The following are some thoughts to consider when faced with this daunting task.

Self–exploration

How do you feel about what’s coming up? What have been your experiences doing this event and what have you found helped or did not help? Personal confession: Going to the dentist is not on my top million list of things to do. I know this about myself so when it came time for my kids’ first visits to the dentist, I was honest about my feelings. I knew that anything I said about the upcoming visit to the dentist was going to contain some of my bias. While explaining what would be the sequence of events, I included where I felt challenged and what I did to make it better. Your emotional context of the event is going to be different from your child’s because you are unique individuals with unique perspectives.

Respect your knowledge of your child

How does your child best take in information? Do they need time to process or does time make them more anxious as they imagine every worse case scenario? Do they learn better hands-on or are they a better visual learner and like to read about a new event before they participate? Every child, at each stage of their development, is going to have their own way of approaching new information.

Find out what your child already knows

Often, when a parent has just confessed to me that they haven’t told their child anything about surgery, the child will be able to go into immense detail about what is going to happen. They know. They listen. They pay attention. The information is just so much more meaningful when there has been a direct conversation with opportunities to ask questions. When you ask your child what they already know, their response can give you helpful guidance in how they understand the event and what, if any, misconceptions they might have.

What to expect and what is expected of them

Not knowing what is going to happen is usually the source of anxiety, not what is actually happening. We as adults can think through all of the possibilities of what to expect and have more life experiences from which to draw. Kids tend to get more anxious about stepping into the great unknown and fear that loss of control. Explaining what will be happening in a step-by-step approach is comforting in its sense of predictability. Be sure about your facts. Shorter descriptions tend to be more accurate and easier to listen to. End the timeline of the event with something you will be doing when you are done and back home. This helps reinforce that the event won’t last forever and normalcy will return. Kids also need to know what is expected of them, when will they be required to be cooperative and what the repercussions for misbehavior are.

Questions from the audience

Make sure you leave time for questions right after you’ve finished explaining what will happen or later when your child may have additional thoughts on the topic. If you ask a person if they have any questions, the typical response is no.  A more helpful way to get to their thoughts could be to say, “Think of three questions you might have about (fill in the blank).” If you can’t answer a question, have your child write it down and make a list of questions to bring to whomever is most likely to have the answers.

Was it like what you thought it would be like?

This is a good question to sum up the experience. This is also a good question to encourage conversation about what went well and what they would want to change to make it even better the next time. If things didn’t go well, there is actually much to be learned by that. Success is a good ego booster, but failure is a better teacher. As you process what happened, you are also teaching your child how to face a new challenge, which is an invaluable gift for the rest of their life. Well-prepared kids tend to face any challenge with more skill, confidence and success.

Bonus round

It is very gratifying to watch your kids handle something you weren’t sure they could, and their self-discovery of just how strong they can be is priceless.

This is a post by Jeri Kayser, who’s been a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota since 1985. Her educational background is in child development and psychology. She has three children who have been a great source of anecdotes to help illustrate developmental perspective. They’re wonderful at being good sports about it.

If you’re a parent of a college-bound kid, your life has probably been taken over by filling out FAFSA forms, figuring out finances, deciding who’s bringing the fridge and shopping for dorm sheets. They really had to make them some weird size, huh?

You may not have paid attention to how this transition has impacted your younger children still at home. But, it’s not too late to think about what might work best for your family when your oldest leaves for college, especially if your oldest is just entering his or her senior year in high school this year.

There will be big changes and more subtle ones. Sometimes it’s the little changes that feel more disruptive because they have a way of sneaking up on you.

When our oldest left for school, it took our family forever to set the table for four people instead of five. When that fifth place setting was obviously unnecessary, our youngest would always groan, “Oh yeah, Zach’s not here.”

This shift in family life begins to firm up over that heavily ritualistic space of time known as senior year. Every sport or club banquet honoring seniors, every college fair, the ACT test, senior pictures, prom and graduation celebrations all remind us of what’s to come. At a grad party we attended this spring, I found a younger sibling greeting guests. She spied me, sighed and said, “This has been the ‘All Andrea, All Year- year.’ I’m sick of it!”

It can be a bit daunting to achieve balance between giving your kids the attention they need and preparing yourself, your college-bound child and their siblings for this next step. My hope is that the following tips will help your family:

Visit college with the entire family

Take your younger kids on some college visits. It’ll help them understand what college is about and why their big brother is  so excited. Plus, it’s a family trip! Many college visit programs include activities for siblings. Our youngest loved checking out the bookstores. It’s fun to get them a T-shirt from the chosen school because it’s a direct physical connection to their big sibling when they wear the shirt.

Involve siblings in graduation party prep

It’s a ton of work to get ready for a grad party. Assigning a younger child to sort through pictures and make a poster can be a huge help. It’s also a great way for everyone to reflect on all of the shared memories.

Move-in day: Get all hands on deck

Having siblings help on the day your freshman moves into her dorm is another set of legs to run up those three flights of stairs with all of the stuff, but more importantly it’s a great opportunity for them to see where their big sister will be living. They can also make their own imprint on the room by contributing with a picture, stuffed animal or shared item. When you leave, make plans for when your family will next see each other. Even if that isn’t until Thanksgiving, there’s comfort in knowing when you will see each other again.

Use social media

Facebook, Twitter, Skype, texting and emailing can be easy ways to stay in touch. Our kids share an iTunes account and have grown to love the fact that they can listen to each others’ current interests. When my daughter is missing one of her brothers, she likes to listen to one of their favorite songs.

Be mindful that your freshman needs time to establish relationships with new friends at college and most schools recommend that they stay at school for about six weeks without visiting in person. This is a fantastic rule and a tough one to follow, but it’s definitely worth it for their enjoyment of everything the college experience has to offer. Be ready to intervene if your younger children are communicating too much.

Send care packages

Every kid likes to get a care package. And there’s no better time like the present – when back-to-school shopping is in full swing – to start collecting shoe boxes for transporting goodies to your child. As you find items that would be of interest to your freshman, put them in the box and when you fill it up, send it off. Younger siblings can help prepare the care package.

Parents: You’ve got this. Here’s to a great school year!

This is a post by Jeri Kayser, a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.

Yep, you read that right. How do we teach our kids to be sad when every natural inclination tells us that kids need to always be happy? As parents, we tend to measure our self-worth in the reflection of our child’s emotions. As soon as our child cries, we seek a solution to sooth in a sympathetic response. But sympathy can sabotage self-esteem. No one wants others to feel sorry for them.

Empathy is more powerful. When you’re empathetic, you let your children know that you understand their distress and are prepared to support them as they develop their coping skills. This is much easier said than done. It’s painful to see your child in pain. Plus, learning to cope with sadness is a skill set that needs to be learned, so how can we help teach our kids how to be sad?

First Step: Embrace your own sadness. Kids learn by example. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, fatigued, frustrated, or generally not pleased with the status quo, do some self-exploration. There is much to be gained from trying to figure out why you aren’t happy. Seeking solutions is a way to gain control and find balance and when your children observe you work through something, they learn the value of the effort. Plus, they’re comforted by the fact that you have some of the same emotions as they do and have learned to deal with them.

Second Step: Remember everybody gets to own their emotion and every emotion is valid. We can go through the same event and have different responses to it, each equally relevant. There’s no “bad” emotion, just the one that’s present. If you can retain a calm presence, it’s easier to be supportive and not have your emotional response get mixed up with your child’s.

Third Step: Help give your child the vocabulary to express their emotion. Teach your child descriptive words that more accurately express their feelings. As they’re learning these words, encourage them to use art as well to express what they’re feeling.

Fourth Step: Help your child discover coping skills that work for them. One of my kids likes to write down her feelings in the privacy of her room (after the door has been slammed!). We know now to wait for the essay to be finished before she is ready to talk.

Last and most important step: Cut yourself and your child some slack. Being emotional is being human. Emotions are how we embrace life and experience it fully. It is not neat or perfect but real and messy and rich.