wholemom Articles

Dear Linda, Our son, David, is 13. Until fourth grade he was a quiet kid who sat in the corner and read books. During the fourth grade a slow deterioration began in his school behavior. A psychologist told us he was understimulated and getting bored. We tried to help him hang in there a few more years. There is no gifted kids program in our area. We finally decided to partially homeschool him and have been doing so for the past two months. Now that he spends more time studying on his own than in school, he has become a much happier boy, and, ironically, his social relationships have actually improved.

We did not need an official testing process to reveal to us what we knew from the time that our son was very young - that he was a gifted child who was not only precocious in his reading and other cognitive abilities, but whose mind worked in totally different ways from the minds of ordinary children. He was tested at the age of five at the urging of his two pre-school teachers who wanted to advance him to first grade after only one month in kindergarten.

Q What are the benefits of letting your child sleep in your bed? A The article on Co-Sleeping in the WholeFamily site mentions a few of the beneficial effects for children who sleep with the parents -- children have a more rested mother, it's good for family bonding, and there seems to be a lower risk of SIDS. The following resources contain information about many studies on the subject. You might be especially interested in the research now in progress by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber and author Maria Goodavage who are surveying mothers, fathers, and children who have "graduated" from the family bed.

When our children were young, the family bed conundrum was a big issue for my friends and me. But like all new parents, when my oldest was an infant, I filled my shelves with books on “Parenting by Experts”. The leg up I had on the other moms in the neighborhood was that while many of my friends were getting married and having babies in their early twenties, I was 27 when Sara was born.