The Word Route

My emotional moment during my breastfeeding journey came when my child stopped feeding at 4.8 years. All these years, he suffered a lot of health issues, mostly respiratory issues. He was diagnosed with childhood asthma (considered common among babies these days). I was advised by my first paediatrician to continue feeding him till he turned 2. Extended breastfeeding helped me tide over his asthma over a period of time, including his dry skin problem. So I can vouch that if you can continue feeding your baby till he/she is two years old, it’s the best health gift for them. My Journey Breastfeeding came naturally to me after my son’s birth. I did not have any particular struggles while breastfeeding him – no medical issues/latching problems. In the beginning, my answers to my friends’ queries as to when am I going to wean him, were quite vague. I had started initially by saying that I would feed him until he turned 2. After he turned two, I changed my answer to 3 years. It was so natu...

From the moment I conceived, it was my fantasy to have a super tactile bond with my child after he/she would be born (for the longest possible time, I felt it would be a girl!). After my son was born, things became different and the first three months were extremely painful feeding him or holding him thanks to my C-section stitches. So, all maternal feelings vanished into thin air and all I could think was sleep or having “me-time”. There was hardly a chance to cuddle up with him! Post-partum depression had hit me big time and me not being able to calm down a screaming infant had dipped my morale too. Motherhood was nothing like I had imagined it would be! Besides I was terrified that my son would not accept me if I didn’t develop a bond early on. Of course, that did not happen. It was a mom’s fear that had spoken. After he entered the infamous toddler phase, I became the quintessential “villain” for my son – the usual “don’t do this and that”. Yet again, my dreams of becoming my son’s...

I have borrowed the above statement from a famous adage: "The early bird gets the worm". We all learned this proverb in school. It applies to every walk of life. In the case of children, this adage gains more significance as they cross various milestones in life.    There are some habits or values which we want our kids to imbibe early. These are called modelled habits. This is the main reason why we introduce certain habits and values early. For instance, right from brushing teeth twice a day to eating three meals a day (differs in every culture and community) to having a bath and doing household chores, we should have book reading sessions of short duration daily so that it becomes a part of their routine too.   Books are great to enhance imagination and also engage a child constructively. Most of the time kids these days would prefer the screen. But what a visual medium does, is to kill the imagination of a child. Whilst reading a book, the same child...