Magda Gerber, Seeing Babies with New Eyes
  • Home
  • Magda Uncut
    • Selecting toys for infants - Vol VII No 2 Spring 1986
    • Trust your baby - Vol I No 4 Autumn 1980
    • Welcome to Educaring - Vol I No 1 Winter 1979
    • Differences between a caregiver and educarer - Vol I No 2 Spring 1980
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • About Magda Gerber
    • Magda Quotes
    • Magda Speeches
    • Magda Stories
    • Magda, the Personal Side
    • Professional Library
    • In Memoriam

Find Your Passion For Parenting

5/12/2014

Comments

 
We are thrilled to announce that Janet Lansbury's warm and wise guidance has been captured in a new book. Below is the Introduction to Elevating Childcare, A Guide to Respectful Parenting. 
Picture

Finding A Passion For Parenting 

Parenting is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. It can also be exhausting, frustrating and utterly confounding.
The difficulties I faced as a new mother caught me off guard. I had looked forward to motherhood all my life and assumed that caring for a baby would happen naturally. Instead, I soon found that I had no clue. 


My baby was adorable, yet never in my life had I felt so tired, lost, inept and disappointed in myself. The mothering instincts I had assumed would provide me with clarity and guidance never materialized. My life had become a monotonous succession of feeding, burping, diapering, entertaining, and soothing tears (lots and lots of tears, most of them my daughter’s). Though I combed desperately through stacks of popular parenting books, I found nothing that resonated. 


At my wits end, I fatefully stumbled upon RIE (Resources for Infant Educators), the respectful approach to parenting founded by infant specialist and child care pioneer Magda Gerber. The approach made immediate sense to me, and I embraced it like a drowning victim with a life preserver. 


Before long I had experienced a radical transformation in both perception and experience: first, by discovering my baby’s astounding natural abilities to learn without being taught, to develop motor and cognitive skills, communicate, face age appropriate struggles, initiate and direct independent play for extended periods and much more; then by realizing the tremendous energy and stress I had been wasting by struggling to entertain and second-guess my child.


Over the years, Magda became my dear friend and mentor, and her philosophy of child care my passion. I became a RIE parenting teacher, a lecturer at Early Childhood conferences, an active blogger with millions of readers worldwide, a personal parenting consultant, and an author.
This book is a collection of 30 popular and widely read articles from my website. They focus on some of the most common aspects of infant and toddler child care and how respectful parenting can be applied. 


You will find Magda’s name or a quote from her on nearly every page of this book. Everything I know and write about springs from her wisdom and my own experience – with the hundreds of infants and toddlers who have come to through my classes, and with my own three children (now 21, 17 and 12). Janet Lansbury, Elevating Childcare


Do less, observe more, enjoy most. - Magda Gerber 

Our Reviews: 

"More than anyone, Janet Lansbury has been responsible for faithfully practicing, sharing and spreading the concepts Magda Gerber introduced and taught for years. Janet has a gift for "seeing babies with new eyes", and for teaching, writing, and mentoring parents to do the same. She has built upon what she learned from Magda Gerber through her own parenting and professional practice. This book is inspiring, and will give you the tools and information you need to transform your relationship with your baby, and to find your own passion for parenting. Check it out today! You won't be sorry you did."  Lisa Sunbury Gerber

"This book is loaded with well thought out, valuable, caring and parenting suggestions. The approach presented is fine tuned by Janet Lansbury’s experience as mentor to parents and made personal with touching stories about her own children. Janet is an expert in sensitive observation, and the importance of allowing children to experience their own feelings, while learning and growing at their own pace. For me, it is especially touching the way she expresses these ideas so true to the way they were taught by my mother, Magda Gerber." Bence Gerber
Comments

Erma Bombeck and Magda Gerber: Two Views of Diapering Babies

5/13/2012

Comments

 
In honor of mother's day and mothers everywhere, a humorous  exchange between two icons. Enjoy! 
Picture
                                 Erma Bombeck 

Mothers Change Diapers, Not Theories
Changing a baby's diaper has always (excuse the expression) ranked right up there with following a garbage truck too closely. It wasn't something a mother refused to do, but she didn't put it on her resume either.

Now an authority on children has suggested if a mother hurries through the job and treats it as a distasteful chore, her attitude could send a negative message to her baby. She says mothers are foolish to waste all that valuable time when they could use it as an opportunity to verbalize with their babies and involve them in the entire process.


You should never scoop the baby up from behind without warning and start to remove his diaper, she says, but should greet him and say, "You are having such a good time with your rubber giraffe, but I'd like to pick you up and change you. Is that all right with you?"


This should be followed by eye contact and more dialogue asking for the baby's complete attention and the mother's undying ecstasy throughout the process.


I don't care what anyone says about laying the foundation for a child's positive self-image ... unless the kid can roll up his own diaper and hook-shot it into a garbage can and put a lid on it, I don't see how we have anything to talk about.

Besides, it's a two-way street. What's to prevent a kid from verbalizing over a diaper change, "Snap it up, frozen finge
rs, and give me my rubber giraffe back or I'm going to dilute the paint on your newly painted ceiling."

There are a couple of things wrong with this theory. Assuming a mother talked herself into using this time as a celebration of plumbing, what happens when the kids meet other people? No one loves a baby who makes your eyes water, and kids better get used to rejection. It is a lesson that is either learned early or haunts them when you threaten them with a hole in their folding chair at graduation.

Surprise is one of the best things a mother has going for her. Many's the time I've swooped down on a child with a red face like a bald eagle and deposited him, diaper and all, on the bathroom throne just because he "looked" like he was going to "make disgusting."


For centuries, mothers have carved a niche for themselves as world-class martyrs because of their devotion to dry diapers. It is one of the few things we do that fathers are awed by.


Frankly, I resent the fact that someone would think I could diaper babies all those years and not have some rapport with them. There wasn't a time when I did not lean over and whisper in their little ears, "You owe me big for this for the rest of your life. Wet again and the giraffe dies." 



(This column was published on Thursday, June 18, 1987 in the Los Angeles Times. Photo credit: TS & EF on flickr )


Picture
Magda Gerber



Magda's response to Erma's column: 











July 14, 1987

Erma Bombeck 

c/o Los Angeles Times 
Times Mirror Square 
Los Angeles, California

"Erma Dearest",


Please don't kill the giraffe!  The giraffe is innocent.
If you must- kill the "authority" (name and address included), though she may have already suffered a close-to-fatal ego burst from being quoted by her favorite humorist, Erma Bombeck.


Feeling rejected is in the mind of the 'rejectee', a healthy dose of "undying ecstasy" could immunize one against all rejections to come.
 
To enhance our mothers' "undying ecstasy" the same 
"authority" also advises them to get their daily dose
of Erma Bombeck humor. (Who do you read for a boost?) 


Smilingly,


Magda Gerber


P.S.  To make you laugh even more, I am sending you our Manual -- more of the same giraffe stories....




Picture
Erma Bombeck

 And Erma's response to Magda:











July 30, 1987

Dear Magda:


Thank God there is someone out there whose humor has remained intact.


I respect what you do and I'm delighted you respect what I do. It's people like you who try to make it a better world, and it's people like me who try to shoot holes in it while it's airborne. I was kidding about the giraffe.


Thanks for your letter and your manual.


                                                Regards,

                                                 Erma Bombeck
 

P.S. I promise to give you a little peace for awhile.

Comments

    Editors

    Bence Gerber 
    Lisa Sunbury

    Archives

    February 2019
    May 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    October 2012
    September 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012

    Categories

    All
    Baby Classes
    Books
    Diapering
    Discipline
    Educaring
    Erma Bombeck
    Love
    Magda Gerber
    Magda Memoriam
    Magda Personal Correspondence
    Magda Quotes
    Magda Speaks
    Magda Stories
    Magda Uncut
    Parenting
    Play
    Resources
    Respect
    Rie Basic Principles
    Sharing
    Trust

Photos used under Creative Commons from honey-bee, andrewmalone, Jessica Keating Photography, Nina Matthews Photography, aarongilson, Tammra McCauley, kona99, DaGoaty, Netícola - Raúl A., MQuimayousie, storyvillegirl, kevin dooley, Alphagold1, Viditu, Tom & Katrien