Kayla 4 years 10 months

Kayla is developing into a little girl so quickly. With caring for the new baby we have noticed that our parenting styles differ between the two girls in regards to their ages. On top of the basic daily needs which they both have, there is so much we are working on to help Kayla develop to her best potential. We take her on outings to the zoo, park, or museum. We go for bike rides, walks around the block, or to the park to kick or throw the ball around. We read together all the time or Kayla will even look through her books on her own. One of her favorite things to do is play make believe with her dolls and the scenarios she comes up with are starting to get more complicated and intricate. She is amazing with the little games she comes up with when she is playing with her friends too. Kayla is getting so much better behaved in the restaurant setting. The rewarding for good behavior is working so we have started fading them out, but we still remind her about the rules and expectations of behavior we have and praise her about how wonderful she was. We may even try a long restaurant soon instead of just the quick ones. When Kayla misbehaves we let her know it is not appropriate and ask her if she knows what she did wrong and if she knows why it is wrong. She is usually does and is pretty compliant, but every once in a while we have to put her in a time out or have to take away what ever caused the problem. The other day, my partner was really stressed from work and lashed out at Kayla and even spanked her pretty hard for a really minor incident. Spanking isn’t something we typically do and so I had to have a talk with him and we worked things out, he even apologized to Kayla. We aren’t really working on any of these with the baby so because we have the two to compare we have really noticed the difference. I think a lot of our parenting styles come from our background of how we both grew up, we seem to model a lot of the same things we remember our parents doing and it is working so far, although balancing everything is still a daily challenge.

A few examples of Kayla’s cognitive growth from birth to now are her ability to read a few short words and write her name. She can name most of the letters on sight and shows an age-appropriate understanding of phonological awareness (like deciding whether two words started with the same sound, picking out the two words that rhymed from a list of three words). She also shows advanced ability to count, use numbers, understand quantitative relationships and classify objects. These are all things she was not doing as an infant.

Kayla’s personality is definitely blooming each day. She seems to be happy and overall pretty resilient. Her preschool teacher told us that she plays cooperatively with her friends, follows and understands playground and classroom rules, and seems to be able to avoid conflicts and arguments with peers. Sometimes she is reluctant to join in a game with children she doesn’t know. She also told us that Kayla is usually in a positive mood, and seemed to take ups and downs during the day in stride. Occasionally though she got upset by negative events or overly excited by positive events and rambunctious and needed to be calmed down by the teacher. She also said that Kayla works well independently which is a good skill for Kindergarten. That will be coming up soon; I can’t believe we are already at that point.