Every parent can say “yes, we love our child” but can we all say that we respect our child? It’s a strange question to ask, especially when they’re babies. Respect them, how? Respect their decision? Ok, but what happens when my one-year-old doesn’t want to brush her teeth or change her poopy diaper? Do I respect her decision and let her sit in her own filth? Of course not! Respecting your baby doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. But it does mean that you explain to them what and why an action is done.

I first heard about RIE (pronounced “rye” like the bread) from a mommy friend Miao Lu whose now 5-year-old daughter was brought up with RIE parenting methods. As Miao helped change a diaper for a one-year-old, they had a most interesting conversation. “Okay Savannah, I’m going to change your diaper now. I’m going to wipe your bum and give you a new clean diaper.” Miao looked genuinely interested to be changing a poopy diaper and Savannah was engaged, possibly confused as to why an adult would be so happy to wipe her bum, listening to the step-by-step process for the first time. Throughout the whole ordeal the two were engaged in the process of diaper changing.

Developed by Magda Gerber in 1978, RIE believed that babies are born with phenomenal learning abilities, unique gifts, deep thoughts, and emotions. We, as parents, should not rush to conclusions but instead, should enhance our awareness by observing them — allowing them the space they need to show us who they are and what they need.

To explain RIE better, we reached out to Kumiko Akiyama, a mom of two who completed RIE® Practicum group-care training and now trains Beijing’s parents on RIE parenting. “I believe that RIE works for parents, because they can learn a practical method to allow their infants and toddlers to demonstrate their confidence and competence” Kumiko tells Jingkids.

“Before, I was often anxious about my parenting skills. I worried that I was not providing enough so I used to keep a busy schedule with educational activities for my children. When my second child was about 10 months old, I attended RIE observation classes. And right away I knew that this approach would be beneficial for me and my children. During the class, I sat down on the floor and observed my daughter and other babies playing and interacting freely for 90 minutes. I could see that children were treated with respect in many ways. They were allowed to express their feelings, move freely, play and socialize without any interruption in a safe environment. As I discovered how authentic, confident and capable they were, I let go of my worries and found peace within me.”

To be honest, before seeing Miao’s diaper change, I had never heard of RIE. When it comes to early childhood parenting, parents tend to know more about the Montessori approach thanks to their great marketing. What make the two different?

Kumiko explains that RIE believes in uninterrupted play where children can play or interact with other children freely in a safe environment. “The play objects are open-ended and can be used in any creative ways. In Montessori, the work materials are prepared to achieve certain goals and teachers present how to use them first. Children have the freedom to choose which work they want to do. I believe that both approaches aim to develop children’s confidence and problem-solving skills, but there are different levels of choices, freedom and limits. Also, RIE is based on Magda Gerber’s “Educaring® Approach” which means: educating children through care. And there are particular ways to provide caregiving such as feeding, diapering and dressing etc.”

Last month Kumiko taught new parents a free diaper changing class. “I wanted to transform the daily diapering task into meaningful moments to build relationships with babies. I believe it works wonderfully for busy parents who seek to build a secure attachment and deeper connection with their babies. Before, I used to feel guilty for not spending enough quality time with two children, but I could make the daily caregiving into quality time with each child! I wanted parents to see how competent babies can be even during a diaper change. They can understand the routine, language and learn to participate by lifting up their bottoms or legs, or even help to throw away old diapers when they are older!” Kumiko tells us.

After attending the class and picking up new techniques, it subsequently translated in more than just the diaper changing aspect of our day. The entire RIE philosophy has encouraged more conversations as well as verbal and physical interactions between my daughter and I. It’s been less stressful and I’ve been able to watch her develop her own independence.

To learn more about RIE and take part in the classes in Beijing, Kumiko is here to help. There is an online RIE® Foundations Course to learn each principle deeply. For families in Beijing who seek support, Kumiko provides home visit observation and reviews the play and caregiving environment. She will also be organziing RIE introduction courses and caregiving workshops like the diaper changing one I attended. For those interested to learn more, add Kumiko on WeChat at kumikoakiyama.

Images: Kumiko Akiyama, Pexels

WeChat groups are a vital resource for Beijing’s international community, not only providing information but bringing together people with shared interests. Each week we’ll be highlighting a thriving group chat, so whether you’re new to town or just looking to expand your networks, you can find your people.

The first days with a newborn baby can be exciting and joyous, but they can also be anxious and lonely. Children don’t come with an instruction book, and new moms and dads often look for support, community, and a coherent set of ideas about how to approach the complex challenges of parenting. For this week’s WeChat Group of the Week, we talked to Asrya Hyland, who runs one such group in Beijing.

Tell us about yourself, and how you came to be admin of this group.
I started my journey in education around 15 years ago, and have since worked in many different areas of education. I have studied both primary and early childhood education in New Zealand, and lived in China for over nine years, giving me an insight into the lifestyles and traditional understandings that Chinese parents may have.

From my education and experience, I know that from before birth until the age of 3 children set their foundational understandings of the world around them, which will shape the way that they learn and see the world for the rest of their life. Dr. Emmi Pikler – a practiced pediatrician and mother – studied the development of children from birth in institutions and in families in Hungary post-WWII, and made an approach to care and learning. This approach has since been developed further by international professionals and embraced as the foundation of other popular parenting approaches such as RIE.

As an educator, a parent and founder of a new center specializing in care and education of children 0-3, I heard a need from many people to set up a sharing system with some kind of structure to share bilingual information.

Who’s in the group and what do you talk about?
Our learning community is made up of parents, academics, and educators. We knew there was a need for this information, but the fact that our group grew to over 200 members in a matter of weeks and the level of interaction just reinforced the need. My team and I create a monthly bilingual study based on an evident need in the group. We share bilingual readings, videos, pictures, experiences, and interactive discussions, daily. All of our sharing is related to the care and education of children from 0-3.

Do you meet in real life?
We host Pikler trainings and will open a 0-3 infant and toddler center in March next year. Once we have opened our center we will start to have free monthly meetings.

If you’d like to find out more, contact Hyland via WeChat ID: Asrya1.

Photo: courtesy of Asrya Hyland

There is a parenting and early childhood education (ECE) approach that is rapidly gaining attention in China: the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE, pronounced as “wry”) approach. It is based on the work of early childhood educator Magda Gerber in the late 1970s. The RIE approach is based on a philosophy that shows ‘respect’ to babies; in other words, talking to them as you would to an adult.

Next Thursday (April 5), American early childhood educator and RIE associate Deborah Carlisle Solomon is visiting Beijing to hold a workshop introducing the principles of this parenting and ECE style. See the poster below for more details.

RIE Workshop – The Principles of Magda Gerber’s Educaring Approach, Apr 5-6
Adults. The workshop provides an introduction to RIE Basic Theory and Philosophy. Presented by Deborah Carlisle Solomon, author of Baby Knows Best,  is an RIE associate spreading the approach around the world. This workshop is an opportunity for parents and early childhood educators who want to learn how to incorporate the RIE philosophy into their own interactions with babies and toddlers (0-2 years). RMB 3,980. 9am-5pm. Hello Future flagship campus, Cathay View West Gate, Guantang East Road, Chaoyang. Contact beclamb@yahoo.com or Nancy at 152 1060 0619 for more details or to register.

RIE Foundations Courses in Beijing, Mar 26-30 and Apr 2-4 (8 days total); Summer course: Jul 9-13 and 16-18 (8 days total)
Adults. This course provides an overview of Magda Gerber’s Educaring approach, including gross motor, fine motor, social-emotional development of the infant and young toddler; designing the environment; planning the curriculum; and issues in parenting. The course is designed for educators who are wanting to go more in-depth into the RIE approach. The venue will be in Upper East Side, Lido. For details and to register, email: jemina.v@icloud.com.

Parent-Infant Guidance Classes at Green Garden International Nursery
Adults. This is a weekly 90-minute class led by an RIE intern, which allows parents of infants and young toddlers to learn and practice basic RIE techniques in a relaxing, infant-friendly, small group environment. The venue will be in Upper East Side, Lido. For details and to register, contact Kiki Wang at 188 1003 3860.

Parent-Infant Classes at Hello Future, Maquanying (Shunyi/Wangjing), every Mon
Adults. The classes are from 10.45am to 12.15pm, and are led by an RIE practicum student. Contact Rebecca Archer at 130 7116 2353 for more details.

Photos: vborodinova, sathyatripodi via Pixabay; poster courtesy of Hello Future

I have wished many times my child could go back to being a baby. How wonderfully easy were those days, compared to now when she is four years old, mobile and very talkative. Just have another baby, you might say, but it’s not that easy. However after I visited the new Green Garden in Lido I wished I had another baby on my hip. I came in feeling rushed and so busy with work, but when I entered I felt immediately relaxed and peaceful. I love places with great design and pretty visual aspects.

“A respectful beginning is an investment in the future of the relationship between your child and you, your child and others, and in your child’s exploration of the world.” – Magda Gerber, Your Self-Confident Baby

But this place is not only pretty, it has a purpose. Babies from birth to 36 months are welcomed to this nursery with love. Ying Zhang (Vivian) and Jemina Villanueva-Vallee (Jea) have been working tirelessly to get this space ready for the smaller kids to toddle around and be respected. Green Garden’s vision is a courageous one, and much needed in Beijing. The two mothers work with the parenting philosophy RIE, which stands for Recourses for Infant Education. The RIE approach is a method which allows parents and carers to see the world through the child’s eye, talking to the children like a normal person and respecting their feelings and wishes.

Imagine this scenario: Your baby cries, but instead of grabbing the diaper and performing a uniform change, you talk them through it. “I’m going to change you now, because your diaper is wet.”

The Green Garden is a international nursery designed for young children and the loving adults in their lives. Zhang and Villanueva-Vallee believe that young children learn best through self-initiated exploration of their environment, discovery through play and interactions with other children. All the fabrics are eco-friendly organic materials, along with sustainable wood from Thailand and a non-toxic chocolate-smelling floor. And I can tell you it’s the best thing ever for my nose. The nursery also offers support services for parents, caregivers, and educators of infants and toddlers. Go have a look at this peaceful place in the hustle and bustle of Beijing; I promise you won’t regret it.

Photos: courtesy of Green Garden

Cristina Pop is a former Beijing expat who still takes part in the online Beijing community. When parents expressed a confusion over different parenting styles, she offered to write an article for readers. Many thanks Cristina! Find her on her blog at mothers-abroad.com. 

As a new mom I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t read any parenting book before I gave birth. I was the first one to have a baby in my extended family. I didn’t really think about what being a parent meant before I became one. I thought that it will come naturally to me.
It didn’t.

I somehow knew the kind of parent I didn’t wanted to be but I didn’t know who I wanted to be. My midwife, my pediatrician, my friends kept telling me: You are the mother, you know your child best, you should know, just trust your instincts

Instincts… intuition… Yes, all this came to me but not in the first days. Trial and error, this is how I learned.  One day I put my baby in the pram to go out for the first walk outside the house. I did it because all my friends used strollers. But it didn’t feel right. So instead of the pram I used a sling to wear her: close to my heart where I could feel her.  She didn’t liked to sleep alone, so she slept on our chests and in our bed, despite everything I was told (this is too dangerous,  this is a big mistake, she will never want to sleep by herself, she needs to learn to soothe herself, just let her cry it out and she will fall asleep by herself )
After a few months I came across The Attachment Parenting Book by William and Martha Sears. And everything started to make sense. I thought that I was just parenting my daughter but I was amazed that it had actually a name: I was attachment parenting.

It might sound like a new trend in parenting but it is not. Incidentally, the subtitle of the book is “A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing your Baby.”  Jean Liedloff has observed and researched the way  the indigenous tribe of  Yeguana people in Venezuela raise their children and it very much looked like attachment parenting.

With Dr Sears’ book I opened the big door of parenting literature and I felt overwhelmed for the second time. This time not by being a parent, but by amount of conflicting advice for new-parents and parents to be.
Let’s have a look of how two different parenting styles deal with something that parents need to face every day since their baby is born: crying.

“Children do not need to be held constantly and may not want to be held when they cry or are upset,” says Magda Gerber, founder of RIE  (Resources for Infant Educators). “Parents often associate crying with pain. An infant’s cry can stir in us feelings of fear or pain from our own childhoods and we may assume our bay is experiencing the same pain. With babies, this isn’t necessarily so. A child can calm herself by sucking her blanket or thumb. Some children cry to calm themselves (…). Young babies use crying as a release of energy. Crying is a good physical release.”

Now here is what Martha and William Sears have to say: “A baby’s cry is a baby’s language. It’s baby’s way of saying ‘Something is not right, please make it right!’ The infant’s cry is designed to help the baby survive by calling attention to her needs. [And we want our babies to not just survive, but thrive.] Researchers who have studied the sound of a crying regard the infant’s cry as the perfect signal: disturbing enough to command attention but not so disturbing that parents want to get away rather than respond. Crying is how a baby keeps her parents close and attached. Respond to your baby’s cry with your ear and your heart.”

Magda Gerber (RIE) disagrees with baby wearing:  “Using a baby carrier or a baby sling, leaves your baby hanging from your body in a passive position, unable to move,” while Attachment Parenting encourages parents to wear their babies (in a sling or baby wrap) as much as possible: “For centuries women in various cultures around the world have carried their babies in different kinds of slings and shawls. Experience taught these women that babies are happier in the arms of their mother or another person who cares for them. Buggies and strollers are relatively new inventions, in use only in modern times, when experts’ have advised women not to spoil their infants by paying too much attention to them.”

Also regarding where a  baby should sleep, these 2 parenting styles disagree. Magda Gerber writes  “I feel it is important for a child to fall asleep alone in her crib a learned behavior that will serve her well for life. Everybody should be able to sleep alone.” William Sears laughs about an invitation he received to write an article about “the controversy about sleeping with your baby” and he asks, “What is so newsworthy about parents sleeping with their babies? Parents have slept with their babies for thousands of years, and even today the practice is not unusual. Most of parents do sleep with their babies, at least some of the time- they just don’t tell their doctors and relatives about it.”

And the list of contradictory advise can go on and on but I think this is already enough to confuse a new parent.

Do we need these parenting books? Why do we read them despite the fact that they confuse us?
“I would be ashamed to admit to the Indians that where I come from the women not feel themselves capable of raising children until they read the instructions written by a strange man,” stated Jean Liedloff, quoted by New York Times after one of her expeditions in Venezuela where she lived with the Yecuana people.
“It is standard practice in the advanced countries to buy a book on baby care the moment a new arrival is expected. It may be current fashion to let the bay cry until its heart is broken and it gives up, goes numb and becomes a “good baby”… Whatever it is, young mothers read and obey, mistrusting of their innate ability, mistrusting of the baby’s “motives” in giving the still perfectly clear signals babies have, indeed, become a sort of enemy to be vanquished by the mother,” she writes in her unique book, The Continuum Concept,  where she describes the way the Yecuana people raise their children and the differences between their way and the practices in  the “advanced” countries.

Truth is that, unless you live in a community where raising children is done the exact way it has always been done or you want to raise your child exactly the same way your parents raised you, chances are that you come across a piece of advice coming from a parenting book one day.

And even if you raise your child the same way your mother raised you, know that older generations have also been influenced by parenting experts.

In her book What Mothers Do – Especially When It Looks like Nothing, Naomi Stadlen reports: “I recall a woman who bore four children between 1940s and 1950s telling me: ‘Your generation is so lucky. We weren’t allowed to pick up our babies when they cried. I can remember standing in the next room, listening to my baby crying, with tears running down my cheeks, because there was half an hour to go before the next feed.’ She was alone in her home. No one had the power to see her or prevent her from picking her baby up. But Truby King’ regime demanded total obedience from mothers- and often got it.”

Truby King influenced generations of mothers with his book Feeding and Care of Baby. Breastfeeding was supposed to be done every four hours by the clock and was forbidden for twelve hours at night. He set up training centers for mothers in several English-speaking countries, Russia, Poland, Palestine, and China. Similar advice is still given nowadays by people around us, by our mothers and grandmothers, and sometimes by doctors. We might think that it’s genuine parenting that they are passing on, but it’s actually the result of the impact on their generations of the parenting advice given by “experts” These “experts” have already influenced our modern societies, and their advice became an integral part of our collective consciousness.

In this context, the question is rather how to survive in this jungle of contradictory advise? I’m pretty sure each parent has her/his own way of dealing with it.

Here is mine:
1. I check what my instincts say about it. You can call it gut feeling or intuition. As a professional coach, I was trained to use intuition as a tool in my coaching sessions. I find my intuition in my body. If I feel a pressure in my heart and my chest, then I know that this piece of advice is not for me. We all have this tool, but we have unlearned how to use it. The good news is that listening to our intuition can be acquired by practice.

2. I try to find out more about the author’s background (life and work) because I believe this has a direct  influence on someone’s ideas and writing. For example a famous French author, very popular in our mother’s generation, François Dolto, was a children’ psychoanalyst. Her field of interest was the suffering child and her relationship to the mother. I know that when she gives a piece of advice, this is also a result of her work and the extreme cases she saw in her practice.

Magda Gerber, founder of  RIE, was previously an early childhood educator who worked with Emmi Pikler in the Loczy orphanage in Budapest. Janet Lansbury, who writes a RIE blog and published different books on the topic, is a former actress and model who consulted with Magda Gerber and then started teaching RIE classes.

Martha and William Sears, authors of The Attachment Parenting Book are parents of 8 children. Martha Sears is a nurse, certified childbirth educator, and breastfeeding consultant. William Sears is a pediatrician with forty years of experience.

3. I have a look at how close or how far the author’s advice is from the practice in traditional societies.
As an example, the principles of attachment parenting can be observed in traditional societies and among other primates (let’s not forget that, we, human beings are primates too). If you ever travelled to Bali and got the chance to stay with a Balinese family maybe you have noticed the peaceful relationships between parents and children and you wondered like I did, theses babies never cry. Interestingly, Balinese babies dont’ touch the ground during the first 6th months of their lives (they are always carried around and almost never put down), they sleep with their parents and are breastfed on demand.

An example of baby wearing.

4. If I can find the information, I look at the latest findings in neuroscience. Neuroscience has shown that the way our brain deals with emotions is greatly influenced by the education a child receives during the early years.The tremendous discoveries of neuroscience can help parents to better understand how the brain develops and the impact of our actions on the development of a child’s brain.

5. Back to what my intuition has to say. My starting point is my instinct and how my body reacts to the information I’m receiving, and then I investigate it with my mind. And in the end, my intuition will have the last word.

Now that I know my daughter so well and that I have learned through trial and error what suits best our family, I sometimes just check my intuition. But I’m going to be honest, in the early months of motherhood, when I was alone with my family in a new country, a new continent and nobody could answer my question, I did not know how to make this “intuition tool” work for me as a mother. I clearly remember reading a book Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and crying my eyes out.

My husband asked me, “Why are you crying when reading this book?”
I said, “I did everything wrong.”
“No,” he said. “A book that makes a mother cry is not a book to be read.”

He was right. I didn’t noticed it before he pointed it out, but through my tears, my instinct was telling me, this piece of advice is just not right for you and your baby.

May we all find the way to our innate ability to raise our children!