FROM BABY TO TODDLER: FIRST STEPS Technically, a baby becomes a toddler on their first birthday. There is so much development in so many different areas around this time but the one that gets the most attention is walking. A baby’s first steps are often much celebrated and, emotionally, mark the shift into toddlerhood. The name ‘toddler’ even comes from the unsteady, wide based gait quintessential to new, young ambulators. With walking comes more independence
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
DEVELOPMENTAL THRESHOLDS Babies are constantly changing. Even before birth, their development during pregnancy is rapid and constant. And yet, we perceive this development as occurring in stages. Some of these stages seem arbitrary – like the trimesters of pregnancy – and some seem practical – like the motor milestones. The change from one stage to the next requires adaptation and often comes with excitement, pride, mourning, and anxiety. Often, these thresholds feel sudden because we
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
THIS IS IMPORTANT AND YOU CAN HELP! Trans people experience a wide range of barriers to health care including overt discrimination, uninformed health care professionals, systemic discrimination, and personal biases. As a result, trans people frequently have negative experiences in health care settings and often avoid accessing health care services even when it is necessary. Ultimately, this leads to significant health disparity. This is compounded by having intersectional identities and experiences that also experience health
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
Parenting is hard at the best of times. When you have to trust your child’s care and guidance to a group of strangers at a daycare, you want to know that all the hard work you’ve put in will be supported, not contradicted. As a queer and trans family, we believe in raising our child in a gender creative and expansive way. We believe in respecting and affirming their bodily autonomy and teaching and modeling
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
I have now been writing this blog for three years! I recently discovered that with all those posts, my blog was not very searchable (sorry about that!) I have fixed this somewhat but also wanted to provide a snapshot of what you might find here. Depending on your situation, identity, or what brought you here, you will be looking for different things. Scroll through the section titles in this post to find one that seems
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
Our parental roles have shifted a few times throughout our baby’s first ten months. In the first two weeks, I was exclusively feeding the baby from my body. As this was not a role that my husband could fulfill, he made considerable effort to take on as many of the other baby care and general household tasks as he could. That included diaper changes, baby baths, making meals, shopping, and getting the baby to sleep.
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
If you started with Part 1, you’ll already be familiar with my blue-yellow-green-yellow-red stress state system, what each state feels like to you, and have a variety of factors you can use to identify your stress state. If you’ve been tracking your state since last week, you may have already noticed some patterns in how your stress state fluctuates over the course of a day or week. The next step is to identify what is
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
In an ideal world, stressors would be concrete and transient – easy to identify and able to be processed to the point of relief. But in the real world, there are a lot of stressors that are nebulous and persistent. It’s hard to relieve your stress when you can’t identify or get rid of the source. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. The stress is still there whether you acknowledge it or not.
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
You will want to start with Part 1. How is everyone doing? If you have started working through steps 1 to 3 already you might be feeling a bit emotionally vulnerable, bruised, or drained. That’s ok. It’s part of the healing process. But make sure you take care of yourself. If you push yourself too fast and don’t let your emotions settle again before tackling steps 4 to 6, you will be too overwhelmed to
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
My experiences have taught me how to work through intense situations and process emotions so that I’m not holding on to negative sources of stress and being influenced by them in ways I don’t like or can’t control. I wanted to share my strategy in the hopes that it will help you do the same. This process is based on the belief that we can, for the most part, control what is in our own
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Posted by Meaghan Ray
Thank you for writing this! I’m a disabled dance/movement therapist in training, working with Autistic children in Malaysia. There is a lot of emphasis with the developmental milestone which I also find can be ableist. I am trying to navigate topics on developmental milestones without being ableist, and not going to lie, am having a difficult time. I encounter many parents wanting to “prevent as much future disability as possible”. I understand why they want this too. It’s a systemic issue. There is low support in the system for disabled communities in my country here, therefore, to these parents, the best way is to prevent as much disability as they can, so that their children will have a ‘better’ life since the support system for disabled people is pretty crap here.
What advice would you give me in terms of navigating this?I’m also on my own journey dismantling my own internalised ableism which is probably why I can go to the extreme of “Leave your kids be! They will develop on their on times at different times!”. But yeah there really is low support systemically here.
You’re welcome! While I am a physiotherapist, I don’t have experience working with pediatrics. For myself, I would focus on external goals – are they able to navigate their environment to a degree consistent with that age? I would also encourage parents to focus less on specific milestones like walking and more on the skills that go into each milestone – balance, spatial awareness, strength, coordination. These building blocks can be worked on during play in many different ways without ‘forcing’ the child to move their body in a way that doesn’t work for them.