{"id":647,"date":"2008-01-24T14:28:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T14:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2008\/01\/nature-vs-mutcher\/"},"modified":"2008-01-24T14:28:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T14:28:00","slug":"nature-vs-mutcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/nature-vs-mutcher\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature Vs. Mutcher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, Little B! A hard day for B. My sweet little boy. He was having an anxiety attack about school this morning. Crying, scowling, hidden under his hair. He finally was able to articulate it: “I’m nervous.”
I said, “About what, Honey?”
And he said, “It’s mix-it-up day in the cafeteria. We have to sit with new kids who aren’t our friends.” He started making fists and clenching his teeth, with tears in his eyes. I didn’t know what to tell him. But I suddenly thought, it is time to really advocate for Ben. <\/span> Just as I did for Nat, I have to stop following to a T what the school wants and tell them that some of this just doesn’t work for B.<\/p>\n

I was not going to force him to do mix-it-up-day or anything else. I do not believe in forcing kids. I believe in development. Rarely does a person get all of their soft fatty nature squeezed out of them by forcing them into a constricting suit. You can’t mutcher<\/a> it all too much. Soft fatty nature pretty much stays with us, but can be turned into muscle, used to our advantage. But we have to know what of ourselves is SFN and what is fatty habits. And what will we just grow out of, like baby fat. We also have to let development happen sometimes.<\/p>\n

We have a great guidance counselor at B’s school, and she hung out with us for a while talking with him and me about strategies. We decided — with Ben’s agreement — that we are going to evaluate his learning style, which is a big part of the issue. He fades out sometimes, and also gets very frustrated about open-ended assignments. We are going to figure out if he needs some accommodations around homework and certain in-school activities. I think he was very relieved to be able to tell the guidance counselor exactly what he felt about certain assignments, subjects, and teachers. She made him feel very safe and he seemed really together by the end of the hour.<\/p>\n

When B got in the car he told me his day, especially mix-it-up-day was not terrible. He had L at his table in lunch, which was good. Although he had some third graders,<\/span> too! Shudder. The indignity.<\/p>\n

B’s teacher gave him a timer to set to thirty minutes so he can time himself on his homework. If he has been working hard at it for thirty minutes, he is allowed to stop. I added a rule: he has to do all timer homework around me. To help prevent fade-out.<\/p>\n

[Fade Out]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh, Little B! A hard day for B. My sweet little boy. He was having an anxiety attack about school this morning. Crying, scowling, hidden under his hair. He finally was able to articulate it: “I’m nervous.”I said, “About what, Honey?”And he said, “It’s mix-it-up day in the cafeteria. We have to sit with new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-ar","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}