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Transcript of Episode 9:

Ep 9: Curiosity in Bloom: The Developmental Power of Gardening

Dr. Kimberly Bell: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Hidden Language of Children Podcast. Are you interested in knowing your young child in a whole new way? Understanding what’s really going on in their developing mind? Does your child say or do things that make you stop and wonder, where did that come from? If so, this podcast is for you. I’m your host, Dr. Kimberly Bell, clinical director at the Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where we work with families to help children know and handle their own feelings to become the boss of themselves. Our topic today is gardening and why it’s such an effective way to activate the interest and curiosity of young children.

Our guest is Laura Cyrocki, director of the Healthy Meals and Garden Programs at the Hanna Perkins Center. Welcome, Laura.

Laura Cyrocki: Thank you, Kim.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: It is so exciting to have you here today. I have been such a fan of the garden program here and what you do in the school [00:01:00] garden and in the community garden for a really long time.

So I’m super excited for us to be able to sit down and just talk about that. But I want to first start off by talking about your background a little bit. So tell me how you got interested in outdoor education.

Laura Cyrocki: Thank you for asking. My grandparents gardened on both sides of my family and my mom and dad were interested in gardening and they definitely fostered my interest in gardening.

I spent most of my summers outdoors playing in the dirt, and decided to go to college and study plants and and then really wanted to share that. And after teaching gardening for a number of years, at Hanna Perkins and other settings on the high school level and at the Cleveland Botanical Garden I’m now settled into my job here as the director of Healthy Meals and Garden programs. And we use the school garden in the classroom all year long and share gardening with young children and their [00:02:00] families.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah, and the Healthy Meals program here is more than that, though. You really focus on accessing organic foods as well, don’t you?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. As much as we can, we source locally. The garden here is organic. We grow a good amount of food in the school garden and bring it into the classroom and the school kitchen. And then the, actually the students here are integral in preparing food from the garden for the school kitchen too. So it is a very much a garden and farm-to-table lunch program and snack program.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: So here’s what I know, I have always been fascinated with

gardening and growing plants and things like that with children because at Hanna Perkins we often talk about introducing kids to the world in bearable bits.

And when it comes to the life cycle, the first sort of bearable bit of understanding how things are – I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say [00:03:00] are born right? And they go through their life cycle and then they die – in my head, I’m always like, it’s goldfish and it’s plants, right? And what are your thoughts on that?

Laura Cyrocki: I think that is such an important part of the philosophy here at Hanna Perkins.

It starts with growing plants from seeds and then, or tubers, like sprouting a potato, and then letting it grow and letting it die. And learning about death and dying through an attachment to a plant is a whole lot easier to tolerate emotionally than learning about it by losing a pet or a loved one.

And then, when the plants are dead, then we put ’em back into the earth and make compost. And it’s a softer, gentler way to learn about death and dying. Yeah. And life cycles.

Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah. I started dark, didn’t I? I just started right off a little bit.

Laura Cyrocki: It’s life as much as we don’t like it, right?

Dr. Kimberly Bell: That’s really what happens [00:04:00] in the garden is life, right? We grow things, we consume things. We take care of the, the garden and the dirt and all of those sorts of things, and we care for the plant, and then it gives us something in return. I can get really wistful about gardening like that.

But …

Laura Cyrocki: It’s true, it’s important. We depend on plants. They’re… we need them for our survival, so it’s important to take care of them and learn how to take care of them if we can. It’s fun to do. It takes practice, like everything. So…

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Do you also think, OK, so here’s a thought that just came to me as well, when it comes to caring for others, we’re talking about a preschool, kindergarten here.

We obviously, it goes through the entire lifespan gardening, but in these little kids, often a pet is one of the very first things that they take care of aside from a baby doll, right? Like they pretend to take care of the baby doll. Do they, do you think they put that same sort of thing towards the care of plants that they’re growing?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. [00:05:00] Yeah, definitely. We do get attached to our plants, even young children. They just bring a natural curiosity and a concern for the plant’s life. (They) need help with impulses. Not overwatering it, not squeezing it, not, giving it too much love. And yeah, I think we do.

It’s, it is a way to learn how to care for other living things, for sure.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah.

See, that is so interesting to me. And that is just so positive because there is, as a therapist in human to human interaction I’m always, we talk about like with baby brothers and baby sisters, right? You don’t want to hug them too hard. You want to, be gentle with your love.

And here we are, growing plants teaching the same thing.

So I would see, I could imagine. Like parents who are pregnant and there’s, they’re expecting another child. That being able to take care of a growing plant and be gentle with it and understand that would be interesting kind of preparation.

Not exactly right. ’cause there’s not as much jealousy between a [00:06:00] plant and a baby brother or sister.

Yeah.

But it’s fascinating. In your experience, which is quite vast and over many years. We’re talking, are you over 20 now?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah, I’ve been here at Hanna Perkins for 25 years.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: And start, you didn’t mention it, but I want to make sure people understand that when you came here, you were a preschool teacher and you weren’t just gardening, you were a preschool teacher in the preschool for a number of years.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah, I came to the school through gardening because I was, doing a gardening job at the Cleveland Botanical Garden in the, in their Urban Outreach garden. And Hanna Perkins at the time didn’t have enough land around the school to have a large garden for a summer garden program at the school.

So they had a few plots in a community garden down at the outreach garden, and I saw how the Hanna Perkins teacher was working with the young children and the families and I said there’s something very special about how she is working with these families and children.

And she asked if I [00:07:00] wanted to volunteer for the garden program, and so I did. And little by little got to learn about how we do things at Hanna Perkins and then got hooked and they invited me to come and teach. And we’ve always had a garden.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: So what do you think draws children to the garden? Just, I don’t know, any anecdotes or anything you can think of experiences that you’ve had with kids in the garden?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. It’s I was thinking about this question. It. Young children naturally have a curiosity about gardening. I think it’s just something innate in us and there is something very safe and easy about being in a garden. Young children experience the immediate world around them and observe it really well.

And they’re also closer to the ground so they see they’re right in it, in the garden, right at eye level. If you want to know what it’s like to be a young child in a garden, get on your knees. But yeah. I think that they are curious. They are, they’re curious about the natural world.

They just bring [00:08:00] that. And anything we can do to foster that is good. I do, I’m thinking as we talk about gardening one of the things that I, I’ve been thinking a lot about in terms of how do we get started gardening with young children for parents and teachers that may not be gardeners.

I was talking to one mom who is a gardener. I asked her for some advice about how do we get how do we garden with young children? What’s worked for her? And she said, it’s tough because we get inundated with these images and photos of moms and children or caregivers and children in gardens that are just lush and beautiful and it it takes years to learn how to grow a lush, beautiful garden. So she recommends just starting small, very simple, even growing beans in a cup, a clear cup with a paper towel, or, experiencing, taking a walk through public gardens, talking to gardeners, looking at seed pods, talking about [00:09:00] where food comes from ’cause that’s a huge connection that we make with children. And we want children to understand that.

I was thinking about a, actually a teenager one time that I had in the garden. And we were working in the garden and it was time to har harvest the radishes, and we pulled the radishes out of the garden and he said, you mean the radish is the root?

It occurred to me that he had been seeing radishes in the grocery store, disconnected from their tops and that was the first time he could actually see and make the connection between the radish and what part of the plant it actually was. But yeah, at all ages there’s a wonderment about, about nature.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: That is such a beautiful example because one of the things that’s hard for us to understand is, as adults, when kids ask questions our initial instinct is to answer: fix – handle – change. And when we don’t have an answer, we don’t… we tend to feel like, uh [00:10:00] oh, I’ve done something wrong.

Maybe I should have the answer. But in truth, we don’t really know what kids know or what they don’t know or what they have imagined. Like with that person, with that teenager even had, they just maybe never even considered what the top of a radish looked like before. Like it wasn’t even something they could wonder about because they hadn’t been exposed to it.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And so naturally I would think then if you start gardening with kids, it is going to cause them to ask a lot of the, why is the dirt this color and why is this one orange and why is this one red? And I am, and we might not always, have the answers at hand.

But we can remain curious with them. I don’t know, let’s go look it up. Or, why don’t we plant one of those and see what happens.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And that, that kind of makes me think of another mom friend of mine that is a gardener who has, she has a young child and I asked her for suggestions and she said one of the things that’s been helpful [00:11:00] to her is to have different plants at different stages.

So try some seeds, try growing some plants that you buy at the garden center. Try bringing something to harvest. We have experienced here that one of the best ways to hook all ages into gardening is harvesting. It’s just a, it’s something that every, everybody loves to do. But it takes experience and practice getting to harvest.

So if you don’t, if you don’t do it, you can try again. You don’t have to be an expert. Yeah. It’s it, I guess to relate it back to your question, having plants in different life stages gives you an opportunity to observe over time and answer questions. Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: So I like what you said.

You, you called it when we talked about this when we were talking about doing the podcast, and I had never heard the phrase before and you said it was reverse gardening? Is that what you called it?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah, I think that’s how we would refer to it, where a reverse or a backwards garden where we would go and prepare the garden and get [00:12:00] the plants ready to harvest.

And so that when the garden program would start, we would have things to harvest immediately. But then we would also add the other jobs in like planting seeds, it takes time and patience waiting for a harvest.

Yeah, so yeah, so we would try to start with having something to always harvest and then also adding in the planting, putting straw down on paths adding things to the compost …

Dr. Kimberly Bell: One of the things I’ve noticed sometimes as I walk through the garden is that the kids often spend a lot of time standing and watching.

Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about what you have seen kids being able to do at younger ages, right? We know teenagers can do probably the entire process. Yeah. But does there appear to be like things that are better jobs for kids who are two and three?

Laura Cyrocki: Definitely. It makes me think that children get such a good sense of self-esteem from doing real work. So anytime you can give them [00:13:00] jobs that are real work they want to be like grownups so they like to emulate the work that we do. And definitely there are some jobs that you can do with young children and they do really well.

And I guess it’s like all of us, some jobs interest us more than other jobs. And maybe some children like to weed, like to pull weeds. Some children may like to put mulch down on the paths. It can be a lot of labor. Young children may not have the attention span that adults do. It depends on the child, but to not expect, to do, to be able to do all the labor that it takes to get a garden to fruition, but a little bit here and there.

And if you know it’s something they love to do, then do more of it. Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: So a little bit of harvesting and then maybe even a plastic shovel if the other shovel feels too sharp or something, and then they can dig one or two little holes and put plants or seeds in versus 15, right?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. Yes. [00:14:00] Start small.

That is, yes.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: So as always, bearable bits bearable. Yeah that’s what we’re saying is that, so the gardening process doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. It can be a bearable bits experience where, maybe you get five minutes of weeding. And that’s enough to have the experience Yeah.

For a very little one. In that moment, but still celebrating a job well done. And I also I, now I want to go back because I don’t use the phrase that you just used and I’m interested in it, is you said real work.

And what do you think parents sometimes do that’s not real work?

Laura Cyrocki: I know. A story just actually co came to mind from my own childhood that my mom this is I, it’s funny that I’m remembering this, but it’s timely. When my twin sister and I were very little, I think around two, we planted watermelon seeds outside. And we checked them every day.[00:15:00]

And they didn’t grow. And they didn’t grow. And my mom felt so disheartened and so she bought a watermelon from the store and she put the watermelon in the garden. And then years later she explained and apologized and said that wasn’t, that’s not how watermelons grow and …

Dr. Kimberly Bell: They don’t just appear overnight?

Laura Cyrocki: So yes. That wasn’t helping us learn real work in the garden or the, OK. Real understanding.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: OK. So that leads me to this because I actually love that story. And until you said something I was like, I get why your mom did that. Yeah, for sure. There, there may have been another way. So there may have been another way. Yeah. And one of the things that I’m thinking is that you could have gone to the grocery store with her and she could have said if with enough time and patience, this is what we’re gonna have.

And you still could have bought the watermelon. Cut the watermelon. Had the watermelon. Talked about the watermelon and got you connected to what that future watermelon might be. And like we say, actually I’m about to make up a word.

1. [00:16:00] You know how people talk since we’re talking about gardening, I swear to God this has just came to my head, so tell me if I’m crazy. You know how we talk about like fast food versus slow food? So gardening is about as slow food as you can get, right? If you’re gonna plant it, grow it and eat it, yeah.

That’s about as slow as it gets, right? For slow food. But sometimes I do think that there’s a difference between like fast parenting and slow parenting. Yeah, totally. Just made those words up

Laura Cyrocki: RIght.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: In that like what your mom did, which I do not fault her for. We all do. It is like fast parenting. OK, there’s a problem.

I need to solve it. As opposed to slow parenting. And one of the things I do say to parents a lot is when it comes to talking to kids about their feelings and managing these things in bearable bits, it requires more energy on the parent’s part. And it always requires more time and conversation, more time listening, more time problem solving.

And so in this case, too. Being able to talk to your kids about them having patience requires you to have patience. Yeah. And so everything in the developmental process [00:17:00] becomes more patient, right?

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: OK, so what do you think then, as I just made this point about slow parenting, what do you think about going and doing – because I love these activities – pick your own strawberries. Pick your own… If I can pick my own anything, I want to do it. Is that part of, ” we can’t do our garden, but we can go harvest something else?”

Laura Cyrocki: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Any kind of exposure like that to where our food comes from and how to pick it, how to connect it to the place where it grows and experience that. For sure.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Because really I think all of us can if we’ve had the opportunity, if we’ve had the privilege of going out and picking our own as a child, I certainly remember that it was like, pick one, eat one, pick one, eat one. Oh, yeah. As you crawled on your hands and knees to strawberries.

Laura Cyrocki: Kim, I want to go back to the watermelon story and Yes. Just I was thinking as you were talking and asking about, one, one of the ways that parents might [00:18:00] skip the real work part or not understand that children can actually do that.

The feeling part of it, my mom really did not want us to be disappointed. It was so hard for her to tolerate our disappointment. And so it came from, obviously, you know that, but I just was thinking, just being able to tolerate the frustrations of gardening and growing and, anything really, it’s, anything that requires the kind of patience that, that gardening takes, it, there are a lot of frustrations and disappointments and it’s OK. It’s. It’s good to…

Dr. Kimberly Bell: It’s an opportunity. Practice it. What about, so do you think like whenever we have kids who maybe are struggling with a trouble, impulse control problems or something like that it’s possible that gardening can be a way to, to work in bearable bits on patients and controlling your impulses?

Laura Cyrocki: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah. And then, and also working with conscience, because I have to believe in all the years you’ve been gardening with kids. [00:19:00] That somebody has pulled a plant thinking it was a weed.

Laura Cyrocki: Oh, I still do that. OK. Yeah. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And yeah you try to replant it and fix it. Make it better. Maybe it’ll grow. Maybe it won’t. It’s OK. It’s just a plant.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: It’s, that’s when we get back into, we’ve had, in previous podcasts, we’ve talked about little medium and big mistakes. Yeah. And pulling a plant is a little mistake.

Laura Cyrocki: Absolutely.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah. Because for little kids and they’re developing conscience, it can feel like murder, yeah. Really injured something. But yeah, that there’s a learning process and that mistakes are OK, and if you step on something, we can tie it to a stick and see if it grows. So I, I think we want to bring attention to all of that.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. Yeah. I also, as we’re talking about this too, one of the things that we, that I encounter often with young children being in so close to the dirt and digging in the dirt, we see worms and bugs and those can bring a lot of [00:20:00] worries and it’s always very helpful to…

It’s safe. It’s safe in the garden and these bugs and worms and whatever, sometimes spiders or whatever we encounter are safe. And we’re lucky here in the Midwest, we don’t have much we have to worry about when it comes to playing in the dirt. But one of the things that we, that I learned to say at Hanna Perkins that that’s been really helpful in situations where children may want to squish the bugs or pick up the worms or, we are in their home when we are gardening. We’re in the bugs’ home.

We are in the worms’ home. So we have to be kind and take care of them. And actually most everything we encounter in the garden are, good for the garden. So occasionally not, but Right. Those are things that we handle as adults, when we get the pests and whatnot.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah. And I imagine, OK, this I’m gonna say I’m making an [00:21:00] interpretation here.

There may be times where digging in the dirt is not the best idea, and I’m thinking of during. Potty mastery.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. I’m glad you brought this up. Yeah.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: OK. So you’re gonna agree with me then, right? Oh, yeah.

That there are times when a child is working on body mastery, potty mastery, where getting their hands messy or digging in the dirt and making a mess is counterproductive to what we’re trying to teach them about keeping clean and dry.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah, it takes a, it takes some work sometimes that we, I have had children young enough that in the garden that are in that stage where they are, they don’t want to touch the dirt. They don’t want to, or they may want to touch it, but the confusion about staying clean. And is it OK? And actually I brought a prop because I, I had a a late [00:22:00] 2-year-old one… one year struggling with staying clean, getting dirty, not wanting to get dirty.

I provided garden gloves. The garden gloves weren’t enough. And we were planting seeds and she wanted to plant the seeds, but she didn’t want to get dirty, and so I offered a marker. And I said, if you want to make the hole, the ’cause, the gloves just were too, still too dirty, too much exposure to the dirt.

Yeah. So I said, if you want to make the holes with the marker, you can, put, make holes in the soil with the marker and put the seeds in. Or I will make the holes for you and you can drop the seeds in. She actually was able to enjoy gardening that way.

But, yes, it’s true. There is a place where those young children who are potty training have a little aversion to the dirt.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Very cool. OK. We have to move on. So I’m gonna do a quick commercial before we get to our next thing. OK. If you are a parent in the Cleveland area and you like what you hear about our approach to early childhood [00:23:00] education, you might consider enrollment for your little ones in our toddler group or our preschool.

Hanna Perkins was an early pioneer, as you’ve heard today in social emotional education way back in the 1950s when it was still called nursery school. Our school has rolling admissions. We’re always giving tours and taking applications. You can get lots more information on our website, Hanna Perkins.org.

That’s H-A-N-N-A-P-E-R-K-I-N-S.org. Now in addition, if you are a person who’s really getting into this topic, we are going to be working on an online webinar-based training on how to start a garden in your preschool or kindergarten. And certainly parents could take that too if they want to understand how to start a children’s garden.

So if you’re interested in that, send us an email. And I will give you the [00:24:00] email at the end of the podcast here today, and you can send your interest in that training to that email. And we’re hoping maybe in a few, let’s say two to three months, we should I. Have a training available that helps you to know how to build a garden if you are interested in it.

And I’m really looking forward to that, Laura. And now I’ve said it on air, so it has to happen. OK. In a timeframe. OK. All right. We’re gonna change it up now,

Uhhuh.

So this is a thing that we do called, let’s rephrase that. During, let’s rephrase that. We talk through things grownups say to children and come up with alternatives that here at Hanna Perkins we think are a little more useful.

Are you ready to give it a try?

Sure.

1. This one’s right up your alley. OK. All right. Here’s the situation. Dinnertime is almost over and there are brownies for dessert, but the toddler in the family hasn’t touched the green beans. Mom or [00:25:00] dad says you didn’t eat your vegetables. No dessert unless you clean your plate.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts about that?

Laura Cyrocki: Oh boy. Food struggles. Yes. There’s, so there’s, I understand. I guess I would say, try to stay out of using food as a reward or not. And the Clean Plate Club is something that probably most of us got as young children, and it’s just instinct to, to do it to our children.

And we like to let children come to food on their own and enjoy it. Just remember that eating should be a pleasurable experience. And I guess this is a long way to answer this, but what we do is provide a variety of foods. We always have fresh vegetables. They might have to see the vegetables 30 times before they try it and… or may have to put maple syrup on it to like it or eat it with cheese or not, and taste change [00:26:00] sometimes when they’re young, they might have liked it and then all of a sudden they’re not eating it. One thing we always do is we always have peanut butter and jelly at the table if they don’t like anything else we serve, at least there’s peanut butter and jelly, and hopefully they like that. But yeah, eating with young children is, are, developing food preferences and all of that is a, it’s a tough challenge, but please just try to stay out of the food battles and green beans?

I still don’t like green beans. And I love brownies though, so I’m not gonna stop myself from eating a brownie because I didn’t have the green beans.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: I was well into adulthood before I would even look at a

beet.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. I know. I was the same way. I really never ate tomatoes until I started picking them from the plants. And we find that if to, to connect it to gardening if, children often are more curious about eating it when they pick it themselves. So especially when they can prepare it with you and …

 

Dr. Kimberly Bell: Yeah. So maybe relax about ,it and try growing [00:27:00] them. Yeah. There you go. I, yes, and I, I absolutely agree. I don’t think that getting into big food struggles, is worth it from a developmental perspective. As long as your child is on track, growing. That’s right. Then we try not to worry too much about picky eaters and then also because children’s taste buds, our taste buds, they dampen over time.

So children’s taste buds are not the same as ours. Like a beet doesn’t taste to a child the way it tastes to us. They might be more able to taste the dirt. Sort of dirt taste that comes along with those. And I say dirt because I’ve talked to a lot of kids who don’t like foods and it’s like broccoli is fuzzy, strawberries are fuzzy.

Yeah.

And like green beans are waxy or… so there’s a lot of things that they have a sensitivity to that over time we’ve lost our sensitivity to and we can’t remember that we lost our sensitivity. We’re just like, oh of a sudden, I like beets. They taste sweet to me.

Laura Cyrocki: Yeah. Yeah. We, for, a situation like that, we just encourage [00:28:00] them to keep trying it, but don’t make them try it. Let ’em come to it when they’re ready. And we say maybe one day. Maybe one day you’ll like it. Keep trying it. Maybe one day you’ll like it.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: OK. So we are also, that was a really good answer. I enjoyed that one. I enjoy that one a lot. We’re always glad to get questions as well from our listeners. So when time allows, we answer them in the podcast. If we can’t get to them here, we try to follow up directly through email.

So we have one today that we’re gonna address. So this one is “My 6-year-old daughter needs constant attention. I can’t have a five minute conversation with my husband without her interrupting. If I’m on the phone for more than a minute she tugs at my sleeve at school. The teacher says she’s doing the same kinds of things and taking time away from classroom activities.

I’ve told her a million times that interrupting is impolite. Timeouts and being sent to her room don’t work. How can I break her of this bad habit?”

OK, that one I think, let me tee that one up a little bit. The thing that we like to say here [00:29:00] at Hanna Perkins is that nobody wants attention just for attention’s sake.

So with the child that needs that much attention, there is some trouble underneath. There is something going on there, and if you approach it like it’s a time for discipline rather than curiosity, you probably aren’t going to get much progress because being impolite is not what led to the desire and the pull for attention, it is something else.

It is much more likely to be attached to a feeling of loneliness or a feeling of I can’t do this on my own. Oftentimes the question is, are you keeping me in mind? That’s one of my favorite phrases to say to a child: I’m on the phone right now, but I’m keeping you in mind. And maybe you just need to sit at the table while I’m on the phone or you need to be close to me while I’m doing an activity, but you don’t need my direct attention, right? Like I’m keeping you in mind. [00:30:00] You’re keeping me in mind.

And sometimes there are children who struggle a little bit more, but if a child is doing this in all environments, there’s something going on and that is the time when I would recommend talking to a professional that can help you get to the bottom of what the child’s concerns are. And also the first thing I say to parents when it comes to this is, have you asked the child why this is happening?

It is amazing how many times parents, I’ll say to parents what did the child say when you ask them about this trouble they’re having? And parents will be like, oh, I really didn’t… I didn’t talk to them about it. And so not in an angry way, and not in a punishing way, but in a way to say you, when you have the time to be able to have a conversation and say, it’s really hard for you to be away from me and be on your own.

What’s your, is there anything you can tell me about? And sometimes kids will say, I don’t know, and that’s fine. But that is a perfect time really [00:31:00] to talk to a professional in child development to help figure out, because for as many kids as there are on the planet, there are just that many needs for attention.

There are so many reasons why a child displays that particular behavior, and we have to figure out what the communication is behind that behavior. So if you have a child and you have this concern, you can give us a call at (216) 991-4472.

Anything else about the garden you wanted to share that I didn’t ask you about today before we wrap up?

 

Laura Cyrocki: If you’ve been a gardener for a long time and you’re trying to bring children to the garden, it, you might find it frustrating that you can’t garden as much as you used to.

But there will be a time when your children are older and you can get back to it. And if you’re brand new at gardening or somewhere in the middle just be patient with yourself. It takes time and practice.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: I assume just as a yes or a no as we wrap up, you are a [00:32:00] fan of getting a community garden plot right as well if you don’t have something at your home.

Laura Cyrocki: Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. Find a community garden. It’s great. If you don’t have space to have your own garden and there isn’t a community garden nearby container gardening is fine.

And, oh, actually here, I brought this. You can, you, you’d be surprised how much this could do. You can poke some holes in the bottom, put some soil in, plant some seeds. Watch ’em grow. Not too much water, sunlight, that’s all they need. And yeah, you can grow a garden just about anywhere.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: All right. That is our time for today. Thank you. If you’d like us to answer a question about your parenting concerns, please send us an email at Hidden Language of children@gmail.com. Hidden Language of children@gmail.com. And your interest in a “How to Get Started in Gardening” class can also be sent to that hidden languageofchildren@gmail.com.

Or you can also [00:33:00] visit our website at hiddenlanguageofchildren.org. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Cyrocki: Thank you, Kim.

Dr. Kimberly Bell: We are grateful to all of our listeners today. We hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did and found it to be helpful when making parenting decisions that are appropriate for your child.

The Hidden Language of Children Podcast is a production of the nonprofit Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in beautiful Shaker Heights, Ohio. Our audio video editor is Greg Romano. Our producer is Bob Rosenbaum, and Dan Ratner is our consulting producer. If you like this podcast, please subscribe to hear future episodes and share it with your friends and family far and wide.

We welcome your comments and questions, and one more time. You can contact us by email at hidden language of children.org. For more links and information about our approach to Healthy Child development, visit us on that [00:34:00] website. I’m Dr. Kimberly Bell, and we will see you next time.