01/08/2025
I have had a lot of messages asking me how my friend managed to get my son to speak, stop being hyperactive and potty trained in under 2 weeks, so I’m going to continue my story.
At the end of the holiday, I went to pick up my son from her house and met a completely different child, I was shedding tears of joy. She sat me down and said to me `in the period your son has stayed with me I have put in a lot of work and time to achieve what you’re seeing please don’t spoil my good works’. She gave me a list of instructions and we also added ours, here’s a list of what we did;
1. She told me to stop screen time completely, so for 3 months we did not switch on the TV in our house, we only watched if the kids were sleeping. I would say screen was the major cause of the problems I faced. When I was pregnant with my daughter and was on bed rest, I would always put cartoons for him so he won’t bother me but that was my undoing. I started reflecting on when his hyperactivity started, it was then because TV became his companion, he will jump up and down non stop and throw tantrums whenever you turn it off. Please do not ever use the screen to BABYSIT a child, it doesn’t end well. My second child I didn’t expose her to the screen until over 2 years of age, the difference was very clear.
2. I started putting in more effort to spend time with him so instead of leaving him in the sitting room to watch TV while I cook, I started taking him with me in every room I was in. If I was cooking, I will lay a playmat in the kitchen with his toys to be playing. I also involve him, tell him what I’m doing and send him on little errands.
3. Once I left her house I never put him on diapers again even while going out, it was tough but worth it. If I had gone home and put him on diapers again that will send the wrong signal to him. The potty was always close to wherever he was.
4. We started taking him for speech therapy, gradually he started saying more words and building his vocabulary. Dear parents living in Europe, speech therapy is free please always take advantage of it. It was a very stressful period as Ivy was still very young and I had to take him for speech therapy 3 times a week.
5. We enrolled him into a nursery school. I wasn’t working at the time so we didn’t qualify for any government funding so we had to pay and it wasn’t financially easy for us but we had to make the sacrifice.
6. We continued praying for him because if God is not involved we would be striving in vain.
Anything I remember in the coming weeks I will post too. May God help all of us, we shall not labour in vain, our children will make us proud.
