There are three skills that are very important for our little ones to learn early in their lives.
1) Children need to be able to fall asleep on their own. Infants and toddlers who are always rocked to sleep, or breastfed or bottle fed to sleep, learn to depend upon others for falling asleep and do not develop their own falling asleep mechanism. This can cause much distress for parents who go through the nightly nightmare of trying to get their infant or toddler to sleep. Instead of always picking up and rocking a crying little one, which only reinforces the childs dependency on you putting him or her to sleep, try patting the child and then leaving for a few minutes. If you keep coming in, patting your child and reassuring him or her that you are here, eventually your child will stop depending upon you to rock, hold or feed him or her to sleep.
2) Children need to learn very young to play by themselves and amuse themselves. It is not healthy for children to be constantly dependent upon others, or upon the TV, to amuse them. I work with many adults who never learned to play by themselves. These adults feel lost when they are alone, having no idea what to do with...