My 2nd daughter now 20 months was breech. She had her hips scanned at 6 weeks a routine process for breech babies in our area. We were told by consultant while I was still pregnant that it was just to make sure all was well. During her new born checks all was well and pead told us she would more than likely be discharged at the 1st scan. However during the scan the consultant discovered that her hips were immature and she would need to be put in a splint. We were asked to return in 4 weeks for her to be fitted with her splint. I asked if during this time we could do anything to help. She suggested we double up her disposable nappy. I was just away to start with our cloths, so I basically went home & doubled up her cloths straight away. I spent the next 4 weeks researching splints and wondering how we were going to cope. We attended the appointment and Libby was scanned again to check measurements. She was still wearing 2 cloth nappys. To our and the consultants amazement her hubs were perfectly within the normal measurements. The consultant called her cloths her magic nappys and said that they probably had done the job. As you can imagine we were delighted. I’ve used cloth on both my girls. Both have crawled, crused & walked at 1 year old.

That “year out” did them no academic disfavours either – they were still ahead of the pack when they went to boarding school later. And now I know why.

I cannot recommend highly enough John Holt’s book Learning All the Time. He was a well-regarded educationalist who loved children and mad it his life’s work to help them learn better. What he learned himself was that adult intervention ends up turning kids OFF learning. They are best left to discover things for themselves in a household full of books and conversation – proper conversation, not kiddie-talk.

Apparently, given guidance when asked for (and only then), any child can teach them to read within 30 hours, however young. They learn to speak, don’t they? Lists and spellings drive him mad, because the child picks up words in conversations that make sense, not from lists that don’t.

He’s also harsh on so-called number facts.Children learn 2×3=6 and later they learn 3×2=6 as different number facts. But they aren’t. I remember doing maths puzzles with the boys on the walk to school as a fun game – I’d give them a total and ask them to tell me ten different ways of getting to that total. The boys did addition and subtraction and I recall Bob once doing division on me – way before he had learned it at school! Because we had talked about what numbers mean, so he had the concept in his head.

Given the adult way with which I have always talked to the boys and the maths games we did, you won’t be surprised they are both pretty confident in this area. It’s just that I was inadvertently doing what John Holt recommends.