Katrina Haselgren sits outside with her 3-year-old son Giovanni having "mommy and me" time. Her older sons are at school.
“What’s that noise?” she asks him gently.
“A grasshopper,” Giovanni says softly.
The neighbor’s big dogs suddenly run to the fence, barking loudly. Giovanni looks startled. Haselgren is calm and reassuring.
“Was that loud?” she asks.
“Mm hmm,” he replies.
“But it’s OK, huh?”
The scene is a far cry from the chaotic and violent home life of Katrina Haselgren’s childhood. Her step-father routinely beat her mother, who paid little attention to Haselgren. She felt no love.
“I would lash out and I would beg for help,” she says. “I needed someone to advocate for me.”
As she and Giovanni play with monster trucks, Haselgren looks at what her son is looking at, repeats the word he intends rather than the word it sounds like he's saying. These are techniques she practices on a daily basis. Haselgren marvels at how fast her young son seems to be learning.
“When he sees that I am into what he’s into, then his vocabulary comes out and he tells me words that I didn’t even know that he knew,” she says. “It’s just when he knows we’re connected to the same thing and we have something in common, then he wants to know my input too.”
[For more of this story, written by Jenny Brundin, go to http://www.cpr.org/news/story/...tighten-family-bonds]
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