lifetime

Here is the second lifetime project summary I wrote. I'll definitely post when I write the real paper, but for now, here is the next portion.

"I never went to daycare and was always cared for by my parents. My mother credits this constant attention and interaction between my parents, my sister and myself with my early development of talking. I babbled relentless, and after being spoken to by my parents as well as my older sister, I started to speak simple words such as Dada and mama and actually understand them at six months of age. By 10 months I had developed a significant vocabulary including the words bird and Oma, as well as a baby form of my sister’s name, Kirsten. My mother and sister also spoke early, so my quick development might have come from a genetic predisposition for early words. My father is fluent in German, and so I grew up hearing some words in German and picking up simple words and phrases such as “guten morgen,” “danke,” and “bitte” once I reached early childhood. This exposure also may have led to my predisposition to learning languages quickly and easily.

My parents were very involved in my early development. I never attended daycare and spent all of my time with my parents and older sister. However, this type of environment did not cause me to be over dependant on my parents. I was potty-trained before I turned two because I wanted to be. I saw that my older sister didn’t wear diapers, and I didn’t want to wear them either. It was like this that much of my development occurred.  I wanted to dress myself, feed myself, and play my own games. I engaged in gender stereotype play such as playing with a kitchen and playing with dolls of my own accord, but I also enjoyed playing in the sandbox or on the swing-set and playing with playmobile.

After they realized what an independent streak I had, my parents developed an involved but non-controlling approach to parenting. Their parenting style would best be classified as permissive. Because they didn’t try to control my life, I was able to learn to motivate myself and achieve for my own happiness and not to please them. They were very involved in my life, but didn’t exert much control over my choices, preferring to allow me the independence I strove for since infancy. Weeks after my seventh birthday, I was allowed to attend a week of resident camp hours from my home because I wanted to go. According to my father, he was far more upset about the separation than I was. I believe it is this parenting choice that has allowed me to change and restructure myself so much differently than my infancy should have allowed for."