parenting choices

there is so much pressure i feel as a parent. much i put on myself. but i think a lot comes from my surrounding culture, and some of the messages you get are not only powerful, but conflicting! sometimes it's really hard to feel that what you're doing is what's best for your child and your family as a whole. sometimes it's really hard to know what your own instincts are telling you, amidst all the messages you are receiving from the world around you.

maybe you want your baby to be able to sleep alone? maybe you want to cosleep? maybe you want to put your baby in a crib, but your baby has other plans? maybe you want to stay home and parent, but you cannot afford to? maybe you don't want to use daycare but everyone you know uses some form of daycare or mother's day out program (whether or not they work)? maybe you want to work? maybe your spouse wants to be the parent who stays home? maybe you want to try putting your child in some sort of daycare program but whenever you tried, your child was too scared or sad and every instinct inside you said your child wasn't ready, but other people said not to worry, that "it's ok to let them cry it out. children are resilient." (same advice for teaching the child to sleep alone). even more confusing i think is when you try to leave your child alone, to sleep, or at daycare, or with a babysitter, and you are told that the child's crying is only them being "manipulative."

what does it mean to call a child's emotional displays manipulation? if it is manipulation does that mean the emotion is not genuine or shouldn't be responded to? if the child is throwing a temper tantrum, do you walk away so as to "not reward the behavior with attention" or do you attend to the distressed child to show them that even when their emotions are powerfully negative and they are "out of control" that you will stay by them?

how resilient are children? how does a child develop a healthy capacity for attachment? how easily are abandonment and rejection issues formed in children?

there are parents all over the world in cultures so different from one another, yet i wonder how many of our issues overlap.

i have heard that in many cultures, parents and children co-sleep and the u.s. in particular is thought to be barbaric because parents leave their infants crying alone in another room, so they can learn how to be "independent."

the philosophy of Attachment Parenting addresses these kinds of issues. if you don't already know about attachment parenting, here's their main philosophy:

The long-range vision of Attachment Parenting is to raise children who will become adults with a highly developed capacity for empathy and connection. It eliminates violence as a means for raising children, and ultimately helps to prevent violence in society as a whole.

The essence of Attachment Parenting is about forming and nurturing strong connections between parents and their children. Attachment Parenting challenges us as parents to treat our children with kindness, respect and dignity, and to model in our interactions with them the way we'd like them to interact with others.

from the API website: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/



i think the AP philosophy is wonderful. but i do not judge anyone who chooses to parent differently from me. as long as they are not abusive, of course. i want to do my best for my child, and make the decisions that feel right for my family. and i know that the decisions that feel right for me, would not feel right to someone else. i think we each need to honor and respect our own unique needs. and take care of our families in accordance with our instincts and beliefs.

i'd like to end with a great article i read this morning that got my mind going thinking about all this. and i want to wish everyone out there health and wellness and peace within your families. may we all do our best for our children. and feel good about ourselves. because part of being a good parent, i believe, is learning that we can't be perfect. and modeling self-acceptance. it does our children no good for us to expect perfection from ourselves, to be hard on ourselves. for one thing, this leads to the danger of being perfectionistic towards them, and teaching them that they are only acceptable or lovable when they do things "right." i believe the best we can do for our whole family is to accept each other and ourselves as the human beings we are. we can be messy and confused, and not do everything right (whatever that is), but no matter what, as long as we approach one another with love, acceptance, and positive intent, we'll be doing ok. and i think this goes for how we treat one another out in the world, not just within our own homes.

The Daycare Dilemma
By Jan Hunt, MS

It’s always a dilemma for me to know just how to address the subject of substitute care, because there is such a gap in our culture between the ideal and the possible. Ideally, there would be little need to use substitute care, nor would any mother feel a strong personal need or desire to do so. The reality, of course, is that parenting — the most important job a woman can have — is not valued sufficiently.

No one should ever feel that she is “only a mother” — motherhood should be more highly valued than any other profession. No other job is as critically important; no other job has the potential for improving our world by nurturing the capacity to love and trust others. As Canadian psychiatrist Elliott Barker wrote: “We have to change a lot of established patterns or ways we do things — our priorities — so that nothing gets in the way of attachment in the earliest years. The capacities for trust, empathy, and affection are in fact the central core of what it means to be human, and are indispensable for adults to be able to form lasting, mutually satisfying cooperative relationships with others.”

Our culture not only minimizes the importance of motherhood, it maximizes the desire to consume commercial products, defining success always in economic, rarely in humane or social, terms. There is no question that a mother with a professional career who uses daycare for her children receives far more recognition and respect than the mother who has left a professional job to stay at home with her children — despite the fact that the at-home mom is in a position to contribute far more to society in the long term. If motherhood was valued as highly as it should be, more mothers would choose to stay at home, and more pressure would be put on governments to help provide the means by which this could be done.

Creative solutions can only come about through a deeply-felt need. If everyone understood the critical importance of mothering, there would be fewer daycares and more and better alternative solutions that keep mother and child together. There would be more family centers where mothers with infants and young children could get together with other parents, watching the children as they play together. Families would be given sufficient financial support by the government, and this support would be seen not as a “handout” with all the stigma that welfare has now, but as a wise and critical investment in our future. Everyone would know that motherhood is the single most important profession there is, one that deserves the highest esteem and the highest pay. What kind of society do we have where athletes, movie stars, and CEOs get the highest pay? What kind of society do we have when the professional woman with her children away from her all day enjoys higher esteem than the stay-at-home mother who has the opportunity to nurture a human being, whose personal qualities, positive or negative, will affect all future relationships? Which is the more critical job?

Our vision is too narrow, too immediate, too limited. We see only the present contribution of the professional woman and are blind to the even greater potential contribution of the mother at home. We need to value these mothers now — or our future will look no different than it does at present, with our myriad social problems.

If we really understood the importance of the mother-child bond, we would find those solutions that now seem so elusive and difficult. We would recognize that a young child who has bonded with a particular caregiver, who then disappears from the child’s world, can internalize feelings of rejection and disappointment. We would be committed to finding ways to keep mothers, babies, and young children together. We would provide whatever financial support is needed, and give extensive parenting education to all. We would give greater prestige and sufficient financial support to dedicated stay-at-home mothers. Most of all, we would recognize that repeated separations from the mother can damage the mother-child relationship and create a tragic reluctance in the child to love and trust others in the future. Close bonds of love and trust take time to develop; they take time to maintain.

We would recognize the critical importance of providing paid maternity leave. We would understand that parental care has the most stability. We would build a healthier population and fewer hospitals and prisons. We would strive to learn more about the father-child bond, and give fathers an opportunity to bond early with their child, and to support the mother in the earliest years. We would enjoy a very different and vastly improved society, where compassion and connection were valued and desired more than any other goal or commodity, where a small house filled with love, trust and joy would be valued far higher than the biggest mansion.

This was last week's featured article on The Attached Family online magazine, and there's plenty more to read there. Check out the online magazine (The Attached Family Magazine)