Who are you as a parent? When we are pregnant, our paths do not often obviously diverge from the norm a lot. Yes, some of us may choose to have our babies at home or in a birthing center. But the majority of us try to make good food choices and remove alcohol and other substances from our lives for the good of our baby. That’s the cultural norm.
What if you don’t follow the cultural norm as your child gets older? We certainly didn’t. When my daughter came into the world, I said that I would respond to her needs. That was my only parenting strategy, and it led me to attachment parenting, in part because I had a child who loved only to be held at all times. That wasn’t the path that I’d chosen intellectually at the time. I wanted a baby who would sleep well in a crib. Unfortunately, that was not the model I was given.
As my daughter got into her preschool years, she became an increasingly more verbal, tall, and confident child at home. However, she was still a very attached little girl, and she really wanted her parents present most of the time. In lieu of us, we had grandparents babysit when we were not able to be there. I pushed the envelope a couple of times and hired new babysitters, to disastrous sobbing results. I eased her slowly into preschool and stayed some of the time at points when she was having a particularly hard time separating.
We practiced extended nursing and bed sharing and at first I was very tentative to admit to either of those things. Now that I have a happy and confident five-year-old, I am more confident in the decisions that brought us to this place. I can defend the choices we made, because I’ve seen good results. Yes, we still cosleep, but I like snuggling and so does she, so there’s no problem there. Yes, we’re going to homeschool part time because I think that she would be utterly exhausted by full time school, but it’s also because we just enjoy each others’ company. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
As you grow with your children, do you become more confident in the choices you’ve made to get to the place where you are now?
Image courtesy of bjearwicke at Stock Exchange.