Developing Parenting Knowledge: Doing The "Right Thing" and Schools of Thought

Taiwan Parenting
1

No one told us before we became parents how hard the basic daily tasks of parenting would be, nor did anyone tell us how hard it would be for us to develop the knowledge to become competent parents.

I’ve sort of realized parenting is this major knowledge challenge unlike the other rote and repetitive tasks we have done our
whole lives. In parenting, you have no formal training or experience, probably. So you have to survey the available knowledge, which might be books or could be advice from family and friends. Then you have to apply it to your own kids on the fly.

There’s your mother, mother-in-law, or other experienced family member who has never read a book but sometimes has some good old fashioned common sense ideas based on her experience, and you know she has the child’s best interests at heart. A lot of her advice may run contrary to what you read in books.

As for books, parenting authors belong to schools of thought. Knowing that is half the battle.

Even prior to birth, you have to figure out what the schools of thought are. The Democrats would be the Lamaze method of natural birth at a hospital. The Republicans would be modern medicine ob/gyn who eventually does a C-section. The Green party would be natural birth at home, using only a midwife, using a birthing ball, a tub, with your kids and neighbors watching, while someone videotapes, while you eat ice cream and get a Shiatsu massage.

For feeding, the Greens are the attachment theory school (Dr. Sears) who want breast feeding for as long as the child will take it (multiple years). The Democrats want breast feeding for at least 6 months. The Republicans think formula is fine.

When it comes to feeding or sleep scheduling, the Democrats are the attachment theory school (Dr. Sears) who want feeding or sleeping on demand so she doesn’t cry, as crying is bad for kids in their eyes. The Republicans are the old schoolers who are ok with some crying, like crying it out for a baby to learn how to sleep on its own (Dr. Weissbluth). Then on the far right are the Tea Partyers, which are ok with a lot of crying in order to get the baby onto a schedule. I think BabyWise falls into that category. And many of these are the probably the more systematic, well researched authors. Then there are plenty of shoddily written books or web articles written solely for commercial value where the content is of dubious added value.

For constipation/incontinence, the Democrats are the naturopaths who think it’s related to diet or think it can be solved with supplements. The Republicans are the pediatric GI doctors who prescribe Miralax (a laxative) for years on end. The radical independent party is both conservative in its old school methods and liberal at the same time by taking a psychological approach and believes in suppositories/enemas for psych retraining.

Every major parenting issue has multiple authors taking positions and usually criticizing or ignoring the other side. As a parent, you should get used to hearing people criticize doctors and you will soon take it as the conventional wisdom that doctors are only good for certain things and don’t really know anything about real parenting solutions. So you can’t even rely on a doctor for good advice on many daily parenting task. They could be Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, depending on if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. And as hard as you try to do the “right thing”, it’s very hard to determine what the right thing is. No one can seem to agree on what that is.

Finally, as hard as you try, parenting by its nature is not scientifically rigorous. There is no double blind, randomized, control group. For many, parenting isn’t even empirical in any sense (e.g. you might not have a baseline of prior experience for comparison because you didn’t have younger kids around you growing up). In terms of the knowledge that we bring to bear, parenting for most of us is essentially speculative and based on fragmented book knowledge (how many books can a frazzled parent really read?), or based on word of mouth anecdotes from friends and family at best.

Whatever you do sends you down a particular irreversible path. You cannot repeat the experiment. Your sample size is 1. This is a live experiment that you have to make work in real time.

EOR (end of rant).

2

:laughing: Lots of truth here but I’m not sure about the last part. You repeat the experiment with subsequent children. You make fewer mistakes with the second. By the time you get to the third you realise that as long as you feed them and love them they’ll mostly turn out okay.

3

Yeah, hopefully it all just works out. I guess I just figure even with a pretty good bit of parental education, we are still going through problems which could have been easily prevented with even more parental education than we actually underwent (e.g. feeding issues and constipation issues). So part of wanting to educate ourselves a bit more is just to try to keep our own headache level to a minimum. Still, it’s so hard trying to sort things out because everyone contradicts everyone else!

Anyway, I will consider us blessed if we don’t have a third opportunity to use all this great knowledge and experience. Our plate is completely full with just two little ones! :slight_smile:

4

You’re on the right track by thinking about it in the first place.

But Parenting just can’t be taught. Yes, you can take classes, and yes there’s an awful lot to learn. Some good basic knowledge is great. Some common sense advice is gold. But ultimately, you are a human and your child is a human. You have to learn to trust your instincts, go with your gut, and let your love for your child and your desire to do what’s ultimately best for him or her guide you through which mistakes are worth it and which aren’t.

There are times when I have to make choices for or about my son, or something that has nothing to do with him, but will directly affect his life. I don’t always know what is best. I often don’t know enough of the variables to make the best choice. This is what parenting actually is: helping your child through the process. Good or bad, best or worst, you’re there for your child. You do the best you can, of course, but you can never hope to control everything.

And it’s good that you can’t, because watching you deal with things, seeing how you help your child deal with things, is how your child learns. So, sometimes a less than best circumstance is a good thing for a child. Just like it’s good for a child to puke his guts up if he’s snuck around and eaten all the Halloween candy at once, or pilfered a cigarette somewhere and tried out smoking. In spite of my mother’s best efforts to keep me away from it, I insisted on touching the hot oven door when I was a toddler. My hand was blistered. But I never touched that door again!

I’m a much better parent than my mother was and this is mostly directly because I have made a huge effort to learn from her mistakes. We all live and learn.

You’ll make mistakes as a parent. That’s okay. The only thing that counts is how you deal with the fall out. Be there for you kids. Salve the blisters if they insist on learning the hard way. Ask forgiveness when you know you should. Treat your kids with the respect of consideration and discipline. Always listen actively–it’s how you give them a voice. Teach them to use that voice respectfully by having, and enforcing high expectations. They know low expectations equal low opinions. And be ready with large measures of grace and forgiveness when needed.

Just be THERE. Love them actively. It really is all that matters.

5

Well here’s a question related to the schools of thought listed above: can one “spoil” an infant with regards to putting her to sleep? I’m asking this because I’m becoming quite the master at dancing my little darling into dreamland - to the point where my MIL with 10 years nannying experience just hands her over to me when it’s bedtime. However, a mother of two reacted to this with surprise: “Better be careful - you’ll spoil her, and it’ll be a lot of work getting her to bed later on if you don’t let her put herself to sleep now.”

Any opinions on this?

6

Yeah, mistakes are nature’s teacher. Much better to be learn from mother nature than have to listen to mommy or daddy tell you what to do or not to do!

Most of what we’re dealing with right now are not really their mistakes, because our kids are so little. It’s more mistakes we may or may not make that ends up making them (and therefore all of us) miserable until it’s resolved.

But point taken in regards to mistakes they make. Our son jumped off our bed twice when he was really too young to even learn from mistakes. So that really traumatized my wife and I, and it took us a while to get out of that overprotective mode. But what helped us is a blog called Play At Home Mom where one of the things they do is let really small toddlers climb a lot. Still, it took me months to convince my wife to let our toddler start climbing all over the furniture. Being over protective can actually impede their development. But now he climbs all over the place. We still hover and verbally caution him when we think he’s not paying attention to where he is, but it’s great to see him show us his climbing competence combined with knowing when he is in danger of falling.

I think I read somewhere that parents today are very different from a generation or two ago. There is more of a striving to be good now. In the old days, parenting just happened, and you dealt with it. Certainly that’s my impression of my parents at least.

The irony of my own parent’s mistakes is that their worst mistakes are what define who I am today. So I would not be who I am without all the conflicts I had with them as a child. I was molded in that fire. My parenting style is the complete opposite of my parents. I reason with my older son, because no one ever deigned to reason with me when I was a kid. I hope it’s not the case that you have to be an a-hole to your kids in order for them to grow up to be reasonable people. :ponder:

Sounds like your kids are a little further along in age than ours. We’re still dealing with really basic infant/early toddler stuff right now. But yeah, all good advice on how to proceed. We haven’t really had many behavioral issues to work on yet.

The biggest behavior issue has been random meltdowns on occasion. Like getting frustrated by a toy, and instead of just dealing with it well, sometimes he’ll just go into meltdown mode and just wants to cry and nothing will console him. If we’re lucky, we catch it in time and distract him quickly enough before he really melts down. But this type of behavior seems almost out of his control, like it’s triggered by lack of sleep, hunger, stress, being sick, or some other unknown factor. When it started happening a lot at one point, we realized he wasn’t getting enough sleep (plus he had been sick) and we were more aggressive about him getting more sleep, and it has improved a lot since then. So we haven’t really tried to deal with it as something requiring him to “learn how to behave” since it seems like it was just a symptom of other issues.

How old is your infant?

You’ve landed right smack in the middle of schools of thought land, so all I can do is describe the landscape a bit.

Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep, Healthy Child is really good for understanding how important sleep is. He’s an old school cry it out guy, and that’s not something every parent can stomach. We held our first son to sleep until roughly 5.5 months, at which point we discovered Weissbluth and let him cry it out. It was pretty rough for us. It worked just like predicted. But part of me wonders at what cost. I do feel like his personality changed after we went through that. Very unscientific and I honestly just don’t know.

We are currently using some of the tips in the No Cry Sleep Solution and No Cry Nap Solution for our 4-5 month old. We don’t swaddle anymore. The latest iteration (we’ve gone through many) is rocking him in our arms until he’s pretty sleepy, put him in the Playard bassinet, turn on soothing music (which auto shuts off in maybe 10-15 min), then rock the bassinet, then slowly stop rocking, then leave the room. It’s imperfect, because he needs a lot of rocking to get to sleep, but at least we’re not holding him until he completely falls asleep like we did with our first.

Would love to hear anyone else’s advice on transitioning them to sleep on their own where you put them in the crib and they just fall asleep like an older toddler does. Vay, crying it out is always an option so you can always exercise that option. The real question for me is, are there any other options for teaching them to sleep on their own? We’ve tried the No Cry Sleep Solution ideas but there’s very little concrete troubleshooting advice, it’s mostly high level advice that sounds good on paper but hard to execute.

7

[quote=“Teddoman”]The biggest behavior issue has been random meltdowns on occasion. Like getting frustrated by a toy, and instead of just dealing with it well, sometimes he’ll just go into meltdown mode and just wants to cry and nothing will console him. If we’re lucky, we catch it in time and distract him quickly enough before he really melts down. But this type of behavior seems almost out of his control, like it’s triggered by lack of sleep, hunger, stress, being sick, or some other unknown factor. When it started happening a lot at one point, we realized he wasn’t getting enough sleep (plus he had been sick) and we were more aggressive about him getting more sleep, and it has improved a lot since then. So we haven’t really tried to deal with it as something requiring him to “learn how to behave” since it seems like it was just a symptom of other issues.[/quote] My son is nine years old. When he had these kind of problems–frustration with a toy–he couldn’t just deal with it well because he didn’t know how. I taught him specifically and exactly what to do. We practiced this when he WASN’T frustrated. I talked to him about that time yesterday when he was upset and he cried and threw his toy. I told him that if it happened again he sould STOP, PUT THE TOY DOWN, TAKE HIS HANDS OFF OF IT, AND COME ASK ME FOR HELP. Then we practiced this three or for times. Then later, when we were doing something else entirely, I said, “Kitten, show me what you need to do if you get mad at your toys.” And we practiced again. Later, when he was getting frustrated with a toy again, I said, “Kitten. What are you supposed to do when this happens?” That was all it took. He knew what to do. Sometimes I had to tell hima few times to take his hands off of it, but after he had, and he’d walked away from it to ask me for help, it was a much easier situation to deal with. No more melt downs, but a lot of active parenting. These days, I use that same formla for some other problems. There’s one particular playmate who seems to love to stir up stuff between my son and his best buds. This kid is currently going through a lot of things and isn’t really coping well. I’ve spoken to my son about this, but I’ve also told him that, just like the toy, he has to just stop, drop it, and walk away. Come talk to me about his feelings if he’s angry at this friend, or his feelings are hurt. Still, the hardest part for him is letting it go, but it does help.

Oh, and you are correct in your observations that with toddlers, as with most adults, being tired, hungry, or sick makes it much, much harder to cope well with most things! But it’s still okay to teach stratagies to help.

[quote=“Vay”]Well here’s a question related to the schools of thought listed above: can one “spoil” an infant with regards to putting her to sleep? I’m asking this because I’m becoming quite the master at dancing my little darling into dreamland - to the point where my MIL with 10 years nannying experience just hands her over to me when it’s bedtime. However, a mother of two reacted to this with surprise: “Better be careful - you’ll spoil her, and it’ll be a lot of work getting her to bed later on if you don’t let her put herself to sleep now.”

Any opinions on this?[/quote]
Some people just seem to have a magic touch, right? My mom had a friend with a day care when I was 20 or so. One baby there just never wanted to go down for a nap. I happened to go there one afternoon for something, not sure what now, but there was something going on, fixing a sink, or something. Anyway, they asked me to stay and sit with that baby while the other’s were asleep and they were bussy with fixing whatever it was in the other room. I had that baby asleep in ten minutes, and in fact, dozed off myself–in spite of the noise. Because of this, they asked me to come back at the same time the next day. After two weeks of this, the kid would fall asleep almost just looking at me! HA! It got so I had to drive over there so they could lay him in my arms for about five minutes. I’d hand him back and be on my way.

So, that mother’s advice is likely spot on. You’ll end up being the only one who can put the baby down to sleep, and if you ever can’t be there to do it, there will be some miserable care givers out there. Unfortunatly, I don’t have a real answer for this one. I’m a pretty good mom most of the time, but my nine year old still sleeps with me! I figure in the next year or two, he’ll move out on his own because he’ll want some privacy, but we are very acceptional in this reguard. Most people would not be okay sleep sharing for so long. I guess this has been possible because I’m still single, but for now, we’re both still happy enough with things the way they are.

Oh, and it wasn’t Kitten who ate the candy and smoked the cigarette–those exploits belonged to my cousins, but my aunt tells some colorful stories about what they learned, and how they learned it! :sunglasses:

8

I was the best parent until i became one. Then everything got thrown in my face and i realized holy crap, parenting IS hard. Id rather be at work at a regular job than be a stay at home parent! Heck, i prefer mopping the floors and scrubbing the toilets to disciplining my toddlers.

I never read any parenting books until i held my first one in my arms. They say if your first is an easy baby, dont be too smug because payback is a bitch. My second was payback times ten during infancy, but now is an awesome almost two year old. We just learned to parent as we went along. There is so much info nowadays i find it too overwhelming sometimes. Attachment parenting, cio, helicopter parents, french parenting, liberals, bullying, tiger parents, therapy, paraphrasing emotions, etc. too much info is not always good nor easy.

Anyway, before four months, i dont see how u can spoil a baby. Theyre still in their fourth trimester. Thats what i believe anyway. I also believe in sleep training at four months, and i do cry it out. From my research, thats what works best for my family, but i respect families that dont do that. We just had another one and baby is co sleeping with me so easier for me to feed. I enjoy the bonding time too, though some would say co sleeping gets them into a bad habit. Just do what you are comfortable with. Everyone elses comments can be used as reference, but youre the parent, so you do what keeps yor family sane.

9

Coming up on six weeks.

What was the desired goal in doing that?

In what way did he change?

May I ask why you switched “schools”?

This is my big concern. My MIL just dominates in baby care, so it worries me that she’s hanling the baby over to me on this issue. While it’s great to be appreciated, I’m afraid I might be causing future problems as my friend suggested.

10

Going to sleep on their own, it’s basically sleep self-regulation which is good b/c they get more net sleep if they know how to fall asleep on their own, and the parents get more sleep too

Really hard to say. It could be my perceptions just b/c it was hard on us too.

We didn’t switch per se, for our first son it was the only school of thought we were exposed to and we just followed it. For the 2nd, we learned there was more than one school of thought. Cry it out is a backup at the moment, just because we figure we might as well try some gentler ways before we get desperate.

11

Thanks for all your input guys. Here’s something someone linked to in the “parenting resources” thread which seems very helpful:

The Parenting Science News Feed

Infant sleep problems: A guide for the science-minded parent

Gentle infant sleep training: Programs for children 6 months and up

12

On the question of getting a baby to sleep, I’ve found that babies are frustratingly individual creatures and that what works for one won’t for another. So I don’t believe that one single good method exists. Where babies are particularly hyper and needy, the letting-them-cry-it out method won’t work. Let’s not forget failing to comfort a crying baby for hours on end would been seen as evidence of neglect were the parents feckless in other ways. And yet some ‘experts’, especially the parents of babies who go to sleep easily, would advocate this method and imply that the babies are ‘spoiled’ because they need comfort to go to sleep. Hell, I need comfort to go to sleep!

Let’s be clear I’m not talking about going in to briefly comfort a baby every five minutes until they eventually go to sleep after an hour, I’m talking about the people who believe that infants must conform to some standard of ‘good’ behaviour.

The thing is, for all the books and experts and anxiety that parents of young children go through, nearly every baby grows into a normal adult. Unless the parents are doing something to actively reinforce dysfunctional behaviour, babies won’t grow up into adults who need to be rocked or cuddled to sleep, they will learn to not get frustrated and throw tantrums, they will learn to speak and interact with others normally and in short do everything that you or I can do.

There are many parenting methods out there and lots of people swear by one or other of them in particular, but what they forget is that whatever problem has apparently been alleviated by the application of a particular piece of advice, would most likely have gone away on its own anyway. Children are all different and they develop at different rates. They walk, talk, become potty trained and so on anyway, as long as they’re in a normal, loving environment. Where children lag others in certain things they will almost certainly catch up in the end.

I was reading of the latest method for weaning a while ago, which advises parents to give their 6 month old babies lumps of cooked food for them to eat by hand, rather than feeding them pureed gloop from a spoon. The idea (I think) is that human babies used to learn to eat this way - which isn’t actually true as far as I know - and that this helps their jaw muscles develop so they can speak better, or earlier or something like that. I thought, wonderful! At last we have a method for helping babies to learn to speak, because none of them ever learned that before.

In short, relax. Do what you have to to make your life easier and think long term.

13

At first, my reaction was that this is a great idea once my son is a little older to recall things. It’s tough to talk to him about different time frames at the moment. I can’t ask him about his time at day care because it’s over. I think he still mainly exists in the present. That said, at one point he was having trouble napping or waking up early, so we started a routine of telling him what to do when he’s in the bedroom: “lay down, don’t talk, close your eyes, and if you wake up, just go back to sleep, mommy and daddy will come get you when it’s time to wake up”. And this surprisingly seems to produce decent results. So maybe he is ready for your idea after all. I would love if he could self-regulate in that situation. I read somewhere that if you keep it short and simple, kids have the ability to recall short phrases to help them remember what to do in those moments, so it sounds like an example of this same concept in action. Will definitely give this one a shot!

I totally agree. At work, even annoying coworkers are rational adults. Kids are amazing, but yes, it is way harder than anything I have ever had to do work-wise.

We are getting hit with payback bigtime. Not only is #2 a terrible sleeper, but #1 is starting to have issues too!

I agree, it’s quite overwhelming. Because a lot of it is commercially driven, there’s a lot of noise out there. And the fact is that pediatrics, and parenting, are fairly immaturely understood sciences or arts relative to other fields of knowledge. If you’ve read any books that talk about the state of parenting science even 30-40 years ago, you’ll hear some pretty horrible stories which makes you realize the experts are only a few feet in front of the parents, even today.

What you said does a good job of distilling the anxiety and frustration that all these parenting methods create for young parents, particularly first time parents. So parents may overestimate the impact of what happens at the infant stage to what will really affect the child over the course of his life.

As to the main thrust of your point that kids will develop fine no matter what you do in the early phase, I guess it comes down to how much leeway you give parents before they are deemed to be “doing something to actively reinforce dysfunctional behaviour”. Because I’m sure most of these schools of thought would say that not following their method is basically “actively reinforce dysfunctional behaviour”. For example, Weissbluth would probably say not following sleep cues and helping your child onto a sleep schedule using a consistent soothing method is “actively reinforc[ing] dysfunctional behaviour” that may result in a teen or adult who has bad sleep patterns.

But anyway, I guess this also comes back to one of my original points which is that parenting is a one off experiment and is not double blind, placebo controlled, and randomized. So as you point out Petrichor, on the one hand it’s easy to make incorrect causal inferences and assume the method is what worked rather than the baby simply developing into a different phase or it being due to the baby’s particular propensity to fit a certain method. And likewise, it’s also very difficult to ascertain if something specific you are doing is actually causing your child to develop along a different path than most kids. There’s simply no way to know.

In some ways, parenting is much more challenging than the many questions in this world which are easily reducible to double blind, placebo controlled, randomized studies. A lot of parenting, by the nature of the beast, is well-intentioned trial-and-error guesswork.

14

Our boy slept in the same bed with us from birth to about age 3. At age 5, he still wakes up in the middle of the night and slips into our bed 3 or 4 times a week. We’re not bothered by it, and he certainly doesn’t seem to be developing any of the “problems” that children who sleep with their parents supposedly develop. But mention that our kid sleeps with us to people back in the US and jaws drop to the floor in disbelief.

I have an Australian colleague whose sons slept with her and her husband until they were ten. One has a PhD and teaches in a US university. The other is in some sort of special forces unit, and he has done a couple of tours in Afghanistan. I’m pretty sure that sleeping with mommy and daddy didn’t mess him up.

15

Yes, Weissbluth probably would say that. He/she has a lot of books to sell. But the question you have to ask yourself is, are parents the world over using Weissbluth’s methods? Then the next question is, do adults the world over have bad sleep patterns? You could also ask yourself, what’s a bad sleep pattern anyway? Recently evidence has come to light that implies that the ‘natural’ pattern for human sleep is to sleep for four hours, wake for an hour, then sleep for another four hours, and that it is only the invention of cheap artificial light that allows us to stay up in the evenings.

When I say ‘actively reinforce dysfinctional behaviour’ I mean it in an extreme sense, not within the normal range of parental reactions to children’s behaviour.

I think as long as you’re a loving parent your child is very unlikely to develop along a different path to most kids. People discount the influence of genetics. You’re finding out now how different siblings can be from one another despite the fact that they are raised much the same. Even something as affecting and terrible as child abuse doesn’t cause a significant proportion of those children to turn into abusive parents. It’s very unlikely that parental decisions over such small things as whether a child should cosleep or not are going to have a large influence long term.

16

Welcome to Housecat and Jive Turkey, our resident co-sleeping families.

JT maybe you know more people going the separate sleeping route. In my neighborhood, there are a lot of attachment parents (who often co-sleep). It’s actually tough to bring my son to the occassional playdate, even though he’s already 2, because many of the moms are still breast feeding, and I seem to missed the forumosa thread on how a father is supposed to behave when multiple mommies whip out the boob during playdates. I’m all good with that, don’t get me wrong, but I waver between being afraid they’ll think I’m a lech if I look to being afraid they’ll think I disapprove if I don’t look. :doh: Sometimes it’s just easier not to show up.

Well, all I can say is now I can add the Petrichor school of thought to my list of plausible theories. Your concept sounds plausible, just like Weissbluth sounds plausible ten minutes after I’ve read him, just like attachment theory sounds plausible just after I’ve read attachment theory. Honestly, I don’t have the faintest clue who to believe. :slight_smile:

I was just reading the wikipedia entry on attachment theory and came across the following interesting snippet: “Parents’ perceptions of their own childhood attachments were found to predict their children’s [attachment] classifications 75% of the time.” So an attachment theory person would say it actually does matter what you do, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of child abuse.

It seems reasonable on some level that many kids with not so good parents still turn out fine, but it also seems reasonable that many people have baggage that reflects their own upbringing. By the time I figure out who is worth believing, I’ll probably be ready to write my own book and cash in on my own theory. :smiley:

17

Yeah, but parenting research is necessarily very unscientific. You can’t do proper experiments on children (anymore). I tend to take all that stuff with a pinch of salt these days.

I’ll look forward to reading it! :slight_smile:

I’d go further with the statement about people with not so good parents turning out fine, and say that many people with not so good parents turn out to be damn fine parents themselves, having learned from the mistakes they suffered. You’re right, a lot of people have personality problems, but it’s just a current trend to blame it on your upbringing. As the saying goes, first world problems. I’m not saying that outright abuse doesn’t leave its mark. Of course it does. But who you are is a series of choices. If you’re going to teach your kids one thing, let that be it. Sleeping alone or with parents? Not so important.

18

It takes practice, and it takes patience. It’s active parenting. But IMO it’s much better to ask you son a simple, pointed question, then remind him of the answer, than to yell at him, or to become stressed or irritated. If you ask him, “Son, what are you supposed to do when you’re mad at your toys,” and he can’t remember the answer, or he’s too upset to think about it, you can remind him. “You need to stop, put the toy down–yes, just put it down there on the floor/table/whatever, take your hands off of it, good, now ask daddy to help you.” You’ve taken his focus off of the frustration he’s feeling about not being able to do something/make something work, and given him a focus on some instructions that he CAN do immediately. You’re also offering him YOUR undivided attention–the thing he cherishes most in the world! You can say all this in a very calm voice, with a calm, confident tone of voice. You son will quickly begin to respond in an equally calm way when he sees that you are there, not angry or upset, and willing to help. Remember to practice when he’s not upset, but can still remember a time when he was. Good luck!

19

Vay, I’m also a big believer in the “fourth trimester.” After that, my advice is to listen to your parenting instincts and go with what feels right for you, and what works in the moment for you and your family without worrying about what others (and that includes the grandparents) think or what the future may/may not bring.

Personally, the sleep parenting book that I like the most is “Sleepless in America” by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, which goes into some of the scientific background of sleep and then offers suggestions based on your child’s temperament in a non-judgemental manner. An interesting blog with info on sleep and other parenting issues is: moxie.blogs.com/askmoxie/2005/12 … dirty.html She writes about how CIO worked very well for her first-born while her second child would cry and scream for hours if they tried that method. Every child is different, and when they’re developmentally ready to do something, they’ll do it. I think Western parents tend to stress about sleep (sleeping through the night, sleeping on their own, etc.) but at the same time, doesn’t expect their infant to go to the bathroom and relieve themselves in a toilet and feed themselves with a knife and fork. Everything will come, eventually.

20

Funny take on (my) Gen X and much of it true: