Finally Writing About this Dad Stuff Again

I like reading parenting blogs because they make me think. They make me think so much that I often times wind up copying my blog posts here from my original contents there. If you don't read Evil Witches by Claire Zulkey yet, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, here's my comment to her interview with Cara Goodwin about research based parenting. (Probably not a huge shocker to anyone here, but I tend to go with the research I already agreed with, you know, I'm.... data based... yeah, that's it.... Snort.)

Wow! So much of this is so familiar. Thanks for doing this interview, I think it makes for a very much needed buffer against the impressions that I see people get about atttachment and respectful parenting.

tldr; I did most of the things, but probalby, per the books, I did them wrong? I did them because I was selfish and they were easy for me in the not-even-slightly common situations I had.

We did 'attachment parenting' because strollers just looked like so much work to me, (mostly because of all the stuff you can put in them, and then you have all this stuff to track, and things go do, and rules, and aaaahhhhhhhh.) Consequently, I told my parnter I really, really wanted to use a wrap instead, and she said, "Well, as long as that's mostly on you, cool." And it was. We were both grad students and at the time my partner was in a lab and I was doing theory, and we couldn't afford/hadn't signed up nearly early enough for daycare, and so I got to wander around a National Lab for several hours a day getting some work done, and meeting lots of scientists and administrators with the kid, and hanging out with other grad students in the grad student lounge where there was a nice couch in a dark room for naps. And it was so easy, for me, because I just had to have a backpack with some diapers and wipes and maybe a bottle of milk, or maybe make dashes across the lab to find my partner when the kid woke up hungry. 

Oh, and don't even get me started on how wonderfeul wraps and public transit are. Whoops, I got started anyway. All 3 kids hated carseats with a passion. I mean hated, like really hated, like screaming from the time we left the house till we got to our destination. And then? Then, we moved to San Francisco, and whoooo!!!!! So much public transit, and you knnow what you ain't gotta have on public transit? You don't have to have a goddamned carseat! (An aside: for folks that want to use strollers, public transit is not very well set up for that, and it totally should be set up better, and it sucks that it's not.) I could hop on with two kids who were walking/toddling and a kid in the wrap, and we were off! Unsettled kid during a ride? I could get up and bounce a little and maybe walk a little, and coo. It was awesome. But again, this worked so well for me because we had tons of public transit and I had a job where I could move my work hours around.

And a brief pause here to point out that I never read a book about wraps, I just saw women with babies in wraps dropping by the coffee shop where I did a lot of work and writing in Boulder. They'd pop in, get a latte or mocha, take the kid out of the wrap to play, or not, and then toodle along. This looked like heaven to me compared to rules and activities and equipemnt and what have you. Having said that, it seems that all the books kind of create this picture of having a kid strapped to your chest in the house all day because it's somehow good for the kid? Yikes! And bleah! And No! Wraps were good for me because I could easily leave the house.

Also? When you need to get the new puppy neutered at the height of a pandemic and you're taking public transit? Oh yeah! Wrap's rock... for me.

I found out years after we did it that we did self-led-weaning with the kids, and I think that's considered good? (I don't actually know, I hung out with the 'bad' crowd maybe. Co-sleeping was also considered really good.) But anyway, I started it because kinda like the car seat, the kids hated being strapped into a high chair, which led to screaming, and yeah... Anyway? It was easier just to pop the kid into my lap, and from there, well, there's all that food in front of me, and well yeah, they wanted to try it out. We avoided things like steak and nuts until the kids were old enough to not choke on them, and just let them have at it. Added bonus? I never once had to buy or make baby food.

And then, there's gentle/respectful parenting, and for the most part I love that stuff, but again, it's largely because I like the idea of it as a guideline, and because we do it wrong. I think just about anyone that manages to pull it off probably does it wrong in one way or another. For example, there's a respectful parenting blog that I really enjoy, and for years I'd read comments to the posts that amounted to , "well yeah, but how do you handle the kid doing xyz that's destructive or disruptive or whatever without timeouts or anything?" I can't remember if there weren't answers to the comments, or if they were just vague, but finally about two years into this blog, the author mentions that well, when a kid is hitting another kid, that the author, "kept them from doing that anymore." (I'm reading this as hugs, or a timeout.) And yeah, I'm pretty sure the author had been doing that all along, because what else are you going to do? 

'Pleases' and 'thank yous' and other manners based things that are frowned upon in respectful parenting? I don't know how other people get that to work, but yeah we told the kids they needed to do those things. We also told them that they could decide to skip it, but then they wouldn't get invited back to the nice places because people wouldn't like their behavior and wouldn't want to invite them back, (see? we did the bad thing! we totally told them their behaviors affected other people's feelings, because they do, and then there's consequences like the college of architecture won't allow you into the next college of architecture career day that you blundered into and were subsequently invited back to the speakers' room for nibbles...)

I guess the better way to put it is that I thought gentle/respectful parenting was about letting kids make their own decisions, but again that was a selfish summary that I made up about the whole subject because I really, really wanted the kids to be independent, because I thought it was good for them, and I knew it would be a whole lot easier for me. Because independent kids is what I was shooting for, if I don't help them understand what there decisions can cause (pleases and thank yous as an example) then it's not going to work out well for them or me. And of course I couldn't be there for them all the time, (and oh boy did they not want or need me there all the time), or they wouldn't figure out how to make mistakes and recover from them, and how to deal with people in the wide, wide world.

So anyway. I think parents should do what they need to do to get things to work the way they want them to work with their very specific kids in their very specific situation because what else could possibly work. But also, I wish there were way more books about respectful/gentle/attachment parenting that were written more realistically so I could quit having conversations about parenting where I describe how we're parenting using resepctful or attahcment concepts or whatever and get the raised eyebrow response, "How Do You Ever Make That Work?"

We do it wrong, that's how we do it, we do it so, so wrong :)