Skip to main content

Fear based parenting: refusing the pressure

A friend with a nearly 4-month old baby visited me today. We don't see each other much these days since I've moved away, but before she gave birth I offered her a few thoughts on baby parenting (mainly to trust her instincts rather than parenting books / other people's opinions, and follow the baby's lead) and she told me today how much she took those things to heart and how well it's served her. Both she and her baby are thriving and loving the bonding early months.

But, she also told me that there's already pressure on her - friends with babies the same age are sleep training them (leaving them to cry alone), raising their eyebrows at her feeding her baby to sleep... at not even 4 months old?? I was gobsmacked. She asked me, why is it bad to feed your baby to sleep?

My answer: I'm not sure, I still feed my 3yo to sleep and it's the one thing that makes her want to go to bed - without it I don't know how much fight she'd be putting up!

But of course I've had that thrown at me too. You can't keep feeding your baby to sleep, it's a bad habit!

Why?

The best answer I can come up with, from conversations with friends, is fear. Why do people let their babies cry until they can cry no more, and call it self soothing... why go through that awful time as a mother, when every fibre of your being screams at you to just GO TO YOUR BABY and you refuse... what can possibly trump the power of that instinct? Fear.

What are we so afraid of that we create issues where none exist? When a baby could peacefully feed to sleep in mama's arms - instead to spend hours and days and nights refusing its urgent need, until it learns to stop asking? Where does this fear come from?

We have to learn to refuse the fear. Refuse the pressure. I will not create issues where there is no problem right now, just because I fear some vague problem that may (or may not!) occur in the future. 

So if I feed baby to sleep, they may not be able to settle at night without me? Well here's a newsflash: I signed up to being a mum when I brought this baby into the world. Being there for my baby is my calling, my duty - why should it have to settle down without me? If there's an emergency and I can't be there, the baby will suffer a bit and then eventually manage; but why make baby go through that without the need?

So if I don't force my baby to sleep all alone, they will NEVER sleep alone? Newsflash: I know so many families whose children - school age children! - regularly come into the parents' bed at night... yet my 3yo sleeps through reliably every night, and has done since age 2. I  refused to make her associate falling asleep with distress - shouldn't it be a safe, calm, warm experience? Funny how many kids hate going to sleep and stall and stall. I wonder if there's a connection.

So if I don't send my kid to nursery (later: school) they'll become a loner with no social skills? Well newsflash: we're surrounded by people to interact with. People of all ages, not just those within a year of the same age who are still very much learning what is and isn't socially acceptable behaviour. My 3yo is polite, friendly, open and inclusive - not least, I would say, because she learns how to interact from a variety of people, not just from her equally immature peers.

I will not base my parenting decisions on fears of the future.

"For God has not given us a spirit of fearfulness, but one of power, love and sound judgement."
- 2 Tim. 1.7 HCSB
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
1 comment
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
2 comments
Read more

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...
Post a Comment
Read more