A Parenting Mindset, Part Two: Finding Another Way

Part One Recap: I don't want to spank, Time-Outs a la SuperNanny make me cringe, and I distinctly remember from my own childhood that losing a toy, a privilege, a special outing, or personal property was a supremely ineffective deterrent in the long run.  It usually just made me determined not to get caught the next time.

So what else is there?

There's the "Now, Jenny, you need to use your indoor voice", as the child is standing in her chair in a crowded restaurant throwing a tantrum. The siblings chasing each other through a store and knocking over a display, heedless of Mother's pleas that they stop behaving like wild animals.  The punk on the street corner giving his momma lip, blowing off his school work, and generally giving teenagers a bad name.

Don't lie, we've all seen it and judged. Said to ourselves, "That child is going to grow up to be more trouble than she's worth." or "His momma must not have whopped his butt often enough when he was a youngun'." I'm just as guilty as the next person. And while I now appreciate the potential situations from a new viewpoint, I'm still going to ask for a new seat if there is a screeching toddler at the next table.

So I don't want that either.

It seemed, as I began to read and look, that there really were only those two options.  For the sake of having labels to use, punitive parenting styles and permissive parenting styles.  There's "obey or else" parenting at one extreme, overwhelmed or just uninvolved parents at the other, and a whole host of self-proclaimed parenting experts somewhere in between.  But in the end they all come down to the adversarial paradigm with which our culture approaches child-rearing, either by upholding that constant battle as "the way it has to be", or by rejecting even the language of control for fear of impinging on another's free will.

Well, then.

Par for the course, I decided that since I didn't like either of the two options available to me, I was going to keep looking until I found something better. (Remind me to tell you folks about HypnoBabies sometime.) The Attachment Parenting boards I had already found didn't seem to be much help, since so many of the mamas seemed to run out of useful advice as their kids got older. I was having trouble finding much on how to use AP-style thinking effectively with toddlers, older children, teens, until I clicked a link in someone's signature and ended up on Arms of Love Family Fellowship and Gentle Christian Mothers.

Mind. Blown. Seriously. I'm going to attempt to explain, but please, check these sites out for yourself.

Arms of Love is a ministry devoted to the explanation and facilitation of Grace-Based Discipline, "a parenting style ... rooted in the New Testament teachings of Grace", and GCM is the associated web community.   The founder, Crystal Lutton, is Senior Pastor of her congregation, and let me tell you, this woman has done her research, both in spiritual sources and in the realms of child psychology and development.

The more I read on both sites, the more I found myself saying "YES!!  That, that right there!"  I also began to find more and more of my underlying ideas about parenting and relationships being called into question.  I knew, for example, that I wanted to keep spanking as a last resort but pretty much expected to "have to" issue a swat here or there to nip disrespect and disobedience in the bud early on.  Grace-Based Discipline uses a number of entirely different tools, some of which I knew, others I didn't, but with an underlying philosophy that children are people too.  As their parents it is our job to a) set them up to succeed by seeing to it that their physical and emotional needs are met, b) provide them with tools for dealing with their problems in an acceptable way, and c) model the use of those tools so that our children see that they really do work.

Quick sidebar: This was my problem with "No hitting!" followed by a swat. It's a logical inconsistency, and children are itty bitty learning machines that will default to actions rather than words. To those who say that spanking doesn't teach children to hit, I say this: It sure taught me to hit. A discussion for another time, but I learned that hitting was okay if you were the one in charge, and I learned it so well that I still have to fight that reflex when something doesn't happen the way I think it should.

Now, as I read more about GBD and what it was NOT (time-outs, spanking, shaming, etc), the question occurred as it always does.  "This sounds really great, but what does it look like in practical application?"

It's a lot a lot a LOT of work.

"But parenting IS work!" I hear you thinking. Yup. But some ways are more proactive than others, and GBD is a wear your sneakers, eat your wheaties, and prepare to get messy sort of parenting.

It's recognizing that a very articulate three year old is still a baby in many many ways, and not expecting her to behave 24/7 like the miniature adult she seems to be sometimes.

It's saying "You're frustrated because brother took your toy. You may be frustrated, but you may not hit." and removing the child to a place where he or she can play with a bit more supervision. Reverse to brother: "I know it's annoying when sister keeps poking you with her toy. It's fine to be annoyed, but it's not okay to take her toy. Next time call for mama, and I will help.", and removing sister to a place where she can play without disturbing brother.

It is lovingly returning a potty-training child to diapers after the second accident of the day, without making any sort of "What a naughty boy! Only babies potty in their pants!" sort of comments. Then you take a look at what the kid's eaten, their stress level, if something has changed recently, if they might be getting sick, etc, and see if there is a hurdle or two you can remove for them tomorrow.

It is being prepared to physically step in a LOT when they are small and make your instructions come to pass. Gently and with love, but make it happen, and don't give an instruction you aren't prepared to make a reality. The idea being that the subconscious mind will note that every time a parent gives an instruction, it does eventually happen, and in fact it may be physically impossible not to comply. As one poster on GCM put it, it's kind of like Jonah going to Ninevah. He can go on his own, or he can go in the belly of the fish, but he is gonna go!

It is protecting children from natural consequences until they are developmentally able to process those consequences and learn from them. A toddler can be scooped up or taken by the hand to stop them running on the wet sidewalk. A seven year old can skid out, get a skinned knee, and let the natural consequence teach the lesson that listening to Mama's words did not.

Obviously there is a lot more to it than this, much more than I could ever summarize in one blog post. Of particular interest to me were Crystal Lutton's articles on spanking, it's history, and how she addresses the "Rod Scriptures" so often referenced by Christian parents and pastors to justify spanking, even present it as something you MUST do in order to assure your children's salvation. (Link is to a topic page, several articles are in the associated drop down... oh just browse the site, you'll get the idea!!) It was the level of research and careful thought that went into those articles went a long way toward convincing me that this woman was onto something, and it was worth my time to keep reading. Grace-Based Discipline has implications reaching into all aspects of parenting, with all ages and ability-levels of children, even into the relationship between Mum & Dad!

The end result is that I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for membership registration on GCM to open up on the 16th. I have found another way, one that makes sense to me and is backed by both Scripture and child development research, and I'm going to run with it. I know that as JJ gets older I will make mistakes, probably slip back into the old ways more often than I will care to admit to later, but right now it's enough for me to know that there IS another way, and that I found it in time to start right from the beginning with my babies.

A Parenting Mindset, Part One; Now What?

You know, I can already hear the groans.

Oh, boy... here we go... another preachy judgmental defensive first-time-mom on the war path...

I hate being preached at, judgmental horse poop makes my teeth hurt, and folks who get defensive when I honestly wasn't intending to attack them just plain confuse me, so I really try not to do any of those things to people.  FTM is accurate, so I'll forgive the eye-rolling.

For now. *wink*

But as my little guy gets bigger and starts to show me a little more personality, the fact that one day he's going to purposely do something I've told him not to do is looming ever nearer on the horizon.  So I've had to put some serious work into the "how will I handle ____" sort of thinking.  I'm thinking about this time next year, this time in 2015, Christmas in 2027, you get the idea.  Obviously, I'm focusing more on the early challenges that are fast approaching, but those later hurdles are in the back of my mind and applicable ideas get tossed that direction once in a while.

Those of you who follow me know that I lean pretty heavily toward following my instincts where my son is concerned.  While I've gone through several manure-loads of anxiety and stress over the past four months, every time I step back, take a breath, and just play it by ear, things improve.  Whether that's JJ's demeanor and behavior or my stress levels and attitude, things get better.  Those instincts led me toward things like co-sleeping (even bed-sharing), baby-wearing, leaving my son intact rather than circumcising, using cloth diapers, and never ever leaving my child to cry alone in his crib.    

As I started to think about the coming years, the "terrible twos", the "NO" and "MINE" stages, the inevitable moments of sassiness, I found that the conflicts between my upbringing and my instincts were leaving me very perplexed.  I was raised in a significantly messed-up household, but for the sake of the current subject, I'll leave out the complexities that growing up with an abusive parent added to my particular stew, and address the parenting I received from my mother.  

While I remember my mother as loving and gentle, even occasionally permissive, she soon found herself resorting to the punitive methods which she often professed to despise from her own childhood.  Time outs, spankings, groundings, loss of a toy or a privilege, loss of a promised outing due to misbehavior, etc.  My mother used to carry a kitchen spatula in her purse, to be used as a spanking instrument on the bare behind of the child who dared act out in public.  We always knew it was there, and let me tell you, for something that never left marks, you could feel that sucker for DAYS.  As we got too big to spank, she still had to control her children, of course, but it became more and more about the special things we were denied when we failed to measure up, and less and less about the talking things out that she tried in our early teens.

To many in the United States, that looks like a fairly reasonable approach to parenting.  It looked that way to me... until I was faced with a child of my own.  Suddenly things took on a very different perspective.  I started to remember being confused by early accusations of lying.  Feeling hurt and angry when a punishment seemed unfair or out of proportion.  Getting into still more trouble for refusing to submit to a spanking, or asking for an explanation of exactly how I had sinned this time.  Obeying rules, not out of desire to do the right thing, but merely to avoid punishment.  The difference between "hitting" and "spanking", between "stealing" and "taking away your _X_ because you did _Y_", between "lying" and "editing for your own good", all began to sound disturbingly like those exercises in semantics adults use when trying to justify their actions to the child who has spotted a flaw in the logic.

It occurred to me... I used to be that child.


I really... REALLY don't want to be that grown up.



Crap.




Okay... now what?




Next time... Part Two; Finding Another Way

My friends all told me...

So, every pregnant woman has had this experience... your friends and family (and random total strangers) feel inexplicably compelled to regale you with a combination of warm fuzzies and horror stories until you're not sure whether to hide in a corner with a blankie or blow your nose with a pancake. This morning one of those little tidbits occurred to me, and I thought ... what a great post that would make! All the stuff my friends said, and whether or not it turned out to be true!


"You'll fall more in love than you ever have in your life."

Yeah, got it in one.  He drives me a little bit nuts with the meltdowns, but then he finally falls asleep and all I can do is stare at that perfect little face, and I go right back to day one.


"You're having heartburn?  Oh, he must have lots of hair!  But he'll rub it off in the crib and be bald for a while too!"

As you've seen, JJ was indeed born with a mop.  Still waiting on the baldness, thus far there is no indication of hair loss.  No Baby Rogaine on the horizon.  (Yes, I'm kidding.)

Four days.                          Almost four months.

"Childbirth is the most painful/beautiful/horrifying/magical thing you will ever experience."


Intense?  Yes.  Beautiful?  The reward was, the process, not hardly, things were far too chaotic.  Agonizing... no, not really.  The last 15 minutes scared the hell out of me, and that's what made it bad.  Now I know.   Magical?  That one I gotta give ya... five minutes after he was out, I was already saying, "Yeah, that was intense... but I could do it again."

"You'll be completely paranoid about germs and bugs and air and (insert potential life-threatening danger)."

Surprisingly not.  Yes, I throw the cats out of the bedroom when we're all asleep, or if the baby is napping and I'm not in there to watch.  Yes, I make sure his harness is snug in his car seat.  Yes, I have smiled sweetly at idiotic fellow motorists while cussing them in my soul.  No, I don't insist that people use hand sanitizer before they touch the baby, or worry that the extra gentle shampoo I buy for me will somehow turn toxic and burn his scalp because it doesn't say "Baby Shampoo" on the front.  Soap is soap.

"Cloth diapers?  You're crazy!  I know you, you hate doing laundry, you'll give up in a week and go back to disposables!!!"


I'll admit it, this one had me worried, but JJ's almost four months old and I'm adding to our stash of dipes every time I can scrape $20 to spare.  His butt hasn't seen a disposable diaper since he was three weeks old.  The laundry?  At first, John did it all.  And I confess, he still deals with the poopy ones.  But diaper laundry has turned out to be the easiest, least complicated, and most easily maintained laundry ever. And we have yet to make the acquaintance of the infamous blow-out.


"You'll sleep again... someday." (Maniacal chuckling and that "It's your turn" grin.)

Half & half.  We've hit the four month sleep regression with a vengeance, so NOW I've experienced the three to four wake ups a night to feed the baby.  I'm hurting, I tell ya, folks.  I am one sleep deprived momma.  Up until two weeks ago, I swear to you we hit the baby lottery on night sleep.  But last night and the night before, we got it down to one middle of the night wake up, and honestly he was never really awake, just fussed enough to get my attention, ate, and was back in the cosleeper in twenty minutes.  So it's (I hope) a growth spurt thing, and we can go back to sleeping through the night here soon.

Sweet Jesus, let it be so.

"You'll get used to noises while the baby is sleeping and stop chewing people out for breathing."

Not so much.  Four months next week, and I still flinch every time something hits the floor while JJ is napping.  Answering one's cell phone will get you shooed into the kitchen, and a belly laugh?  If looks could kill, my husband would be very very crispy several times over by now.  People who ruin half an hour's work and wake JJ right as he's almost asleep are considered to be volunteering to fix the situation.

"Breastfed babies tend to be smaller, so don't worry when he doesn't chunk up right away."

Thanks all for the warning.  Keeping this in mind helped me not completely panic when JJ didn't start really filling out until he was closing on two months old.  Y'all have seen the pictures, he was a very slender guy, and even though he's chubbed out nicely, I don't think he's ever going to be the roly poly sumo baby.

Two Weeks                      Two Months 

Three days ago... and yes, folks, that's the same type diaper in all three pictures.

"Any pacifier will do, sometimes they just want to suck."


The second part is absolutely true.  The first part is a load of bovine excrement.  The cheap binkies we got at first just to have a few were barely tolerated.  When he was about 10 weeks old, I bought a couple of Soothies, and he now flatly refuses to take any other pacifier.  As evidenced by his literally spitting one of the old ones at my nose and screaming at me today when I couldn't find the Soothie and tried an old Nuk in desperation.  Yeah, bad call, Mom.

And my absolute all time favorite:

"Don't worry, breast-milk poops don't stink."


Every single one of my friends who has ever breast-fed a baby has said this to me.

I have just one thing to say.

You are, every last one of you,

Dirty.  Rotten.  Liars.

DST, Mommy Wars, and Fixing What Ain't Been Broke.

Before I jump into the latest burr under my saddle, the REALLY latest burr under said saddle is Daylight Savings Time.  I hate it.  It's stupid.  It jacks with my baby's rhythms.  It's pointless, and it doesn't actually work.  I promise, people still follow their body's clock, even if the mechanical one says something else, and the disparity creates more energy usage, not less.  And farmers?  They're ruled by the sun, the rain, and the seasons no matter what the clock says.  I saw this little gem on the web last night and it cracked me up:

Seems even more ridiculous when you put it like that...

But on to other things...

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about sleep.  And sleep props.  And feedings.  And schedules.  All the stuff that the "experts", the mothers with a half dozen or more, and the ever present "they" say that I should or shouldn't be doing with my son to help him sleep, wake up, eat, and mess "on time".

What does that mean, anyway?  "On time."  From what I can gather, it means baby doing all his various activities in a schedule that fits into my life.

What with moving clear across the country three weeks before he was born, I didn't have much of a life to begin with, so there isn't really much of a schedule for him to fit into anyway.

It didn't make sense to me to expect an infant to neatly slot into grown up time-tables.  So I didn't try to make him.  Well, I did try, did the Babywise deal for about a week... made things worse, not better, so we stopped and went back to letting JJ schedule himself.  And you know what?  He did.  Entirely on his own, he settled into a cycle of wake up, eat, play, eat, sleep, naps ranging from forty minutes to three hours, and consistently sleeps at least eight hours at night, usually more like ten, and in the last couple of weeks occasionally teases me with a twelve hour night.

Just in time for the four month sleep regression, I know.  *sticks fingers in ears and hums loudly*

While many many mothers work, and thus need a more defined schedule for their little ones, I'm happy to say that if you're blessed enough to be able to stay home, a rigid schedule is NOT required.  Some babies take to it and it works for them, some don't.  I am so grateful that I can stay home with my son, and that he is the sort of baby who settled into a reasonably predictable schedule all on his own.

And yet, when people find out that I still do this or that or whatever it is they happen to feel passionately about, I hear the same old song.

"Oh, my, you do/don't/did/didn't/still __(insert parenting choice)___???  You're going to have so many problems with  ___(insert dire predictions)___!!!!"  People get amazingly bent out of shape every time they discover that some other parent did things some other way, as if that passes judgment on the choices they made, and they must now defend those choices to the bitter end.

It's amusing and confounding and irritating as holy hand grenades all at the same time.  Because while they usually have raised or are raising children, none of them have raised my child.  None of them watch him all day and all night.  None of them sleep with both ears wide open to catch his sleepy burbles and listen to his breathing.  None of them read all the books and scoured the internet with my child in mind and finally said "Ya know what? I'll figure it out.  The human race somehow survived before any of this stuff was written, it can't possibly be that hard."

Don't get me wrong, I love hearing about other parents' experiences.  What I don't like is "what worked for me" turning into "you have to do it this exact way or your baby will __(insert more doom and gloom)___"

The problem with all the different theories is that none of them work across the board, and anyone who claims that their method works for all babies all the time (if properly applied and the parents do it right, putting the blame for failure on noncompliant parents) hasn't worked long term with enough children.  Even most of the so-called experts will admit when pressed that there's no such thing as a Baby Manual.  No magic pill, no formula, no step by step or blow by blow that will tell every parent how to handle every baby all the time.  It does not exist.

Everybody knows that.

And yet somehow, everyone also seems to know that their way (or Ezzo or Baby Whisperer or Dr What'sHisNameToday) is the ONLY way that will absolutely work for my child.

I look at my precious baby, contentedly sleeping in his Arm's Reach, happy and healthy and hitting milestones.  (He's sitting up for a second or three unaided now.) I look at myself... rested, with time to myself to write or exercise or do laundry or whatever needs doing.  I look at my husband... rested, working, able to have time with the baby on a daily basis and still spend time with just me.  

I look at our family... and I figure we're doing alright.  We cosleep and swaddle, occasionally bedshare.  I babywear and cloth diaper, but use disposable wipes and vaccinate.  I drive our pediatrician a bit batty and insist on spreading out those vaccines so he gets one new bug at a time.  I gave up on baby baths and instead just take him into the shower with me.  I nurse on demand and let the baby nurse to sleep, rock, sing, cuddle, whatever works to get him down.  I use about a half dozen ASL signs daily for common activities, and will introduce more as he gets older.  When he goes down for the night, I lay there for the first 45 minutes to catch the first rouse cycle and soothe him back down if necessary so that he will sleep through the night.  I could go on like that all day, but the short version is... it's working, and I'm going to continue doing everything that works until it doesn't, at which point I will try other things until I find the new thing that works.  If I ever write a parenting book, it's gonna be...