Thoughts on Parenting

My New Years Res­o­lu­tion this year was to get back to blog­ging, on all my blogs.  So far, this hasn’t worked out great, Leo is crawl­ing and dur­ing the hour nap that he takes in the morn­ing while Oliver is in preschool, I often try to do things like shower, do laun­dry, wash dishes, or just catch up on read­ing arti­cles on the inter­net.  It was while doing the lat­ter that I came across two arti­cles that point straight to the rea­son that this blog ground to a halt ear­lier this year.

I started this blog because I had par­ent­ing issues I wanted to write about that didn’t fit in with the theme of my expat blog.  Along that line, I real­ized that what I wanted to do most was to build a com­mu­nity where par­ents from around the world could share their expe­ri­ences, good and bad, in a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment.  I wanted to bring par­ents together.

The Prob­lem

As I read more and more par­ent­ing sites, I saw that most of the pop­u­lar sites aim to divide us and I became quite jaded towards the idea of par­ent­ing blogs.  As we see in the news media, extrem­ism gets more rat­ings than mod­er­a­tion.  But we do it to our­selves as well.

The two recent, “in the news” arti­cles that affected me, are the intro­duc­tory post of Mayim Bia­lik (the actress who por­trayed “Blos­som” and now has a PhD in neu­ro­science and prac­tices Attach­ment Par­ent­ing) on the TODAY­Moms blog and the arti­cle in the New York Times by Amy Chua, a pro­fes­sor at Yale Law School, Why Chi­nese Moth­ers Are Supe­rior.

It’s not nec­es­sar­ily what was writ­ten, but the com­ments, which I found so dis­ap­point­ing.  So many com­menters full of vit­riol and per­sonal attacks against the author and other par­ents.  As the child of a Tiger Mom and as an AP par­ent, I’d like to com­ment on both these articles.

My Par­ents

My mother was a very crit­i­cal, typ­i­cal Asian “Tiger mom,” and expected only the best.  If I came home with a 96, I could expect to be asked why it wasn’t a 100.  My father, how­ever, was a typ­i­cal Amer­i­can dad.  To be hon­est, my feel­ings now are that my mother was too strict and my father was too lax.  I love them both, but that’s how I saw it.

In high school, I com­pletely rebelled against my mother’s strict­ness, and my father allowed me to do what­ever I wanted.  Even as a grad stu­dent, my mom wanted me home by 10pm, while my dad would allow me to stay out all night.  I turned out okay in the end, my broth­ers and I all turned out well-adjusted and suc­cess­ful, despite hav­ing a Tiger mom and an Amer­i­can dad (the “despite” was a joke).

My Own Par­ent­ing Choices

I’ve cho­sen to be an AP mom.  Actu­ally, I chose to fol­low my instincts.  I didn’t know a lot of par­ents when I had my first child, so I didn’t have any idea what to do.  I just did what felt right.  Six months in to par­ent­ing, some­one men­tioned to me that what I was doing was called Attach­ment Par­ent­ing.  I looked it up and thought, yes, this is exactly right.  Here are some thoughts about what I read said about the AP lifestyle in the com­ments to the TODAY­Moms blogpost:

We co-sleep. My hus­band and I and our two kids.  Oliver sleeps in a tod­dler bed pushed up against our queen sized bed, we’ve got a bed rail on the other side, and fol­low safe co-sleeping prac­tices.  For crit­ics who won­der how a mar­riage can func­tion if kids are in the mar­riage bed, there are plenty of other places to enjoy a mar­riage out­side of the bed.  It’s pretty excit­ing to brain­storm how and where you want to do it next.

We extended breastfeed.

In pub­lic.  Breast­feed­ing in pub­lic isn’t the same as uri­nat­ing or defe­cat­ing, it is feed­ing a child.  Eat­ing in pub­lic is per­fectly legal.  I might not want to see every­one out there eat­ing in pub­lic, depend­ing on their table man­ners, but gen­er­ally I man­age to ignore what other peo­ple are doing at their tables.

Another point made, is that it is for the mom and not for the child.  You can­not make a child breast­feed, espe­cially when they have teeth.  If a child doesn’t want to nurse, the child will bite and no mom wants that.

Finally, there was crit­i­cism that many par­ents can’t do every­thing that goes with being AP.  That’s not what AP is about.  AP is mainly about tak­ing biol­ogy into account.  Our chil­dren are bio­log­i­cally wired a cer­tain way, they are still the same, bio­log­i­cally, as a child born 10,000 years ago.  It was best then for a child to be upset to be away from it’s mother.

Now, we are no longer hunter-gatherers, we live in a mod­ern soci­ety and can’t raise our chil­dren exactly the same, but we can take the bio­log­i­cal needs of our chil­dren into account and try to fit them into our lives as best we can.  AP means lis­ten­ing to your instincts about what is right for your fam­ily.  If the fam­ily can’t sleep all together because the kids or the par­ents are light sleep­ers, or you pre­fer to have sex in your bed with the kids tucked safely away in their own rooms, then it’s okay not to cosleep.  If you can’t breast­feed because of health or men­tal or any other prob­lems, it’s okay.  For­mula is not as good as breast milk, but it is accept­able.  It is not poi­son.  I was raised on it and so were most of the kids of my gen­er­a­tion.  I can’t carry my kids as much as I’d like because of back prob­lems.  That’s okay.  You do what you can.

In the end, I know a lot of fam­i­lies and a lot of chil­dren.  I don’t know a sin­gle fam­ily who par­ents exactly the same as any other fam­ily, and all the chil­dren I know are turn­ing out fine.

What are your thoughts on parenting?

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Tagged as: attachment parenting, bed, Breastfeeding, co-sleeping, Sleep, Tiger mom, toddler