A Breastfeeding War?

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Is this the age of guilty parents? Have mothers always felt this guilty? I don’t think guilt was part of my mother’s generation of parenting—even though she felt plenty guilty…but we won’t go there.

Revolution requires a pendulum swing. We know so much more in the past two decades about brain development and children’s needs that our current revolution is fighting hard to banish traditional parenting modes of fear, pain and suffering to get desired behavior.

The perfect mom?

Connection happens many ways

It is the extreme ends of the continuum that are needed to push our buttons into action. Let’s hope we can learn what we need to as a parenting culture from these polarities and not get mired in blame, shame, and guilt.

The singular idea of a mother breastfeeding her 3 year old doesn’t provoke much emotion anymore. It’s the captured attitude of this casual, hot, hand-on-hip mother breastfeeding a child who looks eight that throws the pendulum and raises all kinds of issues and ideologies (evidenced by the comments on my facebook page).

Inevitably when revolutionary ideas grab for attention, a lot of guilt can result, especially in the arena of parenting. The feminist revolution made us damned if we worked and damned if we didn’t. Many women still feel damned but that swing is beginning to settle.

Now breastfeeding is the gold standard and attachment parenting is the “Oregon Trail”. Time’s cover heightens the guilt of not only the mother who doesn’t breastfeed, but the one who doesn’t for long enough. The question used to be, Are you a “good enough” mother? Now the anty has been upped to, “Are you mom enough?” In other words, can you take it? Can you go all out to prove what a perfect mother you are, no matter what is going on in your life? Taking the question to the extreme—Can you breastfeed for 3 years confined to a wheelchair, working three shifts, as a single mom with four other kids?

Kate Pickert, author of the Time article, hits the nail on the head when she speaks for mothers caught in the middle. “These parents try to achieve [Dr. Bill, father of attachment parenting] Sears’ ideal of nursing, baby wearing, and co-sleeping but fall short for some reason and find themselves immobilized by their seeming parental inadequacy.”

When the dust settles, let’s not settle for feeling inadequate. Connective Parenting focuses on how a parent and child interact, not what they do in order to interact. A mother is equally capable of full connection with her baby (and toddler) when she is bottle-feeding, when she puts her baby down so she can do something, when she allows her baby to reach and crawl for what he wants, when she knows his sleep rhythms so well she can put him in a crib by himself to fall asleep on his own without a tear, even when she can allow him a moment or two of frustration. Connection does not dictate the rules of the game. Connection allows you to play the game however you want as long as all the players enjoy themselves. Sometimes enjoying a game involves anger, frustration, and disappointment but the goal is to come out of it with fair play.

Attachment parenting raises the issue of connection. It does not intend to create guilt. So let’s think of it as a way, not the way. Love and acceptance do not have to pass through skin contact. Eye contact, smiles and laughter, understanding each others’ cues, mimicking sounds and actions, firing those mirror neurons—that is the stuff of connection.

Hopefully when this current revolution wanes, we will have left the punishments and power plays of the old system well behind and can settle for good old relationship building, even if breastfeeding can’t be a part of it.

For Mother’s Day: Is Mothering the Hardest Job?

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Thanks to Hilary Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney never working a day in her life, the subject of mothering has come to the fore once again – just in time for Mother’s Day.

While I believe that parenting, whether done primarily by a mother or a father, is indeed the hardest and most important job anyone will ever undertake, I do not think that society as a whole gives mothering any more than lip service. On Mother’s Day we can give mothers that pat on the back fulfilling our obligation and then be done with it. If indeed it is the hardest job, why do we not feel the need to give parents every opportunity to do the job well?

We certainly consider doctoring a critically important job, hence the years of training necessary to do it. The same can be said of any job. We need education to drive a car, fly a plane, work in a bank, be a neighborhood watchman. But giving birth requires no education at all. We place so little value on the job of mothering that it’s easy for a highly educated woman to make the comment that Mrs. Romney has never worked a day in her life.

Every mother out there, whether satisfied or dissatisfied with her parenting will tell you how important it is to know what to do and how to do it. From understanding child development and individual temperaments in order to know what is appropriate to expect of a child; to understanding child behavior and what it means so a mother doesn’t fly off the handle every time a child screams, “No,” a mother’s day-in-and-day-out responses to her children are critical to the future of our society.

I will argue that every abhorrent and dysfunctional behavior that costs our society megabucks as well as lives can be traced back to dysfunctional family relationships – to parenting.

We can argue that we have been raising children from the beginning of time and there’s nothing to learn.
Oh yeah? How many parents have argued, “I was raised that way, and I turned out just fine.”

Exactly the evidence needed to argue for parenting education. None of us even know our potential had we been raised in a better way. And how different is our present day culture from the one we were raised in, our parents and grandparents were raised in?

Things change; the need for educating parents on the latest research and in the context of more and more technology is a no-brainer.

As a society, we don’t even understand the meaning of behavior. We react to it at face value. If we like it, we reward it, and if we don’t, we punish it. Never do we look below the surface to see the needs that are provoking the behavior. Rarely do parents even understand what a child’s needs are.

Many mothers do better jobs than others and many children are easier to raise than others. The fit of a mother’s and a child’s temperaments often make the critical difference between raising a healthy child whose needs have been satisfied and an unhealthy child who requires external stimulation (often at the cost of society) to fulfill those needs. Many of our addictions, dependencies, physical and mental health issues have direct roots in parenting. And any parent’s current parenting has roots deeply embedded in their own childhoods.

Isn’t it about time we celebrated Mother’s Day with the gift of government-sponsored parent education free for all parents, with huge tax credits given to a parent who chooses to stay home to raise children, with strict and thorough education for daycare workers who are paid well enough to make a career out of it?

Imagine if teachers were paid as well as doctors. Would we get stuck in the quagmire of invasion of personal rights or would this save the government billions and help us raise a healthier society?

Does Whining Drive You Crazy?!

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  I’ve never met a parent who likes—no, is even okay with—whining. For me it was like nails on a blackboard. Many parents don’t know of another torture that would be worse.
Whining is as developmental and normal in a toddler’s life as discovering the pleasure of saying “no”. Don’t think about teaching your child not to do it. Do think about ways you can help yourself deal with it calmly and perhaps shorten it’s duration. Here are a few:

1. Don’t call it whining. It’s very hard to talk to your child about whining without being critical and blaming. “Stop whining.” “I can’t hear you when you’re whining.” These proclamations will not get you what you want. It may only make it worse.

2. Make a compassionate association when you hear it. Can you instead think about how frustrated your child is feeling—even if it’s over something you won’t allow. I once heard Aletha Salter say that whining is stuck crying. A child who whines is actually trying hard not to cry so the cry gets stuck. Sometimes validation of the frustration will bring on the crying which eliminates the whine—for now.

3. Don’t try to teach anything during the whining. As soon as the whining is past and you hear your child’s “normal” voice, name it. “There’s the Sarah voice. What shall we name the voice you use when you feel really frustrated?” Let your child name it. Then when you hear the whine, you can say, “I hear the ‘—-’ voice. Do you need to use that or can you use the Sarah voice?” You might name a couple of different voices you use as well.

4. Give the connection that is really needed. If you don’t think you have to teach your child to stop whining, when you hear it, get down to your child’s level and validate the frustration. “You really wish I could do what you want. I know I would want that too if I were you. Will you take a hug for now?”

5. Pay attention to the times your child doesn’t whine. It’s so easy to focus on the tones you hate to hear, but how often do you acknowledge the times your child does a good job coping. Whenever your child doesn’t whine when she asks for what she wants, notice it. “You really know how to ask for what you want. I like that.”

Know that this too will pass—even though it may seem like an eternity.