Parenting Advice

The last two entries were born of frustration over the deluge of conflicting advice out there for new parents. Seriously, we took a parenting class when we were pregnant, and we heard conflicting advice from nurses and doctors so often that it made my head spin.

The worst though are parenting advice books. My recommendation: throw them all away. Okay, all but one, get a medical type one--I think the one we have that I like is from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I only recommend it because it is helpful sometimes to have a book to look up if something is normal or not. Especially true for first time parents.

But most of the other books--even those by doctors--are utter crap. Oh, they sound reasonable at first, and then as you get further into reading you invariably find:

1. As far as "milestones" and other commonalities are concerned, they are all saying the same thing, so you don't really need more than one book.

2. As far as parenting "philosophies" they are all trying to indoctrinate you into their world view, which is often dogmatic and leaves little room for dissent.

God forbid you should think differently about something, or even have different experiences from close friends or relatives. The real truth for me, so far, is that you have to find the things that work best for you as a parent. And you have to be able to draw from multiple sources--there are no wrong or right answers. Well, except the universal truth, "Don't shake the baby."

Take breastfeeding. The missus and I both support breastfeeding and we are breastfeeding BG. However, in dealing with the realities of modern life: house payments, student loan payments, saving so BG doesn't have to have student loans, etc. we both need to work. That means my wife has to pump. And recently, having been back at work a little while, her milk supply is starting to decrease a bit. We've banked (read:frozen) a bunch when she was churning out milk like a Borden's Dairy, but now, in the not too distant future, we're going to have to supplement. It's just a fact. She cannot stay home, it's not an option. And I can't nurse BG. That's not an option. So what do we do? Well, we're going to have to supplement with formula, and I fear, eventually go all formula. Is that ideal? No. Would we prefer BG to be entirely breastfed. But if that can't happen, does that make us horrible parents? I don't think so.

But there's a certain organization, dedicated to breast feeding (a good thing) that is so dogmatic (a bad thing) in their literature, books and messageboards that they make you feel a pariah if you can't breastfeed until the kid is in high school. Okay, maybe not that bad, but seriously the attitude of many of these advocates not only shuns the economic reality of many families, but they also prey on parental guilt and fears to promote their idiologies. I hate that.

So in the end, what can you do? The best you can. I've accepted that I'm going to make mistakes as a parent. And I could waste time reading books about how I'm doing this wrong or that wrong, or I could simply do what I think is right and makes BG smile.

I'm going with that last option.