An absolutely wonderful read. I read three widely recommended books, which diametrically opposed each other on almost everything. So I decided to ignore most of the advice, and rely on friends, family, medical experts, and my own intuition. Anything the books mostly agreed on, I did tend to follow.
The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that every parent develops nostalgia."
Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of 8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning', who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of love from their parents.
When we had our first born, advice was to wake the baby for feeding so they get used to regular routines. We did this once and he screamed for the entirety of that day so we just fed him at irregular intervals but tried to ensure he still got the right number of feeds in a day.
When we had our second we were told not to wake her. But when she did wake she was so hungry she would have a screaming fit so we learned she preferred to get woken for lunch.
Moral of the story: try as hard as you might to generalise child rearing, they'll always find a way to contradict good advice.
I have two kids and they are about as different as two kids can be. They are truly the inversion of each other in every way. There's no way to generalize, what works/worked on one would never work on the other. The only exception (sounds corny but it's true) is loads of love. But I don't need a book to tell me that, though sometimes a reminder..
This might sound a bit callous (and I know it's more left field than callous but it's my only entry point to this topic) but your story kind of reminded me of a time I visited friends for a weekend at college. A friend of theirs had a new born litter of 1/2 Black Lab 1/2 Pit Bull puppies (the cutest, jet black pups) and my buddy and his girlfriend adopted one, Kujo.
Their goal was to get their new puppy used to being and sleeping alone by making sure it slept outside of their bedroom every night. This was the second weekend they had the dog and I, of course, was outside of their bedroom on the floor. The cold carpet. The living room was the only other room besides the bathroom, which we all wanted to keep dog free for everyone's convenience, in their small college apartment. I was told to try not sleep / cuddle with the dog overnight, but not sternly.
I'm a light sleeper as it is and after about 15 minutes of listening to the little guy cry and whimper I caved in figuring one night of sleeping cuddled up with me couldn't ruin a K-9's entire life of attachment. Plus I was on the floor and as you can tell I'm soft as it comes with animals and children.
I'll never know whether my softness that night ruined Kujo's sense of attachment but I will tell you right now, as someone who has always wanted kids I can't imagine I'll be able to keep my own flesh and blood at a distance while they are crying and calling out all night long :*(.
I have so much respect and am in awe of parents of all types. Keep kicking butt!
It's not easy sometimes but you do learn the difference between kids crying because they're in distress and crying because they're just being stubborn. The real difficulty is when they're distressed but "tough love" is exactly whats needed (eg you're example of getting them to sleep in their own bed).
What I struggle the most with is when they actually put a logical argument forward to get their own way. My eldest is not long 4 and he has already been putting some pretty intelligent counter arguments for why he should get his own way for about two years now. Sometimes I cave even if I know he is just arguing because his points are so well formed that I simply cannot argue back (plus I never want to stifle a kids ability to examine and deconstruct the world). My wife often calls me a big softy for that.
Ultimately though, my wife and I compliment each other in different ways so where I struggle with parenting she excels; and visa versa. I don't even know how single parents cope because I know for a fact I wouldn't.
This is why advice can still be useful, but you need to understand that every piece of advice only works for some kids, and not all. You still need to find what works for you, but it may help to have some idea of what the options are.
As a father of four girls ranging from 8 years to three months old, I have to agree with that elderly lady. My daughters are all very different persons, with their own personalities, likes and interests. There's very little I could do to change who they fundamentally are, even if I wanted to. I also believe that as long as you love your children (which is very easy to do), and provide them with a safe environment where they can feel empowered to try things (a bit harder, but still very doable), they'll turn out fine.
There's this trend in parenting nowadays, where we're all pursuing perfection via different techniques / philosophies, but anything involving living things, especially humans, is inherently messy / imperfect. Raising children is no exception.
>I also believe that as long as you love your children (which is very easy to do), and provide them with a safe environment where they can feel empowered to try things (a bit harder, but still very doable), they'll turn out fine.
I'd add to that "teach a minimal level of social acceptability to behavior by the age of 2". There's a failure loop of "too annoying for playing with peers, leading to shunning, leading to not learning how to play nicely with others". You don't need to do much to steer children out of that, but you'll likely need to do some.
Plus, children that don't annoy the heck out of you are much easier to love.
I personally strongly recommend sending your kid to a daycare up to 3 days a week starting when they're about 6 months old. I've heard that before 6 months, it can be stressful, but after 6 months, they can get very attached to only the people they know, and not accept anyone else anymore, which can be a problem with babysitters, family, play dates, etc.
So get them used to meeting other kids at an early age. It's great for their social development. Of course individual kids may vary, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.
Exactly, forego all "techniques" and just make them feel loved no matter what. Then let them discover the world, pursue their own interests. Take a step back and don't let your fears hold them back. Challenge and push them gently when their fears hold them back.
They won't be perfect, they were raised by imperfect persons after all, but with enough love they'll be ok.
I am not an expert but isn't that just the kind of dogmatic viewpoint which the article suggests has little value.
You may believe day-care for two year-olds is fundamentally wrong, but there's little empirical evidence to show that children raised in different ways have different outcomes.
At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised wrongly, rather than merely assert it as fact.
Empirical evidence can't decide on moral issues. To complicate matters further most moral stuff can't be explained very well. For example, 'murder is wrong' is an uncontroversial moral fact which is both unfalsifiable and hard to explain.
In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care. But most of us already know this.
You have already elided from fundamentally wrong to not as good as. So this is moving in the right direction.
I would ask you to take the next step with me. Please acknowledge, the points below can be true sometimes:
- Some Day Care will offer more love and attention than some parents
- Some children who attend poor quality day-care as two year-olds will grow to become just as mature or balanced as most of their their stay-at-home peers.
All I wanted to do is to show that this situation is more nuanced than "fundamentally wrong".
I am afraid I don't subscribe to your morality. At best, it puts the perfect in the way of the good. For many parents, at some point, day-care is surely the best choice available to them and we should not be quick to judge them as bad parents for doing so.
No, that's what I'm arguing against. Parenting manuals are arguing minutiae while children are increasingly being brought up by strangers who don't love them. Of course there are exceptions. So what?
So then we have move to a discussion about each child's circumstances on its own merits, rather trying to make one size fit all. And I would argue that this is what parents are already doing in their millions. If so many parents are deciding that their kids' best option is day-care I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
I'm not arguing that one-size-fits-all; there are many legitimate parenting styles. The books argue about these, and the article is right, we shouldn't worry. But daycare just isn't one of them, as I've explained. It's the opposite of parenting.
>I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
'At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised [rightly] rather than merely assert it as fact.'
This is a good challenge. You may disagree, but I believe that overall (some individuals may fall far from the mean), there can be no better way to determine how best to do parenting than the way that parents actually do it.
It is inconceivable to me that rules (morality, laws, tradition or whatever) should decide against parents in the large. Evolution has determined that parents will always be the ones most vested in their children's general well-being.
Nah, everybody used to think slavery was OK. Yet it wasn't. Plenty of people know they shouldn't smoke. Yet they do. Evolution is 'red in tooth and claw'.
Let me re-formulate my explanation of why daycare is bad:
(1) Small children need love and attention; they also need adult help available; they need to feel secure.
(2) Love, attention and help aren't raw undifferentiated qualities. The quality depends on the source. A familiar source which knows the child is required.
(3) The anxiety induced by an early childhood separation from such sources is potentially traumatic and long-term.
Therefore, young children shouldn't be separated from their mothers and/or close relatives.
Nobody is arguing for abandoning kids 24/7 to strangers. A good daycare is staffed by trained professionals who know how to take care of children, and know how to provide the love, attention and security that children need. Furthermore, I'm arguing for a maximum of 3 days of daycare, so each parent still has their own full day with the children, as well as the entire weekend with the family.
Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is. You're attacking a straw man. (The existence of bad daycares notwithstanding; they do exist, are hopefully rare, but should definitely be avoided.)
(1) There's no such thing as a professional parent. It's a relationship.
(2) Professionals have expertise in some domain, e.g. heart surgery, but as the article shows, there's no expert knowledge of childcare. There's no prevailing child-rearing philosophy.
(3) Professionals are paid significantly above the minimum wage.
>know how to provide the love
No. A mother loves her child, but love can't be provided as a commodity, like complimentary chocolates. Even if a carer tries her hardest, this will fall short, because she doesn't love the child. She's also heavily constrained by having to follow procedures, timetables, attend to other children, and so on.
>Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is.
That's exactly what it is: somewhere to put your toddler while you head off to work. Or it's a convenience. But in reality small children need someone they trust and are close to available at all times.
Yes, they are professionals. They have been trained for this, unlike parents, who surprisingly often have no idea what they're doing.
Are parents not constrained? Parents have jobs, households to run, appointments, groceries, etc. I see parents dragging children through shopping malls because the child does not want to come along and the parent does not want to deal with it.
And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love? You have a ridiculously dogmatic view of how people work. Your view is wrong.
Just wait until you have children, and give it a try. If it's a good daycare, children will love it there. (If it's a bad one, find a better one.)
Not professionals. For example, we don't call a fast food server a professional, yet he is trained.
Yes, a mother is constrained by having to look after her other children and the household, but it is an organic set of constraints which is customised to the particular family and has arisen in part out of their previous interactions and out of her family traditions. Furthermore it can be altered (by her). It's not a bureaucratic scheme designed to maximise the convenience and minimise the legal/financial risk to the daycare and its staff.
Yes, there are horrific families and there are no doubt daycare workers who are more affectionate than others. But this doesn't affect the argument.
>And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love?
Who do I have to be? I've merely claimed that daycarers don't love the kids in their charge. I think our great-grandmothers would have known this instinctively and would be horrified at the direction we have taken as a society in this regard.
My son is in daycare, and has been since he was 8 months old. My wife and I talked to a bunch of people, weighed up the pros and cons, and felt it was best. We were aware of opinions on all sides, and even some empirical evidence that suggested daycare was bad for kids (particularly boys). So here's why we decided to do it anyway.
We live in a prosperous neighbourhood in the UK that has a lot of good daycare centres. Our friends with kids used the same daycare and were very happy. We have only one child and knew that would always be the case, and wanted him to grow up around other children, comfortable being with people other than his parents. We don't have any family living nearby, so asking them to provide daycare wasn't an option. I couldn't give up work, so without daycare my wife would have had to abandon her career. But she really enjoys her job - she didn't want her whole life to be about being a parent, which is good for her mental health (and by extension our son's mental health). Plus the income gives us extra financial stability, and it teaches our son that is normal for a woman to go to work.
On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised. Indeed, he has played with toys and watched films we didn't really like. In the short run it actually cost us money.
So we started daycare at just 3 hours per week, and gradually (over the course of 4 years) increased that to 20 hours per week. We always ask him whether he likes his daycare, we are engaged with them and we coordinate activities and teaching methods. He has thrived. Of course, we can't say how things would have turned out had we decided a different course, but he's doing absolutely fine. Also, this is just a one-off case, and not some 'proof that it's a good idea to send kids to daycare'.
As parents, it's all about your child, your values, your circumstances, what kind of daycare is available, what alternatives you have, and a lot of other factors. Blanket comments like "daycare is anti-parenting" are unhelpful at best, and harmful at worst.
I don't know what your situation is - whether you even have kids. Perhaps in our situation you would have made a different choice. Perhaps you'd even have been right, and somehow our son would turn out 'better' (whatever that means) if he hadn't gone to daycare. What I do know is at the time of choosing whether to send our son to daycare, your comments would have been hurtful. Feeling like you're being judged by the "good parenting police" often leads to extreme anxiety, and that's rarely in the child's interest.
So if you don't approve of daycare, that's fine. Don't send your kids to daycare. But please keep those opinions to yourself, or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
> On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised.
That is only a problem if you have very unusual ideas about how a child should be raised. At a good daycare, your child is cared for by professionals who need to meet much stricter criteria than parents.
Of course not all daycares meet the highest standards, and standards can also vary per country. But a good daycare is good for your child.
I agree. For example, my wife and I think he's much too young to be interested in superhero movies, but all his friends at daycare like superheroes so now he does too. Despite my reservations, I suspect it's healthier for him than growing up solely under our influence. Instead, we discuss what it means to be a 'goody' or a 'baddy' and use it in a positive way that fits within our values.
That's a touching story. Not unusual, just human.
In the long run your child will almost certainly embody you and your wife's values, with his own twist.
Don't forget that those circumstances include the decision of whether or not to have children in the first place.
>But please keep those opinions to yourself
That's silly. This is a discussion which you're not obliged to read and I'm not a best-selling author or anything like that. More importantly, in response to lovemenot's request I tried to move beyond opinion and give an explanation. You're free to criticise it on its own merits if you don't like it.
>or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
But I did recognise it: 'I'm not arguing that one-size-fits-all; there are many legitimate parenting styles'. Also 'Yes' at the very start.
Btw, using one's own child as an example in a discussion like this increases emotional investment and then it's harder to determine what's true. Better to argue abstractly I think.
> Empirical evidence can't decide on moral issues.
It can, depending on whether the moral question is one of fundamental axioms or applications of axioms to objective conditions. That is, if you take as a moral axiom that it is wrong to raise children in ways which cause certain harms, empirically showing day care does not cause those harms would answer whether (under that rule, at least) day care was morally wrong.
OTOH, if you take “day care is morally wrong” as itself axiomatic, it's true that empirical evidence has no role.
> In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care.
The first sentence is very loosely true (empirically, even); in the sense in which it is true, however, the second is not in the general sense (that is, it is not true that there is no way care choice for which it is true), though it may be in a naive sense (if one assumes that all parents have I'd a binary choice between day care and Monday care, and then the children are blindly sent to something meeting the definition of “day care” if that option is chosen.)
Good people already know that daycare is bad, even those who use it, even though they can't explain. So yeah, it's axiomatic.
>however, the second is not in the general sense
Au contraire, it's a perfectly true general statement that children can't get love and attention at daycare. From minimum wage, high-turnover staff looking after a large number of kids in a bureaucratically-controlled environment? No way.
Actually I guess most people wouldn't want or expect employees to love their charges anyhow. It would likely be construed as 'inappropriate', as when a teacher hugs a pupil.
Good lord, are you wrong. Just no. Good people investigate daycares and send their kids to a good one, rather than spreading harmful lies on the internet.
A bad daycare is bad, a good daycare is good. Do your homework as a parent. It's possible you live in an area where there are no good daycares, but you need to understand that your situation is not universal. But instead of just badmouthing people who are making responsible choices for their children, you could also help create a market for better daycares, you could join the parent committee for the daycare to help improve it, or petition the government to better regulate or fund daycares.
Maybe you need to try a bit harder to find a better daycare.
Small children need love and attention, but they also need social interaction. They can get both at a daycare. And a daycare doesn't have to mean they never see their parents again. I consider 3 days of daycare and parents each working 4 days to be a perfect balance, and I notice a lot of parents doing exactly that. Although different people may have different situations and needs and find a different balance. But the benefits of daycare shouldn't be too lightly dismissed.
'Uncontroversial statement' if they prefer. I'd be happy to nitpick with them provided they aren't murdering people or sending their babies to preschool.
> while often getting fundamentals wrong, e.g. there are millions of two year olds in day care.
You suggest there's something wrong with that, but I'm at a loss as to what it could be. Of course two year olds go to day care. Do you want to deny them their social development? I recommend starting daycare around 6 months.
I'm personally really happy with our arrangement: I work 4 days, my wife works 4 days, and 3 days of daycare. We get to spend plenty of time with the kids, but we also have a (practically) full-time job and the kids get lots of time to play with other kids.
I'd be more worried if millions of two year olds were not going to daycare.
I likewise didn't find any perfect instruction manual for keeping a baby healthy and alive, but I did find the process of reading and considering the advice they gave to be helpful in forming our own processes and opinions.
I'd recommend that any prospective parent take some time to read several baby books from conflicting perspectives, to give you the opportunity to be intentional about your parenting style.
Watching other parents is also really really helpful if you have the chance. More often from a "we need to make sure we never ever do that" perspective than anything else.
The most insidious thing about a lot of these books is the way they can undermine your confidence as a parent at exactly the time you're most vulnerable. Look at these guarantees, look at all these testimonials, look how we use the word 'science' on every page; if your baby isn't sleeping then you're obviously still doing it wrong, you're a bad parent, it's all your fault.
I'm pretty sure it was The Baby Whisperer that nearly drove my wife to a breakdown before we agreed to bin it.
> if your baby isn't sleeping then you're obviously still doing it wrong, you're a bad parent, it's all your fault.
I would strongly hope that parents would draw the conclusion that the book is wrong. With so many contradictory books, some are bound to be wrong, so if a book doesn't work, it must be one of the wrong ones. Try another one to see if it works, or maybe try your own ideas and see if those work.
If the answers were all diverging, perhaps the questions themselves could be of help? Gives you things to watch out for. Were the questions answered by the books similar enough?
The three books I read:
* The Contented Little Baby - https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Contented-Little-Baby-Book-eboo...
* The Fourth Trimester - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Trimester-Understanding-Prot...
* The Baby Whisperer - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secrets-Baby-Whisperer-Connect-Comm...
The most helpful thing I read: "Nobody has been the parent of your child before. What worked for one baby may not work for yours. And remember that every parent develops nostalgia."
Also, an elderly lady in my church who had been a teacher said by the age of 8, you can't tell who was breastfed or bottlefed, who had 'baby led weaning', who used natural toys, etc. But you could tell the ones that received a lot of love from their parents.