Thursday, April 22, 2010

WEAN is not a Four-Letter Word (or Growing Up is Hard To Do)

wean (verb)
1. to accustom (a child or young animal) to food other than its mother's milk; cause to lose the need to suckle or turn to the mother for food.
2. to withdraw (a person, the affections, one's dependency, etc.) from some object, habit, form of enjoyment, or the like


By far the greatest concern that parents seem to have, and the one that cuts across all domains of child development, is that a wrong choice they make now could have lasting negative effects on their child. If we are not worried about traumatizing our child, we still tend to worry that we will never be able to break our child of one habit or another. If we are not worried about habits being permanent, we are still worried that the weaning process itself will be difficult and drawn out. You have probably said, or heard a friend say something similar to: "If I let my baby cry it out, he could be scarred for life." or, "If I cuddle my baby until she falls asleep, she will never learn to fall asleep on her own.", or, "If I let my toddler get up and walk around at dinner time, he will learn that it is ok to not be sitting while you eat." While these anxieties are certainly understandable, they are not based in reality when you consider what it means to develop. The one thing that babies do reliably without any help from us is change.

Fortunately or unfortunately, growing up is a process of getting used to things and then having to get un-used to them so you can get ready to get used to the next thing. Yes, children are "creatures of habit" in many ways, and that is exactly why growing up is hard. But it is hard all by itself, not because we parents make it so. More accurately, we parents cannot make development not hard. Say it with me now – "No matter how great of a parent I am, and no matter which choice I make among the many appropriate parenting choices, I will not be able to remove all of the pain associated with growing up."

I do not have a grim view of childhood. Rather, I see that we parents need to embrace all the different aspects of parenting, many of which are joyful, some of which feel more like a struggle, and a few of which feel downright demoralizing. Perhaps we’d all feel a little bit more sane if struggles with raising our children didn’t always have to cue us that "something must be wrong", either with our children or with the parenting choices we have made.

Take crying for example. We are evolutionarily programmed to find our children’s crying unpleasant, which motivates us to alleviate their pain, discomfort, fatigue, hunger, etc.. But, like all biological systems, the "cry-and-response" cycle is imperfect, and is mostly there to insure that really serious problems don’t go unnoticed. So when I hear a friend say that they tried such-and-such idea to help their child with something and "it didn’t work", I always ask them, "What was happening when you knew it didn’t work?" The response almost inevitably comes down to the fact that their child cried.

When we are helping our children get used to something new, or get un-used to something old, they will cry. It is the best tool they have available for releasing the stress involved in developing. It doesn’t mean that our helping "isn’t working" and it certainly doesn’t mean we are traumatizing our child.

So, just as we would not use a potentially difficult weaning process as a reason to think that breastfeeding isn’t good for children in the first place, we should not use this faulty logic in other areas of parenting either. If you see a bit of yourself in any of this sort of anxiety, that alone tells me that you want to provide a nurturing and healthy environment for your child, and you are likely to know deep down whether something is really in your child’s best interests.

Will stress get the best of you sometimes? Will you sometimes make parenting choices you wish you hadn’t? Of course. But my guess is it doesn’t take more than 30 seconds of hindsight for you to know that too. You can right the ship – children are very resilient. But struggles, crying, and even the raised eyebrows of outsiders are not an indication of a lack of smooth sailing. Embrace the choppy ride. As Ship’s Captain, you don’t get to set sail only when the waters are smooth, but you can feel proud for navigating the waves.

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Be a calm mom too.

Welcome to my blog. This is an essay that I contributed to NPR’s "This I Believe" series back in 2007. It sums up my inspiration for helping my friends, and parents everywhere, to throw the parenting books out the window. I realize the hypocrisy involved in giving people advice to not follow advice, but stay with me – I really think there is something to this. Where modern parenting is concerned, people seem to need permission to do what their gut knows is right. I have seen people’s parenting self-efficacy (the fancy term for a parent’s belief that they know how to be a good parent) steamrolled by conventional wisdom, stupid Facebook posts of well-meaning friends, and ulterior economic motives (selling books, cribs, videos, drinking formula, magic formulas of all kinds) more times than I can count. Join me in bucking the system and getting back to common sense. Let’s discuss all the parenting techniques you have used that you wouldn’t tell your mother about, and why they worked for you. Permission granted.

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