Kids are different-- there’s no “one size fits all” approach to parenting.
There’s also different approaches that are appropriate for different ages. A kid’s ability at 4 =/= 6 =/= 8. They may be perfectly reasonable about X for years, and then all of a sudden, X becomes an issue. X may be a particular food, or hair-washing, or going to bed quietly, or a particular set of manners over something, or whatever… but they develop and regress.
I remember with my first, I had a little bassinet, which he hated. (I had no clue newborns had opinions.) He also liked waking up to eat at night. Since I was nursing him, he ended up sleeping in bed with us. (Yes, I know, against all billboard advice!) When he got a little older, we tried moving him to a crib in another room. We tried doing the cry-it-out method… and it absolutely shattered his confidence. Rather than being the independent, confident, happy little guy that he had been, it turned him into a clingy, subdued, sad little guy. So we ended up abandoning that approach for the time being, because I wasn’t willing to do what it took to make that approach work.
I was subbing for high school, and the kids were chatting while working on a project, and the subject came up of sleeping with your parents. And our of the six high school kids, maybe three or four of them (all guys) still slept in the same bed as their parents (divorced dads).
DH has a coworker, and she has her 2nd? 3rd? grader still sleeping in bed with her.
So, yeah, just because you allow your baby to sleep in your bed pre-weaning doesn’t mean that you never get to kick them out into their own bed later. But don’t make up an arbitrary rule-of-thumb like, “Our kid will never sleep in our bed!” if you happen to discover that, “Hey, it’s easier on my sleep patterns to do it this way and not that way, and I function better in the morning, because it interrupts everyone’s sleep a little less.”
DH deals with abused/assaulted kids. After he reacted critically to the way I handled a certain situation, it made me very self-conscious about disciplining the kids in front of him, because I don’t want him to associate my parenting skills with stuff he deals with at work. So because of that, he ended up being the physical disciplinarian-- which he thought wasn’t fair that I was always making him play the heavy-- and for too long, I was the try-to-talk-it-out-and-make-them-understand-why-what-I’m-asking-is-a-reasonable-request. When a butt smack would have been more in order.
They ended up perceiving me as safe to ignore, and they ended up taking him seriously. Both of us were raised with physical discipline, and I never expected it to be an issue… until I got that negative feedback with the way I handled X, and then I erred in the other direction, trying to adjust into the kind of parent I thought he wanted me to be. But until we actually talked about it, the kind of parent I thought he wanted me to be was even worse than the kind of parent I was on my own. But you don’t parent in a vacuum— you’re always conscious of the other parent’s approval/disapproval.
