Before you became a parent

[TheLittleLady]

Tragic.

We raised our son in a gated golf community, pretty much as exclusive as it can get in this part of the country. Our house sat right on the green, part of the community was bordered by State Park and a lake.

The kids of that community roam the roads and paths on bikes and on foot, in the summer many houses keep either a mini fridge or a cooler outside stocked with water, soda, snacks outside so kids can help themselves. The kids leave the house when they wake up and come home for supper. There are homes for sale there

 

[Xantippe]

The kids of that community roam the roads and paths on bikes and on foot, in the summer many houses keep either a mini fridge or a cooler outside stocked with water, soda, snacks outside so kids can help themselves. The kids leave the house when they wake up and come home for supper. There are homes for sale there

Yeah, that’s more or less the sort of thing I’ve heard from happy cul de sac families, but yours sounds like it’s on a larger scale.

We had something similar living on a loop with a lot of kids in the neighborhood. Because of demolition, there was one year where we had a loop with a huge green space in the middle. It was fantastic, but the whole neighborhood got demolished the following year, so it’s gone now.

Conditions vary a lot according to neighborhood.

Which is, come to think of it, a good thing for the OP to think about when looking for a house and neighborhood–are there sidewalks, are there kids, do the kids come out and play, how fast is traffic, is there a park nearby, etc.

 

[TheLittleLady]

YES. Look and see if there are kids playing outside, if there is a playground, access to woods or water.

 

[Clementine14]

Very wealthy people often seek nannies who happen to not have children. That’s because you don’t have to have children to know how to deal with children. Many school teachers haven’t got children and they can keep 20-30 children quietly working at their desks. Success has more to do with whether a parent has a teacher personality, and lots of patience.

It is true that there are people who have a gift for working with children, regardless of their own status as a parent. However, teachers who can keep a good number of children in line at school have many of the same problems other parents do with their own children. Children have a way of behaving better for people who are not their parents. So, it would be a mistake to assume that a non-parent (teacher, friend, whoever) who does not care for a particular child’s constant needs, would always have a good enough understanding of a particular situation (for instance regarding sleep or feeding) to “know better” than one’s own parents.

 

[Clementine14]

Ok i wasn’t trying to include actual disorders in that statement, they are different things anyway. A child that is holding out for junk food is not the same as a child being given junk food because they otherwise wouldn’t eat.

The fact is that their child wouldn’t know such junk existed to hold out for, if they didn’t keep it in the house and eat it themselves.

Not necessarily- even if parents don’t keep junk food in the house, kids will see people eating elsewhere. At daycare, at restaurants, at friends’ and grandparents’ homes, on television…etc.

I agree that kids without actual feeding issues can manipulate their parents, and that in those cases “he’ll eat when he’s hungry” can be implemented effectively. But also, it should be applied very carefully. Many people told us this, before our son was officially diagnosed, and it was harmful advice. Also, sometimes kids have un-diagnosed food allergies that affect their eating habits, and when a child doesn’t like something it is not necessarily simply a distaste for it. (This applied to us as well.)

So nobody should assume that they “know better” if they are not directly involved in caring for a particular child. Also, many of our friends have no idea that our son has a feeding disorder, because it is not something we go around broadcasting. So to a friend, it might seem like we are terrible parents who can’t get our child to eat, and we are doing it “all wrong”, but they don’t know the daily struggles we face. It can be really discouraging and hurtful to have people who are supposed to care about us (including both parents and those who are not parents or child care professionals) comment about how our child is manipulating us, and describe what they would do better. Even in the absence of such medical issues, assume that parents are doing their best and that day-to-day parenting is often very different from what we imagined before we were parents.

 

[Xantippe]

Clementine14 has many good points. I’ve heard about the allergy thing a number of times from other parents–that it turned out that the child had an actual allergy to the food item they were refusing.

I’d underline the fact that a lot of times, you won’t know you have a child with special needs until years later. Kids don’t come out of the womb stamped “autism spectrum” or “OCD” or “eating disorder.”

Edited to add: Likewise, sometimes the only sign you have of a medical problem is some sort of behavioral issue. One of our kids used to suddenly start acting evil right before developing other signs of illness. The bad behavior would come first, and then a few hours later, she’d be spiking a fever.

“Bad” behavior in kids is often a symptom of a medical problem. We’ve already talked about feeding and sleep, but this is also true of potty training lapses.

Encopresis - Wikipedia

One of our kids went through that particular problem, and now that I am on the other side of it, it horrifies me to realize how many parents who have kids with encopresis are probably treating it as the kid being “bad” (which is only going to make it worse) or not realizing that it’s a problem with a large medical dimension, and that their pediatrician needs to be brought on board to deal with it. (I fear that one of my siblings probably had untreated encopresis in early elementary school.) When my kid had her first doctor visit for it after a weekend of constant soiling, they did an x-ray and the doctor said that it was not the worst he’d ever seen–some kids wind up with blockages like footballs.

And that’s another thing–it’s very important to have a strong working relationship with your pediatrician. I know when I was a new mom that I thought of pediatrician’s visits as some sort of test for me as a mom, which meant that I was less likely to turn to the pediatrician than I am today and more likely to minimize problems. It’s important to think of it as working with the pediatrician. (And if you don’t have that kind of relationship with the pediatrician, get a new one.)