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Iheartcoffee
Guest
Caregivers need to be able to have a chance to rest themselves, and there are some babies that will exploit the attention they get from having absolutely every noise responded to. Obviously, they aren’t knowingly exploiting anyone with any kind of bad intention since they are just babies, but nevertheless, there are babies that catch on to the idea that if they so much as fart loudly they are smothered with attention. Who doesn’t love attention? Therefore, a lot of them end up being trained to not know anything but having every whim attended to. They end up not learning to just chill out for a second and deal with being a little hungry or annoyed for a couple of minutes while mom gets a second to go to the bathroom or finish a task. The world doesn’t end when you don’t get your way, but most young children aren’t taught this because moms are told they are abusers if they don’t attend to every whim.
Of course I don’t advocate neglect, but I know of moms that respond to every single thing their child does and I see this cycle of a continuously fussy baby and exhausted, frazzled parents. The baby can’t handle anything being less than perfect because it has never had a chance to deal with less than perfect. Meanwhile, the parents are about to die because they can’t get anything done and they are exhausted. Someone finally convinces them that baby won’t be scarred for life if they set him or her in the crib for 10 minutes and give themselves a second to drink a cup of coffee, take a break, and avoid their impending nervous breakdown. The seemingly miraculous change that occurs when they start to let the child cry for more than 30 seconds changes their lives. They baby gets annoyed with something, learns that life goes on, and stops crying…
As a society we need to get over these parenting guilt trips. I ceased supporting a rather well-known NFP group because they suggested that suicide in later years may lead back to mothers not doting on their children enough and some repressed trauma because mother didn’t use attachment parenting and the child cried without immediately getting help for his or her needs. I was floored by their claims of mothers doing anything besides attachment parenting being some kind of abuser. I don’t know how this trend got started of calling women bad mothers if a child doesn’t have every single whimper obsessively attended to. It sounds a lot like the old and debunked Freudian believers that claimed things like autism were caused by “refrigerator mothers”. I have literally seem women on parenting threads on things like facebook seriously question if their child’s mental or attachment problems may be due to the fact that they didn’t always get to spend every moment with them. This mom-shaming and the idea that babies must always have their way, even at the expense of everyone else seems to be coming from a lot of late Gen-X and early Gen-Y children that grew up hearing that they are always winners. they “deserve” everything they have ever wanted, and they will never fail at anything.
And for the record, I’m Gen-Y so I feel completely competent to call out my generation for the problems caused by this “I’m always a winner and I always need exactly what I want” mentality.
Of course I don’t advocate neglect, but I know of moms that respond to every single thing their child does and I see this cycle of a continuously fussy baby and exhausted, frazzled parents. The baby can’t handle anything being less than perfect because it has never had a chance to deal with less than perfect. Meanwhile, the parents are about to die because they can’t get anything done and they are exhausted. Someone finally convinces them that baby won’t be scarred for life if they set him or her in the crib for 10 minutes and give themselves a second to drink a cup of coffee, take a break, and avoid their impending nervous breakdown. The seemingly miraculous change that occurs when they start to let the child cry for more than 30 seconds changes their lives. They baby gets annoyed with something, learns that life goes on, and stops crying…
As a society we need to get over these parenting guilt trips. I ceased supporting a rather well-known NFP group because they suggested that suicide in later years may lead back to mothers not doting on their children enough and some repressed trauma because mother didn’t use attachment parenting and the child cried without immediately getting help for his or her needs. I was floored by their claims of mothers doing anything besides attachment parenting being some kind of abuser. I don’t know how this trend got started of calling women bad mothers if a child doesn’t have every single whimper obsessively attended to. It sounds a lot like the old and debunked Freudian believers that claimed things like autism were caused by “refrigerator mothers”. I have literally seem women on parenting threads on things like facebook seriously question if their child’s mental or attachment problems may be due to the fact that they didn’t always get to spend every moment with them. This mom-shaming and the idea that babies must always have their way, even at the expense of everyone else seems to be coming from a lot of late Gen-X and early Gen-Y children that grew up hearing that they are always winners. they “deserve” everything they have ever wanted, and they will never fail at anything.
And for the record, I’m Gen-Y so I feel completely competent to call out my generation for the problems caused by this “I’m always a winner and I always need exactly what I want” mentality.