A couple of days ago I told you how difficult it can be to follow a philosophy of parenting with attachment, or respectful parenting, when you have three or more children, because of the lack of time for everyone and how intense they can be Children, our patience can end up hanging by a thread in more than one moment.
I do not mean by that that in my personal case the educational style in which I feel comfortable has become outdated, or that I have stopped trusting him, but I have noticed that there are many couples who have made a flag of Raising with attachment while your child was a baby who later, growing and changing things, have changed their way of educating and ended up doing many of the things they criticized. Today I want to talk about it, about when the expiration date arrives with the attachment.
Repeat, Armando, are there people whose education mode expires?
So thats it. I have been raising my children for seven years in the best way I know and in the way I think is best. This mode is what could be defined as attachment breeding, respectful upbringing or natural upbringing, which would become something like respecting the child and his times, trying to understand why he does the things he does and treating him with the same respect that you would like to have received when you were a child and with the same respect What do you want me to have for you as a father?
Within that respect is giving him what you think he needs at all times, at all levels: breastfeeding (the mother, of course), for being the best possible food and for being much more, spending a lot of time with him, talking, playing with him, take him in his arms when he needs it and / or when you need it, sleep with him if he sleeps better, use the dialogue to solve the problems, serve as an example to learn with us, let them know that they are important to us and let them know feel the same way and, in short, make them partakers of our lives, sharing them together, because at birth a child parents stop being a couple and become a family.
In these seven years I have met many couples who have taken the road more or less along with us (Miriam and I) and have even shared hours of talks and laughter, commenting on how well we are doing and how hard it is sometimes Raising in a way that, despite looking the best for babies and children, causes so much conflict.
I don't know why, or maybe I do, many of the people I've met in person, or sometimes I've only met virtually, because the network is very lively and sometimes you share more with the "strangers" than with those of your direct environment, they have ended up getting out of the car, getting out, and have come to do things that I can't understand.
People who have talked about their lactations and how much they have fought for them and who have ended up doing terribly traumatic weaning for their children, people who have put their children's welfare before theirs when they were babies and who have defended their position of not carrying to the children to the nursery by cape and sword and who have ended up taking them to "rest", people who have talked about how important it is to spend a lot of time with them and who have eventually done thousands of things without them , things in which they could be present (such as traveling, for example), people who talked about how well they slept with their children and who have ended up not accepting that once they are in their bed they can return to the big bed or people that they did not allow anyone to talk about awards or punishments and that they have ended up rewarding and punishing, just like those they criticized. They are just concrete examples, some of which I have seen and lived.
Motherhood and fatherhood can become very intense
Most people could be considered "from the heap" in most things we do. Some things are better for us, others worse, but most of us do not achieve excellence in any project we carry out. Maternity (p) is a double-edged sword in this sense, because you can feel excellent and end up spending more energy on you and your personal struggle than on your son (now I will explain myself, or try).
We are at a transition point, leaving behind the authoritarian style with which we were educated and beginning to embrace a much more respectful and democratic one, and the people who embrace it, those who educate their children according to the principles of the theory of attachment, they see immediately that their babies are calmer, cry less, are happier and, consequently, parents are too.
They respect the needs of their babies and that means that most of them breastfeed on demand, end up collecting, carrying them in backpacks and scarves for pleasure or to avoid the cries of the stroller and doing several things that many people in the environment disapprove of. Mothers and mother-in-law who tell you that you take it too much in your arms, pediatricians and nurses who tell you that you are breastfeeding, that you already have to change it for the bottle, people who call you soft for letting you sleep in your bed and Mothers who explain how good it would be for your son to take him to the nursery to socialize.
This makes educating your child becomes very intense, something you must defend, a battle with everyone that makes you close and reject many relationships because you are not able to understand that they do so differently with their children ... that they leave them in the nursery and tell you that of "and what lame in the afternoon, and so I take a nap ", let them cry at night because" he woke up twice and go nights ... ", when yours wakes up more, tell you that" in the end I had to hit , that if not, there is no way ", etc.
Motherhood, fatherhood, ends up being a crusade, a kind of continuous battle. Your son is the first thing for you, and you defend your way of doing it to infinity and beyond, facing others, perhaps, feeling powerful, knowing a truth that others do not want to see, wanting to spread to the four winds that there is another way of doing things and looking for other people who share the same concerns, to explain how great it is to be a mother and father and at the same time how different people can do it, that does not seem to want to open their eyes.
Then this being a mother or father transforms you, and there, in the fight to defend something that you think you do very well, you finally feel that in this you do stand out, that you do reach excellence. The feeling also intensifies and becomes stronger because it is something that only a minority does. If everyone educated in the same way, if everyone did the same for their children, you would no longer stand out, you would no longer feel full. However, you want to get it, you want your message to reach others and you want that to happen, that the children of others receive the same as your son, that they are respected, that their parents change.
And it happens, it seems to happen, that some fathers and some mothers end up giving more importance to what being a father contributes to them than to what they contribute to their children. I've been to places and hangouts, family gatherings, weeks of breastfeeding and even once went to a meeting of homeschoolers (where we went to inform us) where I could see children playing semi-abandoned, some crying alone for having fallen or for not knowing where their parents are, others saved by me before another scare and others asking me for things ("I'm hungry," "I pee"), and I've become lonely as a father , seeing that even there, not even where parents are supposed to be for their children, are really, because some fathers or mothers are more concerned with meeting people or explaining how well they do it and how badly they do it. others, who end up worrying, as I say, more for themselves than for their children (Eye, I do not want to generalize, they are specific cases, but especially striking because you find them there where you do not expect).
The baby stops being and the differences in the treatment remit
Time passes and the baby, the one you give everything you have grows. Breastfeeding goes into the background, some wean themselves, others continue to breastfeed and others stop breastfeeding because the mother decides to quit. He starts to sleep better, he doesn't wake up so much anymore, and some stop schooling to go to sleep in their beds. Enter school and, although at the beginning the separation is tremendously hard, as the weeks and months go by you all get used to that new routine. Definitely, the baby is no longer, and many of the things that you did that differentiated you from the rest of the mothers and fathers (colecho, porteo, lactancia, having it at home when the rest takes them to the nursery) you don't do it anymore, and You're not that different from the rest. It's hard to stay in the gap, it's hard to continue at the bottom of the canyon because you're not so much anymore, your baby is now a child, he doesn't need you the same way and you don't have so many things to defend.
I think it's here, right here, the point at which for many parents raising it with attachment expires. Perhaps it is because, as I say, they have worried too much about doing something right, something that will heal their self-esteem, something in which they were excellent, and they have ended up leaving their son in the background. Growing up the child, not having so much to defend, they need new activities to fill them, new challenges, new things to do in which to try to stand out and new circles in which children have no place.
Perhaps it is because they have not realized that raising with attachment is not doing a series of things and that's it, it is not marking the shopping list (I collect, I breastfeed, I carry ... yes, I grow up with attachment ), but It is a philosophy of life, is to treat others as you want to be treated and is to respect in order to then demand respect, something you must do with adults and children, with your child, but also with the rest of society.
The point is that for many parents, parenting with attachment has an expiration date and realizing this reality, to me personally, has left me a little disappointed.
Disappointed?
Yes, because for me, as I say, it is not only a way to raise your children, but rather a way of understanding life and relating to others. Because I would have liked to be raised in another way and for that reason I try to do it differently with my children, because I do not like to see myself reflected in them nor do I like to see in me attitudes as a father that I killed as a son. Every day I try to be a better person to be a better father, and I try to be a better father to be a better person.
Then you stay with people, you meet other parents who you think are like you, you think that you will be at ease, that there you can be one more without having to give explanations and without having to see how they scream, hit or make their children cry ... and over time you realize that many are not as they claim to be. Do you think you are going to find someone who has also changed the way they see life and you take a click to realize that neither is he so respectful of others, nor is he really respectful of his children. Perhaps we drag so many lacks of our childhood as children that many are still trying to fill them, and you know, when you are still worried about "receiving," it is difficult to devote yourself to "giving."
Photos | Bring Back Words, Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis on Flickr On Babies and more | Natural parenting, free advice and how parents who grow up with attachment (I) and (II) evolve, but what does parenting with attachment have to do with giving homeopathy, not vaccinating and not giving milk ?, The eight “B ”Of parenting with attachment
