As a new mother, I have read a lot of books, posts, articles, joined a lot of groups on Facebook, attended online events organized by parenting experts or psychologists, joined parenting programs and what not.
The topics were various and all baby related: breastfeeding, weaning the baby, baby’s development, regular check-ups, sleep, etc and now parenting and potty training ( both ongoing).
In all this research, one thing is for sure and everybody seemed to agree on: your baby is unique. And I would add to this that your relationship with your baby is unique, too. This finding put my mind at ease, otherwise all this information that I came across, some educated, other not so much, would have made me think that I am so in the wrong with raising my child.
When you become a mother, everything changes in the way you think, the way you see things, and no, nothing prepares us for this. We know nothing, in reality, just like our mothers didn’t know and their mothers before them.
What we do have these days is a lot of access to information, as opposed to our parents who mostly had their mothers and grannies to guide them. However, we pretty much lost the guidance and presence of our mothers and grannies or it is outdated.
What I learned is that all this information, needs to be filtered a lot and aligned with the reality, in tune with you and your child. There are a lot of mothers who give their own example, who don’t have any problem with anything and tell you about it( which I don’t believe it is true), and there are others who struggle at every step.
Here are what I consider the 10 most important things I learned from all this reading and research:
- Your motherly instincts are fine, trust them. All the do’s and don’ts from books, internet or family are guidelines. Yes, there are studies, with pros and cons for how to appropriately raise and educate your child and if we could implement all of it and it would work, we would have ourselves a machine, not a baby anymore
- There is you, baby and most times the father of the baby. The rest of the people are others and what they deem as important or must have shouldn’t necessarily be the same for you. If another mother tells you that you should do it that way and you don’t feel it is right, do it as you feel right.
- Show your child you love them no matter what. Failure/mistake is just another opportunity to learn
- Expose your child to other people, make the trip to visit relatives, friends, take him to a puppet show. Invite people to come over, take him to the park to see other children, explore new experiences every opportunity you get (age appropriate, of course), go hiking, it’s important for his social skills and his development.
- If you don’t feel comfortable putting baby to sleep early on in his room (before 6 months or 1 year), don’t do it. If you feel it is comfortable to co-sleep or bed-share, do it, as long as you and your partner are comfortable with this.
- Praise your child’s efforts, not the outcome and ask if they are happy/satisfied with what they achieved, how did they think to do something the way they did. It will pay off in the long run.
- Spend as much time as you can with your child, don’t get hooked on cleaning the house or cooking, they are not a long term investment, your child is.
- Find time for yourself, don’t dedicate your whole life to the child. There is you and there is the child, of course he often takes precedence, but not all the time. So, allow yourself to do things you used to enjoy doing before you were pregnant or acquire new skills and hobbies.
- Lead by example, if it is food, hygiene, sleep, communication with other people, socialization, expressing emotions, reactions, education, beliefs and so on. Show your child what you want to see in them.
- Tell your child the truth at all times. Children grow and start understanding your words pretty early in life, choose to tell them the truth. In the long run, this will be a good exercise for you.