"Is my gut telling me to get my son a cell phone, or is that just indigestion?"
“Listen to your instincts.”
“Trust your gut.”
I believe in those words. As far as I’m concerned, tuning into your own personal parenting barometer is the only way to make choices you can feel confident about and commit to.
But trusting your gut is sometimes easier said than done, isn’t it? We can’t help but be affected by conflicting advice, a constant flow of “new” (or simply re-packaged) data, our own upbringing, our spouse’s upbringing, peer pressure, new parenting fads…sometimes it can be difficult to hear just what that gut is actually saying.
That’s why I wrote chapter 3 of The Happiest Mom: 10 Secrets To Enjoying Motherhood (it’ll be out soon-pre-order now!) The chapter is all about helping you figure out the difference between what other people say, what the experts say, and what you really think. It will help you figure out if your information-gathering style is working for you or just making you a mom basket case. And it’ll help you figure out how to tell the difference between real conflicts (like your spouse disagreeing with your stance on a parenting topic) and imagined conflicts (like some “expert” you don’t know or respect, and who doesn’t know you or your child, disagreeing with your stance on a parenting topic.)
Have you ever heard that 90% of the time, your first guess on a multiple-choice test question is right? I believe it’s similar with parenting: most of the time, the thing that feels the most right to us is the right thing to do-if we could only get out of our own way and make the choice confidently and with commitment. But too often I think we let imagined conflicts get between us and the decision we really want to make. We what other people might think, what some questionable new study suggests, or what might possibly go wrong down the road ahead of what we think, and it muddies up our decision-making. Then we feel guilty and uncertain no matter what we choose.
This week we’re going to be walking through the “trust your gut” process: first, locating our guts; second, identifying what they are trying to tell us; and then trusting them: tuning into the messages we’re sending ourselves, cutting through the outside noise by narrowing down outside input to those sources we trust and who matter to us, and identifying our own personal values so that we can make choices that support the lives we want to live and the lives we want our children to live. Our parenting choices are not about judging what anyone else does: it’s about doing what’s right for us, without allowing the judgment of others to cloud our vision.
I’d love you to put on your thinking caps and help me kick off the topic by sharing your experiences. I identified one real conflict (you versus your spouse) versus an imagined conflict (you versus some random expert) above, and it’s a topic I go into a lot of detail about in my book. Now I want to know: when you’re making a parenting decision, how do you decide whose input matters and whose doesn’t? Have you ever wasted time or energy worrying that somebody wouldn’t approve of your choice…and then realized later that that person’s opinion just didn’t matter?
So excited to explore this topic with you all this week!
By the way, have you “liked” The Happiest Mom on Facebook yet? I’m planning to beef up the page with space for more discussion and a place to discuss the book when it comes out, so if you’re a Facebook user please check it out!
So far, most of the things I’ve done as a mother I have felt confident about and not cared a bit about what other people might think. But, there’s one thing I can think of that I worried other parents would judge me for, and I just might get taken to task for admitting this here. *deep breath* I turned my daughter’s carseat forward facing at 16 months. I’ve read the articles and heard the testimonies about why that is such a horrible, no good thing to do. (I know, really I do. If you are itching to tell me again, you may want to just save your time.)
This will sound stupid, but it just felt unnatural to keep putting my toddler in backwards. She strongly desired to sit forward, and I strongly desired to see her, and well…We rarely drive outside of town and the whole “safer in a rear impact accident” argument doesn’t jive for me. What if I’m in a front impact accident? So, I turned her and car rides have been so much more peaceful since.
One of the best topics about parenting.
I’ve read a lot of books, because I’m a geek and want to know what “the experts” recommend, then because I’m an engineer and a very logic person, analyse the whole thing and the different opinions to come to a conclusion, my conclusion about what to do. I compare this with my upbringing and with what other moms I like do. And come to my conclusion that 70% of the time is not what my husband thinks we should do, but then I explain my logic about it, and we both try to get an agreement about the issue… sounds long the process, but I’m a natural geek so for me it’s ok.
Sometimes this doesn’t work, because babies, toddlers, kids, are human and don’t respond to equations and logic as I would like them to. When this happens and I freak out, I just trust my instincts, no matter if is good or wrong for others, what ever it is I believe nobody loves more our childs than us, so what we do, we do it with the best intentions, and no one has the right to criticise it. This is the only advice I tend to give other friends. And I try to do the same and not to judge other parents about anything, just try to learn from them either if I think I’d do the same or different than them.
I definitely give my husband the most leeway in influencing when I go against my parenting instincts. There are a few things I would not be swayed on no matter what (the two biggies? I was breastfeeding and I was not circumcising), but beyond those I have opinions and I generally research and think I’m coming to the right conclusion for myself but I am willing to listen and bend a bit more.
That said, I’ve found that for the most part we’ve ended up on the same page. He wishes I could go out and go for weekends away more often, so I am willing to go out here and there and started doing weekends away after a year, and he realized that going out before I am ready isn’t as fun for me and weekends away aren’t as great when I have to take a breastpump, so what is nice is that we generally respect each others give and take. I appreciate when he plans something where the baby can come along, and he appreciates when I’m willing to go out even if it’s not totally comfortable for me. It took a lot of give and take and experimenting and 3 babies to get us to that point, but really we work pretty well together overall.
I really struggle with worrying about what people think about our parenting. When I made counter-culture lifestyle decisions before we had our son (who is now 2 1/2), I felt that people were less judgmental because my husband and I were only “ruining” our own lives. But now that I have a child I have a hard time letting go of what people think. I still parent how I would otherwise, but I know that my worry affects my ability to make friends. This goes back to last week’s topic, but does anybody have any advice for me about how to respond when controversial issues (like sleep or discipline) come up during small talk with moms I don’t know? Any tips about how to be honest while not coming across as confrontational?
MY BFF requested 3 ultrasounds while pregnant, and the ob/gyn kept telling her everything was fine…baby was born and something just wasn’t right…the dr’s at ER (twice) told her he had pneumonia … Turned out the baby was actually born with hypoplastic right heart syndrome with 7 major defects — he basically had half a heart, and was pumping blood right into his lungs, essentially drowning in his own blood. Something that should have easily been identified at the first ultrasound.
A good reminder that any “expert”, including doctors, can be wrong, especially if your mommy instinct is telling you otherwise.