But when it gets right down to it, Lindsay spends more time alone with Meredith than I do…about 40 hours a week more on average.  On top of that, she has built in pacifiers and food sources and most likely there’s some mommy magic mixed in there too.  

I’ve never had a problem when she goes out.  She was gone for most of that 3 hours and Meredith didn’t spend the entire time screaming.  In fact, we had a good time playing with some stuffed animals, in the bath and having a walk together.  But for whatever reason, no matter how many times I look after her alone, I still feel anxious about it beforehand and even during.  What if she hurts herself and I can’t make her feel better.  What if she gets hungry and wants milk and won’t try anything else, etc…

I don’t think my feelings are all that unusual.  I’d guess that most fathers feel the same way, especially fathers that are employed full time while the mother stays at home.  It got me wondering about why I feel this way.  To be honest, I have more experience with kids and young babies than Lindsay does.  I grew up in a foster home (No, i wasn’t in foster care) and we had young kids and babies in and out of my house all the time.  I have two (well almost two) adopted brothers that came into my life when I was already an adult.  Obviously I wasn’t the primary care giver, but I babysat reasonably frequently and I was involved in their care at least part of the time.  

So what about other fathers?  If I feel this insecure and anxious about being alone with my daughter after all the experience I’ve had in my life, how much worse must it be for guys who’ve never done this before.  So to all the fathersout there, try not to worry too much, it’ll get better…

Related posts:

1. Sleep Training Guide for the Infant
2. Go with the flow…
3. A different perspective…

When you read news articles/editorials in the paper (or more and more for me at least Digg), you often hear about Consensus.  Maybe its just a consensus of experts (another ambiguous and entirely useless term since an expert could mean anything), or a more specific consensus such as a scientific consensus.  Often these mythical beings of untold knowledge and power are used to lend weight to a specific argument, or more likely as a signal for the reader that they can turn off their brain and just soak in the obvious truths that the author has decided to share.

A specific example is also one of my biggest annoyances in the world today.  The Scientific Consensus on Man Made (anthropogenic) Global Warming.  Sounds pretty impressive I admit, over 2300+ “experts” (there’s that word again) from around the world apparently agree that humans are warming up the planet.  Not that all 2300+ of those scientists actually agree on the conclusions, they just contributed to an assessment report that nobody actually got to see.  This was then “summarized” (aka heavily edited) to create a second much much shorter document without all that silly science stuff and then released to the public as the IPCC Assessment reports summary for policy makers.  Oh yeah, I guess now they’re calling it Climate Change because the global warming thing didn’t happen like predicted…

While I could probably talk and argue for days about this subject specifically (for awhile it was close to an obsession of mine), the point of this post isn’t to debate that theory itself, but to use it as an example of how people stop thinking as soon as someone (or in this case a group of people) with a perceived expertise on a subject divulges a “truth”.  This ties in somewhat to my previous post on paint-by-number parenting.  Some dude writes a book and calls himself a child/parenting expert and for some reason the readers suspend their inherent skepticism (something I think is very important) and take it all at face value.  They may not agree with everything necessarily, but they don’t call BULLSHIT when they should.

My example would be Dr. Richard Ferber (of the famed Ferber method…aka crying it out).  If people had read this dudes research (if you could call it that) and treated him as a stupid and potentially dangerous psychopath instead of as an authority on pediatric sleep disorders (if that isn’t an oxymoron I don’t know what is) maybe we wouldn’t have parents across North America teaching their young babies that nobody is going to come no matter how long or hard they cry.  I don’t care if he has an MD, that’s nothing special.  I’m pretty sure I could have gotten one if I had tried.  So what makes this guy an expert?  As far as I can tell he gave himself that label and nobody questioned him.

This isn’t an isolated event.  If I could jump back to my favorite subject for a minute, we can talk about one of my least favorite people, Al Gore.  Best known for being the VP and an almost president of the USA as well as his joke of a movie (I refuse to call it a documentary) “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore portrays himself as an expert on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  What are his qualifications for this role?  He had a class once in college with a professor that was passionate about the subject.  Otherwise everything is self righteousness and conviction (and a little used car salesman thrown in).  What earthshaking scientific evidence did his movie show that proved beyond a doubt that humans are the single greatest cause of global warming?  A graph that was poorly explained and WASN’T EVEN ACCURATE, as well as a cute graphic of a polar bear sitting on a melting iceberg (incidentally also inaccurate).  And what was his reward for all this self sacrificing work for the good of all mankind?  A Nobel peace prize (which happens to have a multi-million dollar financial component) and further millions in monetary rewards for his talks around the world, books deals and investment in carbon credit companies and role as an advisor to corporations internationally and in the US.  Hmm, sounds pretty selfless doesn’t it (some estimates indicate he’s made over 100 million directly related to Global Warming)?  Not only that, but the jerk doesn’t even practice what he preaches.  His energy bill is over 20 TIMES that of the average US citizen.

So what was the point of all of this?  If we want to move forward as individuals and as a society, people need to stop acting like lemmings and think for themselves.  This starts at home with their parenting, but extends to all parts of life.  Don’t follow the trends just because someone tells you to.  Don’t believe everything you read just because someone labels themselves an expert.  And for Gaia’s sake, don’t believe what you read in a newspaper because those guys are full of shit 9 times out of 10.

Related posts:

1. Go with the flow…
2. Green Meme Blogger #1

My problem with this is when that formula based parenting is carried on indefinitly.  Its pretty common to find parents who do things a specific way because thats what they read or how they were parented.  They often think that thats just how you parent.  A perfect example is the “crying it out method”.  Why do parents choose to do this?  Is it because they feel good hearing their little babies screaming for hours on end?  While I’m sure there are some heartless people somewhere, most of us feel our babies crying in our bones and it isn’t fun.  These people follow this “method”, and I use that term very very very loosely, because thats what they were told you were supposed to do.  They either read it in a book, heard it from a relative, from a parenting class or whatever and not knowing better believe thats how it is.

First of all, there is no right way of doing everything.  Even in science, 9 times out of 10 you talk about theories, not facts.  Why?  Because there’s always the chance you’ll eventually be proved wrong.  Einsteins THEORY of relativity.  Newton’s THEORY of gravity.  The THEORY of global warming (a personal pet peeve but I might go into that some day when something really pisses me off).  There are very few hard facts in life.  Even something as simple as 1 + 1 = 2 is only true most of the time, not all of the time.  So why do parents think there is a single right way of parenting?  Far as I can tell, kids aren’t like computers.  Giving them the same input won’t equal the same output.

Second problem, parents aren’t trying to figure out what is right themselves, instead they want someone (or something) to tell them what to do.  Parenting books, while a good resource, aren’t the be all and end all of parenting.  Like anything else, a book is the opinion of the author, and only as good as that authors experiences and research.  They are also a business which is why you find all sorts of “methods” in parenting.  Anything that might make some money has probably been written about, both good and amazingly bad.

As the title of this post indicates, parenting requires you to go with the flow.  You can’t decide before hand how to handle situations.  You can talk about it and try and plan things out a little in advance, but life has a way of screwing up your plans (be they travel plans or parenting plans).  Each situation that comes up needs to be handled independantly from the rest.  This is where I probably differ from most parenting styles or guides.  Consistency is trumpeted as THE MOST important thing you can do.  Some examples:

• If you say no, follow through NO MATTER WHAT! (Funny how this rarely is expressed as if you say yes, follow through no matter what).
• If you don’t want them to have sugar, never let them have sugar
• If bedtime is 7pm, bedtime is always 7pm.

The list could go on forever.  But what parents don’t generally ask themselves is why.  They also never put themselves in the kids shoes.  Do you never change your mind about your own decisions?  do you never eat something that isn’t healthy?  Do you always go to bed exactly at the same time?  Of course not, so why do kids have to?

If you take each situation as an individual event, you can remain consistent overall while still allowing you to change your mind between events.  Maybe they give you a good reason why saying no doesn’t make sense.  Most parents will say “Too bad, I already said no” no matter what the kid has to say.  Maybe they had a nap and aren’t tired at bedtime.  What harm could it possibly do to let them stay up later?  I’m pretty sure most kids have enough sense to go to sleep when they’re tired, unlike a lot of adults I could name.

Not only does this sound more like how we treat ourselves and other adults, it’s also much easier to remain consistent.  If the kid knows that you’ll give them the answer you think best each time, then they’ll more likely accept it if you give them different answers each time.  They might question it (heaven forbid) but assuming you have a good reason for your answer that shouldn’t be a problem.  On top of that, you won’t have to worry about them pulling the “Mom said it was ok/Dad said it was ok” trick, or just choosing the parent most likely to give the best answer.  You also don’t need to try and remember what you said last time, because it doesn’t matter anymore.

The only thing that matters is the here and now, which is how it should be.

Related posts:

1. Dog-Friendly Dog Training
2. The mythical consensus…
3. Consensual Living

I’m not positive how often I’ll be posting, not because of a lack in interest, but because I have lots of other things on the go and my memory is like a sieve.  But hopefully I can round out this discussion about how we live and how we parent.

Another note, if you comment please don’t expect an answer.  I’m not very good at keeping track of what I do and likely anything I post will be passing in nature.  I may look at comments, but I’m just as likely to forget I ever posted.

In any case, you’ll probably find me interjecting my own little bits whenever I can.  Starting with this:

Probably one of my biggest pet peeves is the fact that society in general has a very low opinion of guys and their skills at things like parenting and household chores.  Commercials are a perfect example.  A food commercial where the guy is cooking is probably an advertisment for KFC or microwavable dinners or maybe two college guys cooking KD on a heater vent while staring at the half naked chicks walking by.  Commercials about cleaning the house?  The only guy you’ll see is Mr Clean who looks more like the Genie from Aladdin (only not blue) than anybody you’d find walking down the street.  Apparently we all just floated from Mom’s cooking and cleaning to getting married and having a wife to cook and clean with nothing in between.

There may be some men that are just cruising along doing nothing (shame on them) but there are just as many of us putting in our time and effort to make the house run as smoothly as possible and getting marginalized anyway.  If I hear one more person say something like “Oh, its so nice to see a father holding the baby”, I might snap and do something unfortunate…

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Chores
2. Father Anxiety…