Tiny Grass

I enjoy sleeping with my kids. Sometimes I see their faces in the moonlight, sleeping peacefully and feel very fortunate and lucky that they are my little ones. Not that I wouldn’t mind some extra room, but my ideal solution would be a king-size bed. Our kids can leave the bed when they’re ready, and we see that happening with M. We’ve talked about it but didn’t push it much since pushing doesn’t work with him. He likes the idea of his own room, especially since it’s some place that he can go to avoid being disturbed by little sis. And he told Trish yesterday that on occasion my snoring wakes him up, and he looked forward to sleeping in his own room.

I don’t believe that he’ll switch right away, but I do think it will happen. We may have to transition by reading him to sleep and such. But the one thing we won’t do is reject him and make a big thing out of it. He’s already shown us before that he readily takes to something when *he* is comfortable with it, and trying to make something happen that he’s not inclined towards does nothing positive for us or him.

This all came to mind thanks to the New York Times and a bunch of idiots who responded. Initially the idiots riled me up and pissed me off with their crap about disciplining kids, but ultimately I was saddened by a legion of parents who seem more intent on discipline and behavior than treating their children like human beings. There are a number of caring and thoughtful responses but those are for the most part drowned out by people trumpeting discipline.

The article does warrant that response to an extent, but I read the responses before reading the article thanks to how the NYT had set up its links. The article itself is not as much about co-sleeping and should be more accurately titled Half-Assed Parents Who Co-Sleep, Complain About It and Can Afford ‘Sleep Consultants’ for $200/hr. I suppose it’s to be expected - they give co-sleeping a bad name just like tyrants and dictators give humans a bad name.

But so many of the responses to the article were just plain sad. And the vast majority of them didn’t address one basic fact about human beings: we’re all different. We don’t act or respond in identical, predescribed ways. Several times in public I’ve seen a parent push away an obviously clingy child, and not once did it ‘work.’ Before someone works on ‘disciplining’ their kids, they need to discipline themselves - for parenting and the repetition involved when teaching children.

One of the majority responded that ‘discipline begins on day one.’ Your relationship with your child begins on day one. Would you rather build a strong bond with your child or push them away as soon as possible? Do you want them to cry and learn that you will not always respond to their needs? Do you want to build a strong relationship with them so that as teenagers they will still consider you an important part of their life?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under attachment parenting, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.