I have realized since having my son - well, really since I became pregnant with my son - how incredibly opinionated mothers, especially stay-at-home moms, can sometimes be about the countless choices we need to make for our children - as babies and as they grow older. I think it is great for mothers to be passionate about things that can help our children to succeed, to be happy and healthy and everything else, but do we have to go to the extent of condemning other mothers for making different choices than we have? I agree there are some things that are better for a baby's health than others, there are things we can do to help our babies to grow strong and healthy, there are ways we can encourage development, but to go to the extent of judging others for their choices as mothers is going too far! There is no one right answer for all the "right" things to do when raising a child. People make choices about how to raise their children based on their lives, their feelings, their thoughts, their research, and their children...it is not up to us to make them feel guilty for a choice they probably spent countless hours wondering about and researching and wrestling with and trying to decide upon.
If you are anything like me, every choice - from taking medication during pregnancy to not taking medication and suffering from dehydration and malnutrition, from whether to use a pacifier or not, from breastfeeding exclusively to bottle feeding breastmilk to formula feeding, from giving your child medications to help with issues to waiting to see if problems will them solve themselves to using more natural remedies, from circumcising to not circumcising male children, from using disposable diapers to using cloth diapers, from putting a baby in the nursery to hiring a babysitter to keeping him with you wherever you go, from demand-feeding to clock feeding, from going in to check on a baby whenever he cries to leaving him for a while to learn to self-soothe - is something you pour over reading material and discuss with others and ponder over and, eventually, make a choice on. I may not have made all the same choices as you have, and some of the choices I did make in the beginning have changed.
If I've learned anything from parenthood so far, it would be that what we decide on paper or in thought may not always end up being the best choice for our child. There have been a few times already in Roman's short life of three months that I have had small crises over the fact that what I had researched and decided upon and was so sure of and adamant about turned out to not be best for him, or in one case to be nearly impossible for him. It was extremely difficult to part with my initial decisions and to accept a new line of thought on those issues, and in some cases I have probably hesitated longer than I should have simply because I thought I knew what was best for him based on my research, not my analysis of what was happening in reality and how my baby was responding to certain choices I had made before he was even born.
Babies are unique. Families are unique. Mothers are unique. We should have the right to make a choice based on what we have learned and experienced and how we feel and how our lives run without having to answer to all the other moms out there. We should be able to make a choice and not feel we have to hide in shame over what we have chosen. As mothers we experience enough self-imposed guilt of our own; we don't need other mothers' help with that. We don't need someone to tell us after we have made a difficult decision concerning our children that we made the wrong choice. We make the choices that are best for us and best for our children. Many times we wish we could make a different decision, but life dictates differently, such as when a child is unable to breastfeed. Don't pile more guilt onto a woman who already feels inadequate as a mother. Don't cause more unjustified tears; Mothers, in general, do a good enough job of this on their own.
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