The View

Sometimes it is hard to remember that attachment parenting and grace-based discipline are in the minority of parenting decisions.  I guess, and this is probably true of most any ideology, that when you really believe in something, it only makes 'sense' to you.  Like, answering Hoss' cries makes sense to me because I want him to trust me.  Or allowing him a lot of freedom so he can build the ability to think critically makes sense to me.


But please don't get me wrong:  I'm not trying to be some elitist here.


My wife and I would have been in the majority save for the grace of God.  I had always thought that I would spank my children.  Now, looking back, I see that the driving force for that idea for me was my ego.  It was really just my desire to have children that 'respected' me.  I think what I really meant by 'respected' at that time was 'acted well so other people would see that I'm a good parent'.  


Thankfully God steered us out of that arena of thought and into this different world of parenting.  It's great to find other people to talk about this with, when we can find them.  That was one of the driving reasons for starting this blog.  I wanted to network with other dads who are taking this same path of parenting and see how they view it.  


All that being said, we sometimes have the rude awakenings that we may not be alone in the vastness of this Interneted world, but we are pretty alone in real life.  And when it comes to those you really love and respect and what they think of your parenting decisions...well, let's just say that is part of this 'rude awakening':


A close person to us recently let my wife know that we are messing up our son, essentially.  I won't bore you with the details, as they are the prevelant view these days: 'we don't control him', 'we don't have structure for him', 'he rules the house'


And I can see how they would say that.  We do leave a person's home around 7:00 - 8:00 to ensure Hoss is in bed at his usual time.  We'll leave earlier if the circumstances that day warrant it (if he's teething or just had a rough day).  It just makes sense to me because

1. We are his caretakers.  We know what is best for him right now and we have to deal with poor decision-making on our part, which leads to
2. We don't fight battles we don't need to (in the commonly accepted language of parenting these days)!  And I don't like using this analogy, because parenting doesn't need to be a battle to begin with.  We really can make life easier for everyone if we just listen to our son's needs and respond accordingly!

But this person only sees us as letting him run roughshod over our freedoms as parents.  I just want to scream and say:

'Newsflash!  Parenting is hard!  Just because everyone else is taking the 'easier' way now, doesn't mean that's the best way for us to raise our children!  Back off!'

There's the rub, though: what makes sense to us isn't going to make sense to others.  Shoot, if you had told me a couple years ago how we'd be living now, I wouldn't believe you.  I think there are probably some reading this who are in that boat.  Maybe you don't think co-sleeping, breast feeding, no punitive punishing is too hard or ridiculous.  And in all fairness, I can't blame you.  In our current popular world view, it is ridiculous.  It's ridiculous to make investments in something you won't see a return on for many years yet.  It's ridiculous to take the harder way of life for what seems like no apparent, better reason.

But I'm choosing ridiculousness over easy any day of the week.