To be sick of the perfect modern parent brigade!?

[Toofondofcake]

If I get a flaming here oh well but I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way.

I'm sick of hearing other women/parents lecturing others on parenting techniques in a properly pretentious and judgey way. It always seems to be something like "we don't discipline, putting your child in timeout is abuse". Or "my child Star only wears gender neutral clothing as I won't impose society's gender constructs on them" or "clothes don't matters my 8 year old can wear whatever she likes".

I respect other people parent in very different ways but I can't stand seeing people preaching parenting lectures at others. I just want to scream " your DAUGHTER isn't spirited She's a bully! And letting her wear her dance leotard to the park isn't progressive and changing society, it's October and it's freezing and inappropriate".

Sorry for ranting. This is my scream into a pillow place.

cath my point is that care should be in place as soon as baby arrives. Complete lockdown with mum calling the shots is infinitely preferable to open house, keeping up appearances, and putting health (and future fertility) at risk. Prevention of infection is better than being in hospital. Of course not every mother who runs the risk of straining herself by keeping up appearances will get ill but why the fuck would you ask anyone you care about to run that gauntlet when there's an alternative.

New mums should not be expected to run around after other people making tea. They should be recognised as the second most vulnerable person in the room after the baby.

I don't want my daughters to grow up in a world where they give birth in between scrubbing the loos and making tea. It takes time to recover from giving birth and newborn babies - if breastfed - mostly need their mother's undivided attention.

If anything

With my last few children we put the house on lockdown, I had home births and the house went on shut down. Not because I am s

hoddtastic Basil Bernstein identified elaborated and restricted codes in the 1970s.
www.doceo.co.uk/background/language_codes.htm

But having it all can be detrimental to a womans well being im not saying women are delicate flowers but the pressure of coping can be immense for new mothers

I don't know anyone in real life who goes on about parenting to other people. Everyone seems to do what works for them/their child and lets others do what works for them.
We are quite routine based with ds eg always stick to the same bedtime, meal times etc because that works for him. We also probably seem helicopterish but again that is what he needs.

sorry dropped my phone and pressed post

I don't want my daughters to grow up in a world where they give birth in between scrubbing the loos and making tea. It takes time to recover from giving birth and newborn babies - if breastfed - mostly need their mother's undivided attention.

If anything giving birth inbetween scrubbing the loo and making tea smacks more of martyrdom than having a lockdown at home.

With my last few children we put the house on lockdown, I had home births and the house went on shut down. Not because I am special snowflake but because we have wanted to establish breastfeeding, I wanted to recover and we also wanted our family unit to bond before inviting others in. To be honest I also like the idea of a few weeks of watching Netflix and cuddling a baby.

I don't know why we can't just accept and even respect each other's choices rather than belittling them.

I became a stay at home mum because I wanted to escape the pressure of a career, not because I wanted another one. I know quite a few women who wanted to do similar.

However I am used to feeling successful in a career. I am no Superwoman but did well at my chosen careers and I guess I wanted to do equally as well at parenting - if not better. In fact to be honest I am not that career driven, I wanted to be a better parent than I was a manager, buyer or teacher and so I tried harder. In a world where many are let down by their parents surely we want people to try hard.

I am very uncomfortable with the idea that things were better when mothers were poorly educated and just did what their mums told them

Smacks of '[young] women, know your place'

I'm 47 and educated to degree level. My kids are grown up. I find it quite bizarre that I'm considered to be from some kind of 'dark ages' where women were denied an education.

Whoever said 'it's important to give children choices' is right but (and it is a huge one) they have to be age appropriate choices. I don't believe in giving a 5 year old all the choices about what is for tea/whether you get to go to the shops etc. It's utter nonsense to put that kind of pressure on a child. You're the adult so be a parent. You choose what is healthy for them to eat. If you need to go out, you ask them to get their shoes on because it's time to go out. I don't get this great need to make everything into some kind of drama where a child calls the shots. They can do that when they are grown up.

I don't think it was all that awful Mrs it was just beans on toast, I think?

She said she felt a bit sore, and a bit tired, but that was all.

you I'm 46...

Batteries, assuming you are referring to my posts, you are taking some of what I have said wildly out of context!
I have never said - nor would I - that things were better when women were poorly educated, nor have I said that women should do what their mothers tell them.
What I have said is that because women are better educated and usually have a career before children, there us a tendancy to view the children as a 'project' with deliverables and competition.
Regarding doing as you are told, I have never said that older people are always right, but I do object to the sneering way they are viewed, as if this generation were the first to have babies.
When this generation of babies has their babies, slings, co-sleeping et al will most probably be discredited. How do today's mums think they will feel to be mocked by their daughters for advocating technique s that worked well for them?

Why couldn't somebody else make the beans on toast?

How do today's mums think they will feel to be mocked by their daughters for advocating technique s that worked well for them?

Aside from on MN I don't think that most mothers mock or sneer at many parenting choices - even if we choose to do something very different.

We cosleep and mostly use slings- there was no grand plan it just turned out that way - I suspect that is the way it works for most people. You fall into doing something, it works for you and you stick with it. I have never mocked a parent who chooses to put their child to bed in a nursery or uses a pram.

In fact in the past I have made polar opposite parenting decisions so mocking those decisions would be odd. Again I suspect that lots of us with larger families or bigger age gaps have tried different parenting approaches.

I don't know why people want to create divides amongst women where they don't really exist.

I find it funny that 'gentle parenting' is associated with smuggery as it's quite the opposite with me. I'd love to be the mum who can just stand there hands on hips and count to ten etc while my kids rush around trying to get ready. I have to be super gentle with DD and it always mortifies me in public not to be able to appear more assertive and like a 'proper' mum who has kids that listen to her and behave. But I have to do it or a godawful meltdown would occur. Anyway, YMMV...

Does your dd have additional needs?

Philo because she didn't need them to, I think?

I had 2 sections, and within a day or two of both, I was walking (albeit carefully) and was fine to make a cup of tea, or some toast.

I think a lot of this is down to personality.

I have never liked 'being looked after' apparently even as a little girl, if I was ill, I just wanted to be left to sleep it off. I didn't like being mothered.

To this day, I do not ever want sympathy or lots of attention from people, if something is wrong. I feel uncomfortable to have people fuss around me.

It horses for courses, I guess.

You are a much stronger woman than me Maqueen, I can't imagine doing that after a C section. I have had fairly trouble free labours with most of mine and some of them at home. I don't think I did very much after mine for at least a week. I like the feeling of normality of giving birth at home and in that sense of things getting on with it but would not expect to do chores or cooking. For my normality is lying on the sofa, eating chocolate and cuddling a baby.

I imagine that my husband would want to make me ( or whoever needed a snack) something to eat rather than expecting me to do it just after giving birth. I guess it is different if you are on your own but if somebody is there to help surely just after giving birth is the time to do it.

I could be wrong but I thought that in the past women stayed in hospital longer after giving birth and there was much more emphasis on recuperation- to the extreme that babies were taken away to nurseries. I don't know where I have that information from though. Of course if you have a home birth it is irrelevant anyway.

I don't think that recovering from giving birth is about needing attention! Of course some people are more hardy but I would like to think that very few women have to cook dinner just after giving birth.

Oh, I certainly didn't cook

I think I was lucky after my sections as I just wasn't all that uncomfortable after about 48 hours. My painkillers worked fine.

And, I am just the last person to want to stay on the sofa all day. I like to be up, and doing as a rule.

Youthecat I think it was me. And my whole paragraph was:

Personally I think it's important to give kids choices. It's also important for kids to see grown ups making sensible decisions. It's about prioritising. Acting differently in different environments is also of itself an important life skill to model.

My point was it's ridiculous for people to take one aspect of my behaviour and exaggerate it and assume that's the way I always parent. You give some choices, you also model good decision making. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. I can't help but think it's more common for people to make assumptions about other people's parenting than it is that there are lots of wildly extreme parents who never make their own decisions and leave it all up to the kids.

Beans
I'm really glad you found my comments helpful.
Remember all the following::
Dream feed = waking the baby up for a feed before the parents go to sleep. Has been done since the beginning of time.

Batteries, you're probably right. Sadly I know way too many infant aged children who are given decisions they are not equipped to deal with.

Sorry, posted too soon.
There's loads of °labelling"
Self soothing = going to sleep
Blw = chucking food on the high chair tray and thinking that no generation has ever done this method of feeding before and actually spending money on books telling you how to do do the said food chucking