To ask if those early parenting decisions make a difference to later child mental health

[deliverdaniel]

My kids are teens now but when they were tiny all of the early parenting decisions/ choices seemed so high stakes. Attachment style parenting vs routines. Breastfeeding vs ff. Cosleeping vs Gina Ford style routines. Sleep training etc etc.

For those with older DC what "style" of parenting did you do (attachment style/ routines/ more of a mix etc) and what is your child's mental health / security/ confidence etc like now? I"m not looking for research studies or opinions about these styles in theory- just your personal experience.

YABU- I think my parenting style produced the promised outcome in my DC

YANBU- I don't think any of it made any difference

I think it’s a mix of their temperament / personality and your parenting style. Mine is still young but we’ve never left her to cry, breastfed until nearly 2 (when she chose to stop) and we haven’t done any ‘naughty step’ type discipline or shouted at her. She has generally been very happy going to nursery or spending time with my MIL. She doesn’t really tantrum, if she does it’s clearly related to being tired or hungry. She is rarely unwell. We are very much ‘pick your battles’ but I think that means that when we do enforce a boundary she knows to take it seriously, eg holding hands to cross the road.

I was home with my kids until they went to high school and even then I was only part time. I think just being there for them helped a lot. In many ways they were both sensitive, shy types and both experienced bullying for being a bit different but they never went on to struggle with their mental health and blossomed as older teens and young adults and always seemed to have a very secure core which I think was at least partly due to the home environment they had as young children.

This is really confirmation bias. Many children of mums who work full time also don't have mental health issues. Really, you don't know. No one knows.

I was just answering the question and I do think it made a difference as you say yourself you don't really know either.

Of course it's related ... no doubt whatsoever.

Some scans/tests showed the difference between a cared for baby picked up, and ones in orphanages (?) left to cry. Think it might have been in the Guardian, a long time before I was pregnant, but it was criticising the Super Nanny method if you want to google it. A course we had at work said babyhood issues/ACE can really affect people, just like children who had parents who cheated/abandoned them can have problems trusting and having good relationships.
But you can do everything right, and people can still have problems, and you can't always tell who had a good childhood and who didn't.

All of ours are autistic so all bets are off. The youngest is very much "only just" autistic and has much less care and social needs.

As youngsters they were all pretty resilient, confident kids, skipping into school etc. The youngest continues to be (he's now 18) but the others have now been broken by the education and social care system and have a range of mental health difficulties.

We coslept and attachment parented. In retrospect I'm happy with the decisions we made on this and feel it was the right way to parent our children.

I was always home with my children.All 3 have had severe MH difficulties, 2 tier 3. All have autism and ADHD though.

ACEs aside I have been told by several professionals that parenting has very little to do with it as teens have a huge amount of influence and people in their lives.Parents are actually a small part.

I think comparisons to for eg Romanian orphans etc are not really helpful here because obviously that is very extreme child neglect/ abuse. I'm really talking about the normal range of parenting approaches within a basically loving home where the chiild receives adequate basic care etc

I have read about that study before, and it's often used as an argument against sleep training/cry it out type methods. I don't really think, however, an accurate comparison can really be drawn with those children.

The children in those orphanages weren't 'parented' at all. The interaction they had with adults was the absolute bare minimum. Many never left their cots at all apart from feeding and nappy changing, neither of which was guaranteed either. There were some pretty horrific stories of hungry infants eating their own feces, and images of toddlers with their wrists tethered to the sides of the cot.

None of that really compares with anything advised by Gina Ford or Supernanny. Those were children without any level of loving adult contact at all. I suspect if parents care enough to be reading any kind of parenting book or looking to Supernanny for possible ideas, their children will already be better off than the poor souls in those orphanages.

I think at the extreme level those poor kids were subjected to, it's not surprising many of them, even if only months old when they left, suffered long lasting trauma. That is very different to the impact a loving parent like OP's decisions about bedtime routines, etc, might have.

I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I have teens and younger DC. I breastfed them all for varying amounts of time, co-slept with all, did lots of baby wearing, BLW etc. I’ve always been a gentle parent but not a pushover, I have firm boundaries and they know not to cross them. They’re all good kids, they’re calm and largely laid back- not much of an issue. Never once been in trouble at school, always get glowing reports from teachers and lots of compliments.

I think I’ve done a decent job. I don’t know how much of their temperament is down to the attachment parenting vs me being calm and not lashing out.

Well perhaps different kids have different levels of need and you don't know how much your being there perhaps did help them. All I can speak to is my situation which is how the question was framed and my experience is that it was a positive choice.

I have one DD, now 23. I was 42 when she was born so had had lots of time to observe friends of my own age. Gina Ford appalled me and still does. But so does the poor interpretation of gentle parenting we now see so much of. Penelope Leach makes sense to me, because she helps you see things from the child's point of view.

Theories can and should only take you so far. You have to respond to the baby you actually have, and (cliché) trust your instinct. DD is hard-working, self-reliant and happy. Whether any of that is down to parenting, I don't know. I like to think some of it is.

I don’t think so. I think it’s all genetics, unless something traumatic has happened, I think some people are just far more prone to mental health problems than others

My children are 6 and 1 so too early to see the effect but I will say even at this age I can see very very clear difference between the two children. I have so far coslept as much as necessary with both of them, breastfeed for as long as was practical and we start with gentle parenting and that is our default but also believe that there can be consequences for actions.

My 6 year old doesn't like to show her hand, she stays back and is reserved. She doesn't like new situations and likes to understand things first. She was born during the pandemic and the first two years of her life were very difficult. She had severe silent reflux and has 20 food allergies. I had severe depression and went on to spend 10 weeks in a mother and baby unit. I breastfeed until 10 months when I had to swap to formula for my own mental and physical health. We coslept until 2 years in our bed and until 5 I frequently spent half the night in her bed. We now know that there were child abuse concerns at the nursery she went to between 11 and 22 months. She masks a lot of the time especially when she is unwell, upset or hurt. The possibility of neurodiversity has been raised but it's not something we are actively pursuing. There are so many red flags in her first 2 year that could potentially have contributed to how she is but at the same time, maybe she was always going to be this way. She is wonderful and awkward and difficult and a joy sometimes all at once. We try to be patient, calm, consistent, balanced but we are also human and she can press our buttons or things beyond our control can upset her.

My second we started cosleeping when he was a few weeks old and he has slept 11-5 most nights in his cot since he was about 5 months old.
I am bipolar, I have had anxiety and depression since I was 8. I am hopefully going to start therapy in 2027 to help process my life and much of my childhood from about 5 onwards has taught me to make myself smaller and that other people's needs come before mine always. I believe I was always going to be bipolar and always going to have a mental illness BUT I believe my experiences have shaped the way that I experience that mental illness and my ability to engage with help and support. I do put some of this at the hands of my parents but it mostly doesn't have anything to do with my very early years