Best (and worst) decisions you made in your parenting?

[Algor1thm]

I'm mum to two little ones 2 and under. From more experienced mums, if you had your time again, what would you do exactly the same? And what would you do differently?

From my very limited experience so far... Best decisions:

• Baby led weaning
• Dummy in infancy 🙌🏻
• Learning to understand and validate toddler emotions rather than reacting like my parents did

Worst:

• Too much reliance on TV when I need to get things done
• Not supporting independent play enough

Great idea for a thread, thanks OP.

Best - Sleep training at 6 months. And doing it again at 20 months after he couldn’t self-settle for a couple of weeks due to illness and teething.

Worst - I’m not far enough into it parenthood to have discovered which decisions have back-fired yet!

I guess I’m the same as pp that said worrying too much but that’s not really a “decision” I made.

Best - being strict with routine. Had 2 under 1.5 and set naps, bedtime saved my sanity. Had them both sleeping 12 hour stretches by 9 months. Never letting them in our bed so they don't know it's it's option and in own rooms from 4 months.

Worst - giving them juice as toddler so they now won't drink water

Why was that a bad decision?

Best decisions:

Dummies
Bed time routine
potty training the summer of 2nd birthday
eat all meals with cutlery at the family table
basic social manners.
Let all children feed and dress themselves, cook, set/clear table, push hoover, wash up, share small domestic chores, from the earliest time they could stand upright/and/ or balance on a kitchen chair.
Teach them to ride a scooter, bike, skate, swim, camp, catch a bus, shop, work out the change, fish, make a fire and cook on it, play cards, use a hammer/screwdriver/saw paintbrush, drive a car, change a tyre/ dance/ manage their own money.

Best;
no dummy
co-sleeping
private school from 3
sport & music lessons from as young as possible

Worst;
Not introducing chores at a younger age (to DD)
Im sure there will be too many others to name and my children are still young so I’ve quite a way to go!

Best: routines, everyone happy, rested, well-fed and knew where they were

Worst: not sure whether my attempts to not hover over their school work and pressure them has made them less achieving. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd coerced more.

I've got older/mid teens and upper primary.

@walkinthewoodstoday I have come to believe that circumcision for non-medical reasons is wrong, though I hadn't thought about it so much then. DH lost his faith anyway, he just happened to meet me at a relatively religious period of his life. Sitting outside the room where ds was having his circumcision was about the worst few minutes of my life.

That makes sense. Your post made it sound like you regretted not having him circumcised.

Trigger warning CSA

DD 18, DD14, DS 10 my best decision was learning how to parent from parenting courses (2 have ASD so courses are always on offer) and parenting books rather than what I had experienced myself.

It took me a long while to realise how damaging my own upbringing had been. As kids particularly my sister and me were not allowed any inner world or emotions and we were trained by our parents to be extremely compliant (guilting/shaming/constantly highlighting our faults) and not being allowed to take up any emotional space which was all taken up by our parent’s emotional needs. I would never have realised how that was if it wasn’t for the worst thing I did as a parent which was encouraging relationships between my parents and my children right up until my parents swept the really serious level of abuse of their daughters by their son under the rug when it all came out. It was then very clear after she’d loads of therapy how messed up my parents and actually my whole family was for going along with that.