Is your parenting approach, Dogmatic or Pragmatic?

[ElenorRigby]

Do you follow Spock, Gina Ford, attachment parenting, unconditional parenting, pinkfluff by the numbers parenting
or whatever
Or do you parent intuitively, with consideration for all involved.

Having babies is, for me, rather like cooking - I buy all the books but never read them (except looking at the pictures )

I did try to GF but it all just ended in tears when DS didn't understand that it was essential for him to be napping at midday.

Like someone said earlier it was a panicked response to suddenly having no control and it lasted a month before I realised that, actually, GF has never met DS or me and my instincts are a much better guide to how to raise my child.

I figure I'm an intelligent and reasonably well adjusted adult, if I think about what I'm doing then there's no reason why I shouldn't raise DS to be the same!

I also now live by the maxim "never say never":

e.g. I'll never co-sleep (we did for ages and still do when necessary).

I'll never put on Cbeebies to keep DS quiet (do it almost every morning).

I'll never give him food with added sugar in (had ice cream for pudding).

I smiled at Jamieandhismagictorch's post. I work in agriculture, and have a lot of experience of reproductive stock and rearing young animals. I regularly shocked doctors, midwives and health visitors as a result - I knew the biology but didn't prettify it.

The HV's face when I told her I may not know much about babies, but I knew compensatory growth when I saw it, is a memory I still treasure. (I had problems with milk supply - ds stayed on the 9th centile until he went onto mixed feeding, at which point he moved rapidly up to the 90th over about 4 months. This growth spurt would have been more worrying if dh weren't 6 ft and built like a prop forward! The HV had been telling me that my milk supply was ample so long as I fed on demand.)

I understand myself a lot better having watched ds grow and develop.

Good question.

I would say with DD (pfb) I tried to be rigid (read GF). This, I think, was because I had come from a snr management position at work where I had everything to schedule, everyone did what they were asked and I could have nice little 'feedback sessions' where I discussed things sensibly with my staff and we got on with things like the sane grown ups we are.

What I didn't know then was that bringing up a child is like herding cats. At no time are you in charge of the goalposts. I shall call it my baptism of fire! Feedback sessions with DD include anything from 'NO NO' said by either side, to 'Your cheesy mash isn't as good as Granny's Mummy' - very levelling!

SO, with DS I decided to wing it. And so far life has been much easier for all concerned.

I am much more pragmatic than I ever was (although do like a list - makes me feel like I have some sort of control in that nice little deluded way of mine!) and I am certain it is the better and easier way to be.

every night I ask myself the question "is DS still alive?" if the answer is yes I breathe a large sigh of relief and have a glass of wine. whichever mode of parenting it takes to get thru that day with both of us alive and no laws broken is the one I use.

I'm a fly by the seat of my pants gal. If today has been a good day then fantastic but I know tomorrow can be the opposite.

i am a good enough parent no manual required.human and flawed (and like it that way)

lol libra. that sounds just right.

I champion the middle ground. Long ferrel, now v. fertile!

I have never read a parenting book so I guess like most others I just wing it!

I was only 16 when I had my DS (now 13) but I was lucky to have an AMAZING mother who taught me how to be a parent (she wasn't great on the dicipline though hence my situation )

So I parented as I had been parented with extra tweaks, I am much stricter than my Mum was. People often ask me what I did to get such lovely children (smug face). I like my kids to have personalities.. I want them to be mischevious and playful but respectful of others.

I still have the challenge of the teenage years to come however... my lovely DS is already turning into a grunting smelly teenager

but I do like the permissive with feelings strict with behvior line that comes with 'how to talk so they will lisen and listen so they will talk' and 'the pocket book of parenting' (Thanks OBM for the latter )

Basic communication skills that worm just as well with adults - if not more. Communication is a skill we all have to practice all teh time

Pragmatic I guess. I go to bed knowing that DS has lived another day and when I hear him wake up in the morning, I say phew, he's made it through the night. I josh, but it's kind of true - DS is 10 months and this whole year seems to have been about survival + I've had PNA so I've been freakishly worried about him dying. I hope to relax a little bit next year

I have routines in place, but they are kind of loose so I try to take each day as it comes to a large extent.

Pragmatic attachment parenting - with large doses of not doing it like my parents cos they were rubbish.

NotReallyThoughtAboutItTillNowTiggaxx

Well I thought I was quite pragmatic but now that we are having sleepovers I see that I am more dogmatic than I realised, with a strong clock-watching element.

This is partly because the children whose parents are up for sleepovers at ds's age (5) tend to be the more winging-it types I think, so my shoutier, stricter side is highlighted. I am a strict bedtime kind of girl, mainly because my overriding memory of the early years days was that feeling at 6 am of '13 hours til bedtime, what the hell am I going to DO til then?' I like to know when freedom adult time is going to begin. I also have an enormous amount invested in manners of a rather formal type including napkins, 'please may I' etc. So encountering the freerange child who has no bedtime, and no formal 'manners' to speak of of which there are actually quite a few, is a bit of an eyeopener. So is the lovely relationship they tend to have with their parents, who don't enjoy have to shout the way I do to get the troops dc to obey cooperate.

Yeah, military is probably the word for me in parenting. I feel the best mum when barking orders at ds, oddly.

I don't understand all these terms but first time around as an idealistic teenage mum my bible was the Continuum Concept with a dash of Paula Yates (Paula ) and it all went swimmingly, 2nd child was a shock to the system - she screamed for the whole of her first year whatever I did. By the third I'd discovered ready-made formula and was mixed feeding by about 4 months, using a cot and other daring modern parenting inventions

Pragmatic with a lot of benign neglect thrown in and like scottishmummy aims are a good enough parent.

I've just winged the whole lot. Turns out that's called the benign neglect school of parenting!

sums me up too when I'm being nice to myself. On bad days I'm just a crap mum

I try to be pragmatic, but there are days/moments/moods (me and DD)/situations where I tend to get more dogmatic and realise that I am sounding like my Mum.

I just try to go with the flow with a certain amount of routine as a framework to hang the rest of the day on.

i just try and do whatever gets us all through the day happy, fed and sleeping at the end of it.

i've read so many bloody books and dip into them now and again but to be perfectly honest it's whatever gets me through it without shouting at the dss (3.5 and 20m)

that and a big glass of wine at the end of the day

Before I had children I would have expected to be a dogmatic GF control freak type. Instead I read the Baby Whisperer, threw it across the room in disgust, and "accidental parented" (God I loathe that phrase) my way through the last two and a half years. We're all still in one piece and still speaking. Result.

(Wine helps)

I see the Observer has an interesting article on this issue.

"The study, by the thinktank Demos, tracked the lives of 9,000 families and found that 13% used a "tough love" approach, combining warmth and discipline. It did not matter whether the parents were rich or poor ? those that adopted the approach brought up children who were more likely to be empathetic, more able to control their emotions and bounce back from disappointment, and more capable of concentrating and completing tasks.

Sounds good to me and its what me and DW hope we do with DSs. I get annoyed by parents who seem to have no boundaries for their DCs.

Justine gives a quote at the end of the article which I also agree with.

Hmmm...mysterious. Independent has almost the same article.

Can't help but think dogmatic parents

1. Would mostly not recognise themselves
2. If they did would be loath to own up to being dogmatic.

I mean dogmatism aint something to aspire to!

Maybe most cant even admit it to themselves, yet alone other peers.