Does this sound familiar? Your child is crying hysterically, seemingly for no reason, and everyone around you (especially your mother-in-law) claims to know the purpose – “He’s cold, put on his socks”, “She’s hungry. Do you want a cookie sweetheart?”, “He needs a nap – he’s tired”. But the answer is obvious to you, even though no one may believe you. It doesn’t matter what the real reason for the tantrum is, the fact that you know what it’s about is the reason for this article.
You probably have read in a parenting book or two that say that a parent with a child older than 6 months is an expert on being a parent. I think there’s no truer statement – an expert on that child, that is. When it comes to doing the best for our kids and making the right choices, ask whomever you want for advice, but ultimately trust yourself.
I recall reading in the toddler years series of “What to Expect,” a side note saying that you shouldn’t allow your children to color in coloring books. It was instructed to rather give them a blank piece of paper and so as to not constrict their imagination within lines. I’m all for the spread of imagination, but I’m ALSO for teaching my kids an invaluable lesson about order, not to mention about how color confined within lines creates images. I was shocked to find such a statement in such a well-respected “how to” book. This is an extreme case where I recognized the absurdity quite easily. But haven’t there been times when you read something with advice that perhaps you disagreed with at first, but hearing the reasoning why, changed your mind? And now when you look back, you think to yourself, “What was I thinking?”. Keeping ourselves in check with our own conception of what’s good and not good to do is sometimes harder than it looks.
Ultimately, when it comes to our kids, our gut instinct (like our love for them) is sometimes unexplainable, but has the answers. So trust yourself and I’ll try to trust myself as well.
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