More Milestones

We achieved some more milestones

The girls no longer want me to read to them at bedtime. This wasn't a sudden move but rather started with one of them wanting to finish whatever she was reading earlier, instead of listening to what I was reading, and then slowly transitioned into both of them reading their own books. We still read together for half and hour before bed, but the difference is that we each read our own books. This day had to come but I feel a certain twinge of loss.

The girls are going to school on their own consistently. It has become matter-of-fact - a peck on my cheek, an airy "bye mom" and they ride off on their bikes. I no longer follow them five minutes later. Here again my instinct is to go with them but I think it is a necessary step in independence. I have to really hold myself back.

They are both finally sleeping through the night. Finally! One has always been a poor sleeper and we have tried to teach her good sleeping habits at various stages of life. Invariably she ended up in our bed at night which was fine until a couple of years ago. Now that they are older, our bed is not big enough to accommodate the whole family. If the kids came in bed, either I or my husband had to find another spot to sleep. We made another attempt to get the kids to stay in their beds and surprisingly not only did it work, it was a fairly painless process for all of us. Phew.

NY Times article on co-sleeping

I just read this article in New York Times and was quite shocked at the tone of voice and choice of words. First let me confess that our household is quite similar to those described in the article - in terms of how they sleep, not in terms of all the fancy kids' furniture and sleep-therapists they can afford. However, unlike the families described, or the author herself, I do not think that kids sleeping in our bed is "gross". In fact, I want to laugh loudly at the statement that co-sleeping is inching into the mainstream. Puhleeeze - kids have been sleeping with their parents (except for maybe those of European royalty) all over the world since time immemorial. It is making kids sleep alone that inched into the mainstream in recent past. Has anyone stopped and thought that if parents are having so much trouble getting kids to sleep alone in their rooms, and need to employ sleep-therapists no less, maybe kids sleeping alone is what is 'abnormal'? The adults in the house get to sleep with somebody and little kids have to sleep alone, sometimes on a whole different floor of the house!? If you have to go to all these lengths to create a bear that talks like the mother, and smells like the mother, then isn't the child telling you that he'd rather be next to his "real" mother?

Here is my favorite quote from the article
"It’s commonly believed in the mental health field that it’s important the children learn to sleep on their own. Not doing it often generalizes to other problems, because it’s about a fairly important way that parents say no to their child.”

Bravo! Because I let kids sleep in my bed when they feel like it, I have been instantly labeled a bad and indulgent parent who is unable to set boundaries. Oh and also I must have intimacy issues in my marriage. My kids are not allowed to bully, call people names or kick the seat in front of them in an airplane, but I don't think a child seeking comfort with a parent is doing anything wrong at all. By letting my children know that I am there for them, I am harming their mental health forever! Wow! You gotta love these modern experts. They have so wonderfully positioned themselves over a mother's instincts and are all the more richer for it. This modern world is crazy - we need nutritional experts to tell us what to eat and parental experts to tell us how to raise our children, something that is so natural to our very being that even a bird can do it! The most intelligent life-form on the planet, however, needs an army of experts.

What I really want to say, once I have taken a few deep breaths, is that this should not even be an issue. People are different - parents and kids alike. Although experts who have copyrighted parenting methods would very much like us to think so, there really is no one right way to parent. We do what works for us and agrees with our values, and others do the same. Live and let live, and let us do our parenting in peace without assigning a subliminal pathological explanation to everything.