Parenting is this super weird thing that cannot be likened to anything else. Sure, there are other situations that are analogous, but nothing is completely the same. You and, hopefully, your partner are responsible for turning this little uncoordinated, babbling, poop-factory into a productive member of society. If all is done correctly you do this with as few nurtured mental issues as possible. How to do this, and what are the best methods are all in the rub, as it were. There’s countless blogs (oh, the irony), magazines, and other publications about what the current trends are to create the best human possible. Through the eyes of a new parent this is all very daunting. At the end of the day it all leaves you with a sense of inadequacy.
I’m sure we can all relate; our parents weren’t perfect. My upbringing was no different, it took me quite a while to work through any lingering angst I felt for my parents. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I’ve managed to work out most if not all the why’s. My parents had to make some tough decisions, I may not have understood them at the time but now I understand. To top it all off I don’t think my younger self would have fully comprehended the reasoning behind it all. So here I am, putting together my very own C.S.I. episode about my life, trying to do my best to put all the pieces together, and come out with a better understanding.
I told you that to give you a preface to where all my future ‘Parenting’ posts are coming from. I could go in to detail about my childhood, but I doubt that will ever make it here.
When my wife was pregnant with our first child my brain went haywire trying to culminate all the what-ifs, how’s and whys. As we neared the third trimester I really settled down and was able to formulate more of a plan. I got over the initial sticker shock of what this was going to do to us fiscally and began to think about how we as people operated and how we we’re going to work around being parents.
Like many new parents, I took to the internet to start reading about what to expect and how to handle it. Spending many nights up past my bedtime scanning through headlines like ‘Top ten Parenting Tips’ and ‘How to raise your first child’. I was bewildered with the sheer volume of the people putting forth their opinions on how to handle a child. The problem with so many of these was that they were more focused on their ad revenue and less so on the actual content. Then, the ‘A-Ha!’ moment happened. These ad-laden sites were there because of analysis of searches, meaning that lots of people were searching for parenting tips. Which means that no-one has the answers that I sought.
Armed with this I still looked, now I was looking at literature that the hospital had pointed us toward. Thinking they should know better, right? Nope, hospital pamphlets were chock full of recommendations that had absolutely no research to back them up. So, now what was I to do? I felt like I knew less about being a parent having read all the publications. Then another moment of clarity hit; There is no one-size-fits-all guide.
Well, now what? I had a few conversations with other parents, they didn’t have answers either. It wasn’t until speaking with my Mother-In-Law who gave the best bit of advice I could have ever gotten. “Instructions come with the package.” To elaborate on that a little bit, “Instructions come with the package; You’ll figure out what language they’re in.” And that’s it; the Rosetta Stone for parenting. It has nothing to do with what some article tells you to do or what some check-out lane magazine says. There aren’t answers to the questions, and that’s okay.
Moving forward it’s more about taking a more logical approach to what the child needs. This became more apparent when nurses asked if we would like to test for Down’s Syndrome. There was a small risk involved with the test which made me adjust the terms of the test. Since the risk was a terminated pregnancy, I had to ask if there were any outcome of the test that would cause us to willingly terminate the pregnancy. Since my wife and I are both reasonable human beings that answer was a very quick ‘No’ we opted to not take the test.
2 years down the road my son is mostly polite and thoughtful. Understands sharing as much as a 2-year-old only child can and has developed into an awesome kid. All attributed to my wife and I making good decisions in the developmental process.