Since our 2nd kid was born, I’m increasingly in favor of what I’d call training wheels parenting. Yes, training wheels aren’t the best way how to learn to ride a bike, but if my whole generation had them and we all learned it eventually, surely it’s not that much of a big deal?
Other things that weren’t that much of a big deal for me growing up: sugar, TV, seed oils, ugly plastic toys, kids getting into fights with each other, dumb / inconsiderate songs and nursery rhymes, scraped knees, sharing rooms with siblings
if you want a “village” to help with your kids, you have to expect and accept that they won’t have the same parenting/authority style that you want your kids to receive.
- 🌷 your village will include imperfect people, with their own opinions and inputs. you can’t curate a perfect village like in the sims!
Both too much and too little mothering will mess a kid up. Specifically, their nervous system and its conditioning to appropriately detect threats and self soothe.
“Care work” can be lots of things but it always involves co-regulation, which is the loaning out of your nervous system to someone else to help settle them. If you don’t have a strong nervous system to begin with, this task, when it comes to children, is crushing.
Ideal child-rearing is inexact but involves a gradual transition from total co-regulation for the newborn to ad hoc co-regulation for the youngish child. Too little mothering and the child is left to their own devices too soon. Too much and the child never gets their own devices
“Good enough” mothering through this lens is mothering that broadly accepts the need for co-regulation in infancy and the need to gradually pull back to allow the child to learn to regulate themselves. A long game view will trust that this process will work even w many mistakes
was talking with a fellow dad who was struggling with making certain decisions, like when to be tough, when to indulge, how do you know if you’re going too far, etc. I found myself saying: just imagine that your child’s adult self is in the room watching you. in a sense, they are
- there will be times where your child feels you’re being unfair, but their adult self will understand and there will be times where your child accepts some bullshit you just did, but their adult self won’t