Alec occasionally laments that we were not more laid-back with Holden as a newborn. Lucky for him, we have the chance to try a second time at being cool and groovy with baby Milo. By virtue of this little guy being the second-born, he will undoubtedly get less obsessive attention, but is that really the same thing as learning to chill out and let some things go?
Spend one hour with me trying to manically juggle the happiness of my sons and my husband and you will not accuse me of being too laissez-faire. But I do like the intention of this article on ModernMom.com: How to be a relaxed parent. Since I’m only two weeks into this whole mom-of-two thing, I do believe there’s hope for me yet.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the intention of this article was great, but a lot of what she had to say STUCK IN MY CRAW. In particular, she implies that if your baby is not sleeping through the night by 3 months, it is your fault because you were not a relaxed parent. It’s that kind of expectation that makes sleep issues such a common anxiety among new moms. When our kids don’t sleep through the night “on schedule” we feel like we are doing something wrong. We’re not!
And don’t get me started on her breastfeeding comments. This is one area where knowledge IS power.
One of the things I love about your website is that you tell it like it is. Motherhood is hard, but rewarding. This article is a great example of what your website is not. Reading this sounds like it was written by someone who never had children, and certainly by someone who never had a fussy baby. Lucky her!
Heather, good luck with the new baby. As a twin mom, I can tell you there is never an easy time to introduce a second baby into a home but you figure out how to make things work.
I’ll echo Laura’s sentiment here… the spirit is great but the article devolves into fairly preachy advice. The irony being that one of her rules is “Don’t listen too much to what people say”
I think the problem is she seems to address everyone as if parenting is a totally innate relaxed affair for everyone, and that all these other things like books and doctors and New Yorkers are the thing that stresses people out.
For some of us, it wasn’t that we read too much (I didn’t read much at all) - it was more the overwhelming feeling of responsibility for someone’s entire life that is stressful - and some of thing things like advice books and nose drops make us feel like we’re doing SOMETHING, that we’re actually taking action on that responsibility.
For some of us, it doesn’t feel natural or instinctual to be taking care of this little newborn and so it doesn’t feel like just being there is going to be enough. So it may very well be that it doesn’t matter if we gave our kid anti-gas drops or not, but it makes us feel like we were involved.
And hey, now that we have two kids I can look back and understand that it’s just hard to be a newborn and the 2nd kid has been MUCH less stressful in that department. But there’s no way an article or someone’s advice would have clued me in to this unless I had experienced it for myself…
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