You would know that on your journey of motherhood, there’s no shortage of advice. We go looking for some and it comes from sources that we trust like recommendations from friends, health professionals or authority websites. Other advice is unsolicited and comes from a well-meaning lady in the supermarket, or family members who want to share how they did things without taking time to understand our struggles.
Today I’m going to share with you one more piece of parenting advice. These are words that changed everything for me. Ready to hear them?
There’s no one right way.
Think about that. There is no ONE right way.
What does that mean for us?
There are many right ways, many options to choose from, many techniques to try, as we go about our days. My husband and I like to think of all the advice as a ‘tool box’ which we could go to and choose what we wanted to try. Our first baby was a routine baby– feed, play sleep, no worries. Easy to work out what he needed and when. Our second baby was a whole different story: he gave up naps earlier, I had to carry him in a sling for hours during the day, starting solids with rice cereal gave him tummy pains. We had to keep our minds and options open, and try different techniques from the tool box.
It’s hard, because naturally, we want to get this parenting thing “Right”. But since there is no one right way to do it, we need to be open, flexible and adaptable: and as soon as we ‘figure things out’, the baby will grow and change and we’ll have to learn all over again what they need.
There are some wrong ways. I don’t need to go into this too much; you can use your imagination! There are some things that would be undoubtedly wrong – like neglect or abuse – but there might be some things that are just wrong for you and your family, too. It’s good to think about what those things might be, but to also realise that other people might make different choices than you do.
You don’t need to do everything the same way, all the time. Babies change, we change. Having one baby is different to having a toddler and a baby. Feel okay about making changes to the way you do things, and feel okay that some of the things you try won’t work. One word of caution, though, is to avoid chopping and changing all the time: babies and children need time to adjust to a new routine or pattern, and being inconsistent means they won’t know the boundaries. If you are going to try something new, give it a few days to see if it’s working for your family!
As I mentioned above, the advice ‘there’s no one right way’ was such a freedom for me to trust my instinct and try different ways of parenting as we all learned how to get along as a family! I’d love that for you, too – freedom from the expectations to perform in a certain way, freedom to get to know your children and what they need, freedom to explore and experiment.
Have fun xx
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