Let’s get real, folks. We’re not perfect parents, and we’re far from a perfect family. It ain’t all Caribbean vacations and homemade muffins and Sunday selfies over here, even though maybe it seems that way sometimes.
The truth is, there are a lot of ways in which Sona and I readily acknowledge that we have been less-than-stellar parents. We’ve dropped so many balls at this point that it is nearly impossible to catalogue them. Sometimes, our parenting fails are unintentional, accidental trip-ups that are the result of an oversight. Most of the time, though, we’ve made the conscious decision to just say, well, “*&#! it.”
As women with full-time careers, lives to juggle, a toddler, and now a baby on the way, it is important for us to admit that we can only take on so much. We all have a limited amount of stuff we can care about, worry about, toil over–and we have have to make decisions about what, in the end, just can’t be on that list. So, while I’m airing our dirty laundry as a way to appease whatever guilt we have and as a way to ease your own, the real point is this: if you don’t allow yourself some parenting fails, you won’t be able to stay sane.
Here are our big ones:
1. Yeah, we have a shelf full of highly-rated parenting books. No, we’ve never read them. I can’t tell you how many parenting books we purchased when Sona was pregnant with Finn. Everything from the ones everyone knows about, like this one, to ones our doctor suggested we have handy. We probably have at least a dozen. In the end, we didn’t actually read any of them. Sure, we skimmed through them a couple times, but we never read them the way we’d intended when we compulsively exercised our Amazon Prime privileges on a regularly basis. In fact, this one is the only book we actually finished, and it’s just a bougie indulgence for Francophiles (though we did put some of the advice to good use).
2. Tummy time? What tummy time? Despite all the advice from doctors, blogs, and the aforementioned parenting books, we rarely practiced tummy time with Finn in the early days. In fact, it wasn’t until he was like 12 weeks old–and showing no interest in rolling over–that we decided we’d better be a little more deliberate in our attempts to acquaint him with a belly-sided worldview.
3. Finn’s first foods were champagne, parmesan, and proscuitto. That’s not a joke. To say we didn’t start him off with the traditional food choices would be an understatement. I gave that kid everything–and very, very early: vinegar, peanut butter, and even–go ahead, shame me–honey!
4. Take your bottle to college, kid, if you want. We are, generally, terrible enforcers. I think we could spin this by saying that our parenting philosophy is to let Finn lead and self-wean, but the reality is that we’re just lazy, and I, especially, am known for saying, “It’ll happen when he wants it to happen.” That was our approach to letting go of the bottle, which he used regularly until he was around 22 months old.
5. And bring the diapers with you, while you’re at it. This goes for potty-training, too. Finn is nearly 2.5, and we really haven’t actively tried potty training, yet. We ask him whether he’d like to use the potty all of the time. The potty is always there. We bring it out before shower time, and we encourage him to sit on it. But that’s about it. We haven’t done any boot-camp style potty-training, and I’m not sure we plan to. Honestly, I’m just not that worried about it. I worry about him being a kind kid. I worry about whether or not he is happy and intellectually stimulated and healthy. I do not worry about when he is going to start taking a poop in a toilet. I’m sure daycare is frustrated with us about this, as most of the kids in his class are well on their way to being potty-trained, but our pediatrician made the mistake of validating our rather lackadaisical approach and, well, we let that be the validation we needed to put on the brakes, much to the chagrin of his teachers, our parents, and others.
6. Baby proofing? That’s a thing? Okay, we did put a baby gate on the stairs–which has long since been gone–and we do have those plug covers, but that’s it. We never did any other baby proofing: no cabinet locks, no covers on door handles, nothing. Honestly, I think this has really worked to our benefit, as Finn has NEVER tried to mess with anything he shouldn’t mess with, and we have a rather adult-friendly, not kid-friendly home. We attribute this completely to reverse psychology. Since we never had child locks on things, he never saw those things as forbidden, and therefore tempting, points of interest. He just could care less about cabinets and drawers and anything other than his own toys, really.
7. Bribe or die. This is mostly my fault, as Sona is definitely the parent who is more willing to say “no” to Finn than I am. Early on, I kind of decided that I would pick my battles. Generally speaking, Finn is a really good kid. He does what he should do 90% of the time, and he is more mature than I suspect most 2-year-olds to be (but that’s just my mom bias talking, I know). So, I decided that my hard “no” would be saved for times when he was either putting himself in danger, hurting someone else, being unkind, or being intentionally destructive. Beyond that, I’ve let him do his thing, mostly. Because of that, I tend to rely on bribes of suckers or peppermints to get small things done–like get shoes on for daycare or change his diaper when he realllllly don’t want to do it. He gets a bribe once a day or so, and I’m sure we’re doing some long-term psychological damage, but sometimes Momma just needs to get on with it.
8. Our kid can work YouTube better than I can do just about anything. This is the one for which we really do harbor the most legitimate mom guilt. Finn had virtually NO screen time until about 17 months. Since we live in a two-story home, and have no TV upstairs in the main living space, he just was never accustomed to having a TV on. He still doesn’t care very much about the TV, to be honest. But at around 17 months, we started showing him YouTube music videos that were, we thought, totally harmless. He’d dance, we’d all laugh, it was adorable. Or so we thought. Little did we know, seemingly harmless YouTube music videos are a gateway drug in the realest sense, and that began a slippery slope of iPhone–and then iPad–engagement that, in hindsight, I think we should’ve better monitored. Fast forward a year, and Finn has a full-on iPad addiction. He LOVES YouTube, which he calls “Stompy,” because Stompy the Bear is the first music video we ever showed him. (You should look it up and let your kid watch it, but consider yourself warned.) When he’s sick or super cranky, we sometimes give in, and he is on the iPad for an hour or so a day. Most days, though, he only uses it in the morning. He likes to chill in our bed, drink his milk, and watch other kids play with toys on YouTube for 20-30 minutes when he wakes up. After that, the iPad “goes to sleep,” and he usually doesn’t see it again for the rest of the day. But the fact that our 2.5 year old asks for “Pad?” as soon as he wakes up in the morning is, I know, nothing to brag about.
So, here they are, our parenting fails. I’m sure there are many I’ve left of this list–and many more, still, to come. And just to underscore the content of this post, here are a bunch of photos of last Saturday, when Finn and I stayed in bed for half the day–diaper full-to-bursting, drinking chocolate milk, watching bad YouTube videos, and my just being delightfully, willfully, a pretty bad–but also good–momma.
