Earlier I posted about my irritation at the attachment parenting folks who like to equate sleeping in separate beds with leaving your infant alone for the dingos to eat. But there's people with agendas in all the camps: the sleep camps, be it Weissbluth or Ferber or whispering to your baby; or the pee pee poo poo camps (potty train at two weeks old!); or the discipline camps, with the counting to three or permissive parenting or whatevah. The truth is that most parents probably do a combination of things on a day-to-day basis, and that's as it should be. We don't get into trouble until we get a real strict parenting philosophy. Or really, until we decide our way is the right way for everybody.
There's probably one or two good tips in each and every parenting school of thought, and so much of what works for a given family is really a combination of the kids, parents, lifestyle, priorities, and circumstances. What I detest is the zealotry, the subtle or overt claims that doing anything but x is really going to screw up the children royally and result in a lifetime of trauma and maladjustment. Most of these things that seem so important in the beginning--how and where the kids sleep, what they eat, whether or not they use a pacifier, and so on--well, in our case they've faded until I can hardly remember what we did when and how hard it was. The parents I respect the most approach everything with a certain flexibility and willingness to try different things. And god help us if we ever get so married to a philosophy that we forget that.
