Parent Extremis

Does your kid use a pacifier? If so, when did you first give it to him?

Pacifiers do serve and actual purpose. We have all seen the over-stressed and perhaps ill-equipped mother shove a pacifier in the mouth of her seven year old in the middle of Target, but it is not a silencing device really. Infants have a need to suckle. It calms them. They are able to breastfeed with different amounts of sucking depending on their level of hunger. As long as all of their other needs are met, I see nothing wrong with the modern day pacifier to help stretch out a nap-time or make a car ride more pleasant. Pacifiers nowadays are made much better than several decades ago and do not, contrary to what you may hear, cause any orthodontic or speech problems.

Personally, I was a thumb-sucking kid. I started as a newborn and stopped, for good, sometime in my I-am-not-kidding teen years. It was clearly a self-soothing thing and if I hadn’t screwed up my teeth to all hell, I’d still do it today. My mother was vehemently against pacifiers. Go ahead … psycho-analyze the shit out that one.

When I was pregnant and preparing for Noah to be born I was very certain that I wanted him to have a self-soothing method, whatever it may be. So far, his only soothing tool is my boob, much to the chagrin of my nipples and my ability to get much sleep. Alas, he is young, seven weeks, he has no coordination and couldn’t suck his own thumb if he tried. I digress …

I am all in favor of the pacifier. For one thing, you can take it away. You cannot take a thumb away. Know what I’m sayin? So I bought pacifiers. I bought several different kinds, just in case one was shaped better than another kind. I boiled them and was all ready to hand him a pacifier the moment he got a little fussy. Ha! Haa! Hahahahah!!! The parenting gods laugh in my face.

Noah will not, under any circumstances, take a pacifier, of any brand or sort or color or shape.

Another mother told me she gave her son a pacifier in the hospital and he uses it for sleeping only now nine months later. I chose to wait until he was securely breastfeeding to avoid the dreaded and often hotly debated issue of nipple confusion. For now, we are not a pacifier family. Perhaps when he gets older he will take one, but for now I suppose I should count my blessings and not worry about saving for braces.

To read about other nap-time issues, click here.

Greetings!

I’m the new writer for Parent Extremis. I’m no more qualified to write for this site than I am to care for my own seven week old baby. So it should be a fun ride! No, really, I plan to use this site to evaluate and discuss a variety of parenting issues. I hope you will stay tuned for some potentially riveting, or at least mildly interesting discussions of all the issues I can dream up including breast versus bottle feeding, sleep issues (co-sleeping vs. crying it out), the effect of pregnancy on the family, dealing with pediatrician visits and vaccination controversy, dealing with toddlers, heading back to work, discipline methods and much more.

I recently became a stay at home mom, or a work at home mom who does some freelance writing, to Noah, born December 21, 2007. He is almost eight weeks old and I love him more than life itself. We live with my hardworking and devoted husband, Marc, four cats and a yappy little dog.

Eventually distraction stops working, or it becomes bribery. An older child can figure it out. Eventually they will discover that their defiance is a bargaining tool. They are bound to get something out of the deal. The problem is that you can’t continue this forever. And your child’s future boss or spouse won’t be willing to.

Distraction uses cleverness and mental force instead of physical force or moral force. What is the difference, really, between exercising force by physical means or by mental means? Is either one more respectful of the child than the other? Is either one less forceful?

My wife asked me at breakfast about distraction. She brought it up, she didn’t know I was writing about it. She asked, isn’t everything distraction? Choosing to do something good instead of something bad?

What do you think?

Parenting styles really do come from different worldviews. Some parents seems to believe that children are basically good. In fact, one parenting blogger says that it’s possible to make your child love you so much that they will never disobey you.

Other parents say that children are not basically good, the world is not basically good, nobody is basically good. There is hope for everybody, and God’s image is stamped on everyone, but left alone, people will gravitate toward the easiest path. So will children. They may love their parents to pieces, but if they know they can get away with something, they will try it.

Maybe I tend toward the second style of parenting because I was the second type of child.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that a worldview without suffering is not a view of the world we live in. Raising them to live in a different world might make parents feel good, but I don’t think it’s not responsible. People can go on and on, asking why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes (though can you prevent them?), but the fact is that there are earthquakes. People suffer cold in the winter, and they suffer from heat in the summer. That’s the world your children live in.

Those who think that raising peaceful children means never spanking them should consider how the Amish raise their children. They raise them not only to be peaceful, but to be forgiving, even when a gunman seizes their classroom. But they don’t raise them without spanking them.

Some theories of gentle parenting are only compatible with vegetarianism. Parents are trying to teach their children that the world is happy and peaceful, in which case their view is probably not compatible with watching television either. They want to show their children a world without suffering, without sacrifice, but not without meat.

Farm kids know where meat comes from. For most of the rest of us, we let someone else, someone at the slaughterhouse, face the suffering and sacrifice that meat eating makes necessary.

Of course, it’s important to some parents to raise their children to be cheerful vegetarians. If not, here’s a challenge: help them to clean their own fish or process their own chicken. Then help them fit what they see into the view of the world you want them to have.