It’s a humbling day when the book you’re reading about baby behavior better describes your own. I’ve now had the experience enough times in the past 10 months to recognize the hard truth behind the cliches: When you’re getting to know your baby, you end up encountering yourself in ways you hadn’t counted on, ways that can be brutally jarring, both for the unexpected content of what can now not be unseen, and for the stakes of the seeing.
You thought you knew yourself, and your life, and suddenly everything is on the table, about who you are, who you can be, who you must become in order to be the person specifically worthy of guarding and guiding your child. The bigness of it is daunting. The surprise is unnerving. The possibility exhilarating.
I’ve tried to be very spare in my perusal of books on parenting. They can play to your worst tendencies, and undermine your natural instincts and rhythms for doing what’s right for your child. But because I knew zero about infants and children, and am a first-time mama, I’ve dabbled a bit in particular topics that are important to me.
In general, it seems that parenting philosophies over the past 50 years have followed a trend both parallel and inverted to the arc of philosophies about being a healthy-minded adult. Over the decades, adults have been encouraged to look to their child self in order to find the source for abiding behaviors and defenses that are causing impasses in their lives. We tend to the adult self by returning to the child self that got the shaft, or was ill-served in some way by family and environment.
In a reverse— though complementary—direction, it seems the overriding message of most contemporary parenting philosophies is to treat babies and children like the full human beings they are. They aren’t to be regarded in some separable category, and trained as such, but should be honored and cared for as the fledgling human mammals that they are.
The two arcs have converged, so that we live in a cultural moment where it turns out that all of us, regardless of age, have a core set of needs and capacities that need nurturance, care, and attention. The age or size we are may affect the form and shape of how these are met, but those differences matter little against the sheer fact of their abiding presence, and their call for the devotion of a loved, intimate other.
I think this convergence — this meeting at the deep center when we think about what allows adult or young humans to be healthy, and whole, and freely themselves — is why, when I’ve been reading a book ostensibly about babies or children, I’ve found myself thrown back at myself by the pages. Three examples may help you catch my drift:
A new classic for people into non-authoritarian, non-patriarchal, attachment-focused parenting is a book by Pam Leo called Connection Parenting. It was one of the few books I let myself buy, and it hovers in my Kindle library for whenever I need a little reminder of what the heck I’m doing. (One of the very few sad sacrifices I’ve made is to read books in digital form, because my only spare time for reading is during her naps, and I can hold the Kindle in one hand and read in the dark while she snoozes on my belly.)
Leo’s book presented my first instance of: “Hmmmm. That describes me, at least as much, and maybe more than, my daughter!” I think this was around month 4. A central pivot of the book and its approach to parent-child relations is the founding fact/observation/belief that when some need of the infant or child is not met he/she will respond either by attacking (in the form of crying or pre-verbal/verbal protest) or retreating (withdrawing from you the parent into quietness or physical distance).
All disconnection arises from this unmet need and reaction. “Connection parenting” is focused on how to prevent or reduce such disconnection, or to address disconnection with more effective, less reactive, more nurturing responses.
When I read this early segment of the book I almost broke out howling in laughter (I was stymied only by sleeping baby on me, as she is right now). The nugget concept at the heart of it all not only seemed lifted straight out of many now-mainstream self-awareness books about adult relationships, but the clarity of Leo’s description thrust me immediately into recent glaring examples of my own behavior with my husband in the early stressful/non-stressful months of the new baby bliss-blur.
I’d have some kind of need, it wouldn’t get met (usually because I’d failed to recognize it myself consciously or I’d failed to simply clearly ask for it to be tended), and then I’d either speak with a bit of barbed wire around my words or I’d retreat inward, taking care of something by myself. In the zombie state of the first few months it was hard to see anything clearly, aside from my blazing infatuation with my daughter. But in the wake of Leo’s book, and some months of better sleep, I’m seeing it all now.
The second example was prompted by a line in Daniel Siegel’s Parenting From the Inside Out. The book is sort of a crash course- informed by contemporary neuroscience – in the truth that hits you in the face early on, even if you don’t quite know how to name it: In the most mundane and grand of ways your soul shows itself in how you respond to, and move around, your environment with your child (and partner if that’s your context). Everything inside is made outside. Sort of like the amniotic sac and placenta during birth. It all must—and will—come out.
In the book’s introduction there is the somewhat banal and cliche line that the moments in which you’re just trying to survive as a parent, you can actually source your thriving as a parent and family. Sort of the parenting version of: What feels like it’s wrecking you is the seed for evolution and bloom between you and your child.
Again, to my eyes at least, when I came across that idea my antenna knew I’d heard a variant before from other masters on self and relationships. Most screamingly, the grand dame herself, Pema Chodron. Not saying Siegel tries to steal her thunder, only that the overlap is another instance of the Great Convergence about the nature of the human heart, be it wee or old.
The last example is from a British baby guru/social media persona, Sarah Ockwell Smith. She focuses on demythologizing notions about baby sleep and the mania around “sleep training” babies. She’s also an advocate in the “gentle discipline” movement. Here again, in sleep and in discipline, the trending philosophies and Instagram gangs center around the radical return to regarding babies as the human mammals that they are. Their sleep can be wonky just like us adults. It doesn’t work so well to treat them like tiny controllable action figures, through bullying, power grabs, or disguised coercion, just like with us adults.
A gem from one of her books is the SPACE anacronym. It’s a mnemonic tool for cooling your jets when your toddler triggers your less-best self. I mostly find it handy with my husband. S = Stay calm. P = are your expectations Proper for the situation? A = speak and act from a place of Affinity. C = get Clear on the emotions at play, yours and theirs. E = what example are you setting—do you want to set—in the moment? As with the other examples, it seems too simple and veers toward cheesiness. But I find that it captures more than it misses. And most of all, it works. With adults at least; I’ve yet to need it with my daughter because I’m still in the honeymoon year(s? lifetime?) where my devotion means she gets the best of me without me having to try a whole lot. Which means, of course, that my other relationships get the rest of me. Hence my need for SPACE.
You might have guessed where this is all heading: The best thing for me to do—for my daughter, myself, and my family—is to put down the books and get very present and alert to how I already know how to be with her in most any given moment and situation. I am to behold, and attune to, the common humanity at the heart of us both, and act with the nurturance and dignity called for, with the solidity and the nuance required for us each to feel like equal participants, as equally gigantic beings in our shared small corner of the planet.
There’s a widespread notion that to tend to the child you must turn away from your own heart, or put its needs on hold, or sacrifice its space for another. But the opppsite is what I’ve found to be true: In seeing and tending to the human heart of us both—to the somehow singular and two-fold heart I now live with—I come closer to offering her the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. That’s the core evolution I’ve begun across year #1. In year #2 I hope to carry it to my husband, and to the other relationships that have fallen outside my besotted-with-baby orbit.