My main job is, of course, raising Baby. My goals at this stage are for her life to be gentle, comfortable, educational, nutritious, fun, calm, and social. I guess I perform reasonably well in most of these regards, though I feel like I fail on the educational angle. This is ironic since I am a teacher by trade, disposition, and education. We just don’t read enough books together, which is unexpected, given that my husband and I are both big readers (or at least, I used to be) and know the importance of reading to children. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I need to do better.
I guess it’s hard to say how much of what we do as parents translates to good outcomes for children. It’s quite variable. Of course, in some ways, it matters little how I treat Baby at this age. She won’t remember a moment of it. But I believe that the general caliber of her interactions with other creatures even at this early age seep into her psyche, and her interactions with the environment seep into her body (which is why I am tortured about the superfun but horribly chemically vinyl baby pool we bought Baby today).
My husband was raised in the country in Sweden, in a devoted family of five. I was raised by a single mother in the deep south (although we also lived when I was younger in China, New York, and North Carolina), living at my grandparents’ house. (When I was with my father, I got to live in Alaska and San Francisco). I was pinched, scolded, spanked, dressed-down regularly by my mom. My husband never recalls even once being corrected by his parents; maybe he was extremely well-behaved, which I certainly was not, but it also bears mentioning that any physical discipline of children in Sweden was rendered illegal in the 1970s. He claims that his parents simply made it clear what behavior was expected, and he complied. I hope Baby is this easy!
Given my upbringing, and the fact that I am surrounded by others in America administering physical discipline, and that it’s what I was encouraged to do as a nanny, I have caught the spanking instinct. But we don’t plan to do this with Baby. My husband believes it to be deeply immoral, and plus, if we’re moving to Sweden anyway, there’s no use getting into the habit when we can’t do it there.
These, at least, were the arguments against using physical discipline on Baby (not that she needs any discipline yet at all, the angel) that we drew up when I was pregnant. But now that Baby is here, I have additional reason not to spank: I simply can’t imagine wishing any harm on her. Sure, I have gotten quite frustrated, but my base instinct wasn’t to hurt her, just to ignore her until the crying stopped and/or the sleeping began. Contrary to Swedish law, I would definitely grab her arm if she ran into a street, but spanking her? Slapping her on the hand? Can’t imagine needing to do it, can’t imagine doing it.
But she’ll be a different little lady when she’s two. I guess it’s then, not when she is a delightful, absolutely innocent dear of an infant, that my non-violent childrearing philosophy will be tested. It is in times of stress that the conflict between instinct and conscious decision arise.
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A paper which I co-authored when at my pre-baby job (a research consulting firm) has been accepted to a big, fancy scientific journal for publication! Also, I just minutes ago finally finished a paper I was working on for my corpus linguistics class for grad school. Yay! Just FYI.
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Baby’s first tooth is coming in! Bottom middle. This event is making her sad and causing her to sleep more poorly, but she’s being a trooper. It’s adorable to watch her constantly screwing up her mouth to worry the new tooth with her tongue. I am, however, mourning the loss of her gummy smile.
