Raising children in a world full of accessible opinion is a funny thing. Everyone seems to have an idea about how to do this right. Stay home, work full time, work part time, return to work, cry to sleep, not cry to sleep, pacifier, no pacifier...the recipe for each of us is different, of course. Often we're all right in what we're doing from picking out baby food to enrolling our child in preschool. But it doesn't always feel that way when a barrage of comments and advice from relatives, friends, and people in the supermarket hit us in the shins. What people say about how we care for our children hurts far more than salt in a wound. Editorials on our parenting can seriously linger.

Recently I talked with Liz Szabo at USA Today about this issue. She wrote a popular article called, Why do mothers judge one another and their parenting? where she quoted me and a number of other moms & doctors about our experiences. There is a video interview from New Day NW at the end of the post where I discuss competitive parenting, too.

Most people who read it tell me it makes them feel better.

I'm half way through the book Instinctive Parenting by Ada Calhoun. The introduction and first few chapters are mesmerizing. I found myself nodding, laughing, gasping out loud-- it seemed she and I were so aligned. She made me feel like we really all can do this perfectly. Armed with instincts, we really can help our children thrive. But then about 10 chapters in it started to feel like even in a book about trusting yourself, not the voices in the news/baby books/neighborhood/playground, she had a story to tell. And something about it felt as if it was instructive, too. Not steeped in judgment, but instructive. As if in parenting, to steel ourselves into trusting our own instincts we may have to believe in the demonization of the other side or opinion. Maybe it’s simply instinctual to feel righteous about how you do it. Maybe it inspires the confidence we all need?

Here's how I see it:

• ‹ The Balance between Work and Parenting
• Nothing I learned in Med School: On Parenting... ›