Parenting Goals: Learning to be Realistic

Before becoming a parent it is so very easy to say what you will and won’t do with your child. It is easy to tell people what they also should and shouldn’t do with their children. However, after having my son I have learned, very quickly I might add, that what you say you will do before having your child may not be possible with your child.

My experience started with the fact that both my husband and I were very opposed to co-sleeping. We heard the dangers, we didn’t want to risk hurting our son or even losing him, and so we made it very clear we would never do such a thing.

Then Patrick was born. When Patrick was born he had a lower temperature than desired. It wasn’t so low that he had to be in the NICU but he spent the first 4 hours of life being put back into the Drager Resuscitaire Infant Warmer the hospital had. However, that didn’t regulate his temperature, the pediatrician pointed out that though it was warming him it wasn’t helping him to learn to regulate his own temperature and so the answer was to do direct skin to skin instead.

So Patrick spent his first week sleeping on my chest, regulating his temperature, and me holding him nearly 24/7. Because of this he has come to be used to hearing our heartbeat while he sleeps, feeling our embrace, and been comforted by our warmth. Thus, he doesn’t sleep in a crib or bassinet like he does in our arms. We started doing shifts where I would stay awake holding him, then my husband, back and forth. This still causes a lack of sleep for us and we slowly realized we were falling asleep during our turns occasionally. This still happens but we do everything to ensure that he can’t fall, roll, suffocate, etc. It still is nerve wracking at times but we have adapted and slowly he is getting better and wants to sleep away from us more as he becomes more comfortable not being cuddled.

From this experience I have learned that we must adapt to our children. We must not be stuck in a certain mindset of what we need to do and just because this is what we have to do with our first child doesn’t mean we will necessarily repeat it with our future child(ren) as each child is different.

So when you decide to have children or if you are about to have a child it is understandable that you may have goals or plans for the care of your child just know that things don’t always work out the way we plan and you are not failing yourself or your child just because you have to change the game up a bit. If you go with the flow you will all be much happier in the end!