Reply to Best toddler tips you have or have received from parents with "good kids"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For those who disagree that parenting is not intuitive: please think of parents who are bad. We all know them. They think they're doing the right thing but they aren't. Maybe it felt intuitive for you but we do not know the right things to do with toddlers jus because we birthed a child. [/quote]

I think you're proving our point. "Bad parents"  are just insecure. They don't listen to their intuition or don't trust it enough to pay it any attention. So they flail, they spin. They look for answers from anyone and everyone, which makes them flail and spin even more. There's a lot of bad advice out there. They'd probably do best with something to help their anxiety. Most people do, in fact, just know what to do if they have the confidence to trust themselves. There's no magic formula to raising kids. It's just a bond forming between you and your child, and it will lead your gut to help you know what they need. [/quote]

You and I are talking about two different kinds of parent. I'm talking about the kind of parent who is very secure in the rightness of a parenting practice that is, in fact, wrong. Think of the mom who gives her kids a punishment before her kids have the capacity to understand cause and effect, or the dad who tells his 5-year old he has to be a man and that means not crying. They have confidence, they trust themselves, and yet a 20-year old who has a solid knowledge of human development can correctly identify these parenting practices as misguided.  [/quote]

That's not intuitive parenting. That mom issuing punishments got that idea either from a book or she was raised that way. If she was acting intuitively, she'd take a moment and recognize that her 2 yr old didn't take her brother's toy because she's a thief but because she doesn't understand the concepts of possession or turn-taking. But that mom is being rigid in adhering to a parenting approach she learned from someone else.

And the dad telling his son to "be a man" is an even better example of someone adhering to a parenting technique they learned elsewhere instead of responding intuitively to their child. That dad learned a bunch of stuff about toxic masculinity as a child and was taught not to cry or express emotion, and he's passing that on to his own child, even though some part of that dad wants to hug his son and comfort him. He's actively suppressing that part of himself (as he has been actively suppressing his feelings since childhood, as commanded) in order to follow a parenting approach he's been TAUGHT is better than just responding intuitively to your child's needs.[/quote]

How are people supposed to know these things intuitively when they have been taught the opposite things their whole lives? It seems like what you think is intuitive is some deep inherent natural knowledge of practices that parents might never have heard of or seen, and also happen to be supported by research into child development. My hunch is that it feels intuitive to you because you have been taught that way, but it wouldn't feel intuitive to others and they would do better to check the parenting practices they default to against what others propose. [/quote]

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