Lessons learned from counseling
A wise friend once shared that on becoming a parent, she realized that for sanity's sake, the best step would be to "throw" all her child psychology books out the window and stop worrying about "shoulds" and "musts." She vowed to learn parenting by reading her child, and not a book.
I tend to agree.
More than other parents, moms (or dads) in my profession are even more hyperaware of the numerous ways parenting can go wrong (or right), deftly skirting the mistakes most newbie parents make and (I imagine) hitting target milestones almost every time.
I'm especially conscious of this being that I had always dreamed of being a Mama and had started my own Parenting Tips mini-book (for my eyes alone) since med school, wanting to bring my realizations of parenting learned from others and from clinics into MY own journey; as preparation for when the time actually came.
The thing that I'm realizing now is that the difficulty with parenting books and advice (beyond evidence-based general strokes, of course) is that there are LOTS of variation in between. Whether it's the child marching to a different drummer, external circumstances we are unable to control (aka Pandemic) or parent-child goodness-of-fit, no ONE size or advice fits all.
This became obvious to me as soon as I started reading through the mini-library I had amassed, quickly spotting which ones were useful and discarding a lot that were not... either because they took too much time, effort or weren't culturally "us."
Which made me start thinking how many of our parenting ways, for us to "own" it and feel authentic carrying it out - should come from OUR values, our partner's values, and the values of both families we originated from.
I realized now why some of the parenting advice I had given my patients' families didn't stick, why it seemed I was wasting their time or why a problem didn't seem as significant to address for them as they were for me. Precisely because we had different value systems.
That "A-ha" moment pushed me into taking 2 major action steps.
The FIRST was listing my and B's most important values down when it comes to parenting. Like Princess Aurora and her fairy godmother's gifts, we wanted to be intentional about the values we prioritized in raising our LO.
We wanted her to be curious, to ask questions beyond what her 5 senses perceived. We wanted her to exercise her creative sensibilities, and in that way get to know what and who she wanted to be. We wanted her to love nature and love her body and its amazing capabilities; this even more as we were both NOT athletic (though her Dad was used to roaming forests, fishing by moonlight and swimming in the open ocean when he was younger). And lastly, we wanted her to be secure in our unconditional love for her, to feel always seen and heard when it comes to us; that when or if shit hits the fan, we were the first people she would think of.
SECOND, in counseling and parent education, I vowed to first inquire what was important for the family. To some, maybe peace of mind was (aka what's the quickest way to get him to quiet and keep him still), to others happiness (aka I'm ready to give her anything just to keep her always smiling and safe in our cozy family bubble).
Neither is wrong. In my role as a dev pedia, I struggle to balance between the family values and what the individual child needs.
Part of the goal of counseling is finding middle ground.
I found myself (especially in the early days), making the mistake of stepping in and giving advice too soon, risking its rejection. Now even when the parents come to my clinic, I make it a point to determine if we were on the same page first, or if not, to meet them where they were and give them what they most needed for now.
Almost always, just listening is 3/4 of it.
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