When I read something like this post
from a mom who's doing the "work God placed on [her] keyboard" and has
thereby appointed herself an expert in parenting, my blood boils, I
want to vomit, and I cannot help but sadly wonder what's to become of
her children and the children of people who listen to her. Angel
of 1SmartMom.com is dispensing advice she freely admits comes mainly from a friend of hers and also from a popular but outdated piece of work called "On Becoming Babywise", by Gary Ezzo, M.A. (doesn't that stand for Master of Arts? Not Medical Doctor, right?). Here's a sample:
When
asked "how to handle the spanking", dealing with a 3-year old who is
"pushing us away and telling us 'no'", Angel's response is calm and
collected. She explains that "there is some amount of resistance
they can not help, because it is natural to jerk when hit", and she
gives a tip as exactly how best to hold the child when beating him up
delivering "licks". Hello? So what are we teaching here?
That you should just lie there and "take it" when someone 4 times your
size is beating up on you? Ironically, in her other post she
discusses teaching children how to deal with bullies. What about
when the parent is the bully? What then? I am so sick for
these poor children.
There's more to the "Babywise" book,
by the way, and if you're not familiar with it, it's the one that
advises baby torture, withholding food so as to put Baby on a schedule
(described as "Parent Directed Feeding") to suit the parent, and also
advocates the "cry it out" method of sleep persuasion. One happy
Amazon reviewer says, "Yes your baby will cry, yes you will feel bad
for letting them cry and yes people will look at you like you have
three heads."
My thought exactly. If having a baby upsets
the family's schedule that much, why have a baby at all? What are
they there for, anyway, decoration? Why not just get a bunch of
plastic crap from K-Mart and strew it all over the livingroom, wouldn't
that accomplish about the same thing? Then you wouldn't have to
worry about the diapers, the whole scheduling thing, the mess, the
smell, and you could just go on watching NASCAR and One Life To Live
and Dr. Phil and probably save a lot of money on baby formula.
I
nursed my daughter until she was 3.5 and then only stopped because her
brother was due for an appearance. Both of them and their older
brother I carried around in a sling, slept with, rocked, sang to,
stayed up with all night if I had to, and fed when they were
hungry. Spanking doesn't even enter our universe, yet my kids are
(mostly) well-behaved without being little robots. They're
children. How could
it be okay to hit a child? I didn't read a book to know what to
do. If you
listen, the baby will tell you.
