Our parenting philosophy is these three things

Even before my wife and I started our family, we discussed our views on parenting. What kind of parents did we want to be? How would we raise our kids? What role would religion play? How would we share parenting responsibilities?

Of course, all these questions were important to discuss, and discussing them before we had our first child let us do so in a manner that was less stressful than trying to do it while sleep deprived with a newborn.

In discussing this, we agreed that we would raise our children with two main principles: unconditional love and establishing boundaries.

The unconditional love part was easy and intuitive. Our child(ren), whom we chose to bring into this world, needed unending, undying love from us. No matter what they did or where they did it or who they did it with. We would always love them. If a child of ours grew up to be a convicted felon, we’d still love them no matter what. We wouldn’t be proud of them, but we would always love them.

The other intuitive part was about setting boundaries. The primary practical thing a parent has to do is keep their kid alive. As long as they’re breathing and not bleeding out, they’re going to be okay. We knew we had to establish rules, adaptive over time, on what our kids could do and when they could do it. This helped keep them alive.

So we went forth and implemented these two principles with our daughter was born.

And it seemed like these principles were easy: love and protect our child.

What was not easy was getting her to sleep at night. After several months of constantly waking up, we reached out breaking point and called a child sleep expert, Jessica Vonada from Good Morning Sunshine. We told her our plight, and she assured us that our situation was normal and that she could help.

And she was right. A few weeks later, with Jessica’s help, our girl was sleeping through the night, 12 hours, on her own. And through that process we learned something from Jessica: children need to be able to do things independently. Every time you do something for them, they can grow accustomed to it and you risk creating a dependency.

That was a novel idea to us, something we had never thought about it before. But Jessica was right. Our girl needed to be able to sooth herself and put herself back to sleep. And as she got older, it wasn’t just sleeping, it was everything. Each time we carried her, she wasn’t practicing walking. Each time we fed her, she wasn’t practicing doing it on her own. So on, and so on.

Of course, we’re not asking her to do calculus, but we did learn the importance of ensuring that we were giving her opportunities to do things independently that were appropriate for her age. And that became the third pillar of our parenting philosophy: developing independence, along with unconditional love and setting boundaries.

We’re not perfect, but our two kids are still alive (at least as of the publishing of this post)! :)

By the way, if you have a child who is having a tough time sleeping through the night on their own, definitely reach out to Jessica. She’s worth 10 times what she charges, and you’ll thank me later.