Parenting. It's not rocket science.

"We read the books. Our babies do not" - Spirit Led Parenting

The only text book I'll be studying for a while

I picked up a book from the library about weening and it had a bit about sleep (goodness knows why, this was a book on weening for goodness sake).

I threw it across the room (sorry, library book) when I read about how babies have the ability to sleep through the night, and should be doing it, from merely a few weeks of age.

Who is it who writes these books?

When I was at university I would be jealous of my housemates who studied Pharmacy. While Pharmacy was a lot more intense than teaching, it seemed that at least any of those science-based courses were better because rather than different theories, approaches and learning styles about school aged kids, at least science was just that. More of a one answer fits all.

And I guess because of my educational background I have the tendency to want to find the answer in a book. And that everything should be found in a book, make perfect sense, and be the answer to all my problems and I live happily ever after the end. Wrong!

It took me to be a blubbering mess in a doctors waiting room with a one month old colicky baby for me to realise that everything is not so black and white. Each textbook, with a different approach, was written for one baby, not always mine.

In this day and age, parents are indirectly told to fear. Fear that your life will run into chaos. Fear that you're doing everything wrong. Fear that if you don't follow the trends of the current age, it's not right, and you'll deprive your baby.

And sometimes, we're just too busy reading the books, rushing to the specialist, looking for answers, pondering 'what if' and trying so bloody hard not to stuff it up when we forget to do something that is just the natural thing to do: just be the parent, and follow our intuition.

(That said, if you sense something is wrong, by all means you should be getting medical advice).

Unlike the textbooks I had at uni, this new 'study' (which, I voluntarily force upon myself) is so much more complex than Maslow's heir achy of needs or Piaget's theories of cognitive development. I need to stop reading the books. I need to stop over analysing. I need to just plunge in to the job at hand today.

Parenting. It's not rocket science. Rocket science would be way easier.