Last years conversation

Last year at Halloween there was a party organised here, which I attended. I was pregnant at the time and this resulted in a couple of interesting conversations.

One of the topics was co-sleeping. I was told that it was not good to do that as one of people the at the party had done that with her youngest son and now he was not able to live alone, so when he had to go to another country with the military he took his girlfriend alone.
After a bit of talking I realized that this whole issue had nothing to do with the co-sleeping. The mother of this child had worked full-time as she was a single mother and the little boy only had his mother at night. Therefore it was the best thing she could have done for him considering the circumstances. This had made him to be quite a stable and healthy adult. The only thing was that he preferred not being alone, which is not that strange, as humans aren't made to be alone, they are supposed to live in groups anyway. So definitely this could not have been attributed to co-sleeping and considered unhealthy. Unfortunately his mother did not agree with me.

The other topic was dummies and blankies. I do not want my children to be attached to a dummy or a blanky, as these are substitutes for a non-present mother. I want my children to be attached to me. The reasons for that are that I want them to be able to build up healthy relationships with humans and not have them have relationships with plastic or fabric, as we are humans, so the most healthy relationship is to have one with a human.

The next topic was carrying my baby and the way I parent. I could not continue doing that I was told, I wondered why. Well.... a young baby needs to have a room of its own and sleep on its own and needs silence to sleep and stuff.
Well... not my baby, my baby is going to be part of our family. My baby can sleep in a carrier or on the bed or in the livingroom or so. Wherever we are. There is no need to all of a sudden send my children to school because there is new baby or so. I was very very surprised by the thought that I would have to all of a sudden change my parenting style, just because there is a 4th coming, when I have managed with 1, 2 and 3 children I surely can manage to keep doing what works for us with 4 :-)

And to be honest, it has worked out very well.