Mom Wars, or...why can't we agree to disagree?

A lot of people are great parents before they have kids. We've all heard about (or experienced) people saying within earshot of a mom dealing with a tantrum or a crying baby or some other rather embarrassing situation, "Well, if I had a child, I wouldn't let them get away with that." Or saying "When I have children I won't feed them formula/breastmilk/ice cream/junk food...or use the television as a babysitter...or [insert some judgmental remark here]." You get the picture.

Annoying? Yes, but it kind of makes sense. They don't know. They haven't been in that situation before. Maybe they wouldn't do any of that stuff. Maybe they would, but at least (in my head) there's the ignorance factor. Heh. Maybe I'm so forgiving because I was totally guilty of this before the Little Man was born.

What really gets me are the MOMS who say this stuff. It's like a giant pissing contest between judgy moms and whoever gets their children to age 18 without breaking any mom taboos first wins. Bonus points if you can inflict guilt on as many other moms as you can in the process.

Here's my take on it.

I'm one of 5 kids. My oldest sibling is 15 years older than my youngest sibling. Mom was 23 when she had the oldest of us, 38 with the youngest. So she's been the "young mom" and the "older mom."

My two older sisters were both formula fed. My brother and I were exclusively breast fed, and my younger sister started on the breast but was switched to formula at 3 months because she had both upper and lower teeth and was, um, not gentle.

My two older sisters were cloth diapered. My younger siblings and I were in disposables from birth to potty training.

And so on. In other words - we were raised pretty differently from each other.

But in the end, we all ended up walking, talking, making it through school, and all 5 of us graduated college. Including my brother who has autism - which introduced all KINDS of socially "unacceptable" (for the time) parenting strategies.

What works for one person won't necessarily work for someone else. What works for one KID won't necessarily work for the next kid. Moms should know this. Moms should be experts in this. So someone wants to formula feed or use cloth diapers or disposables or elimination communication, or co-sleep, or have their kid sleep in the nursery, or watch TV before age 2, or cry-it-out. BFD. It won't ruin a kid, and as long as said kid is happy, healthy, and well cared for it's none of anyone else's business.

That's not to say that I don't plan to post strategies or things that have worked for me with the Little Man. I'm all for sharing tools to stick in the Mom Toolbelt, just not trying to force everyone to use them.

Ok? Ok.

/soapbox rant