The Illusion of Choice in Parenting

I had three ultrasounds during my pregnancy and at all three, my baby was kicking, wiggling, and thrashing around like a live fish placed on a riverbank.

At my 20 week scan, the ultrasound tech asked if I had had lots of caffeine that day (I hadn’t) because she normally only saw this much movement in babies hyped up on caffeine.

At 30 weeks, I starting waking up with terrible pain in one side of my ribcage. I asked me doctor about it, and she said my baby was kicking me hard enough in my sleep to cause bruising.

At this point, I had a feeling that I already knew something about my daughter.

Soon after her birth, we learned that our baby would not tolerate being swaddled. She was a Houdini escape baby. She was hours old but she would wiggle out of the tightest, most expertly swaddled blankets.

To this day, she does not like to be strapped into a carseat, put into a pack n’ play, or closed into any space really. She has places to go! Her power and energy cannot be contained.

I think about this sometimes when I think about the strength of human preferences. Some of our preferences and personality precede our ability to hold our heads up. Some even precede our birth.

When I think about it this way, it gives me a more compassionate perspective towards people in general.

It also gives me greater self-compassion as a mom. I am constantly surprised about what kind of mom I am. I don’t really like putting myself in a box, but I tend more towards attachment style parenting, which is a term I learned only after making lots of decisions in line with this style.

Honestly, I didn’t know I would be this way. Becoming a mom brought out so many feelings and instincts that I have decided to trust. They are honestly the most powerful instincts that I have ever experienced. To go against them feels not only difficult, but deeply wrong.

I’ve decided that parenting styles are less like choices and more like personality traits. Can you change your personality? Yes and no. It is possible, but extremely difficult.

Combine this with circumstances beyond our control, and you have a more accurate view of parenting decisions.

So why do we talk about parenting as if it is simply a series of freely-made choices?

For instance, we tend to talk about breastfeeding vs. formula as a decision moms make, but if you talk with moms about these things, they won’t tell you about a decision-making process. They will tell you the story of what happened. Same with whether to work or stay at home. A small number of moms may feel that they freely made this decision, but most will tell you they had very little choice, either due to circumstance or instinct, or at least it was experienced that way.

Like all moms, I have felt the pain of being judged, criticized, and laughed at for certain decisions I have made as a mom, like my decision to start co-sleeping after 11 months of sleep-deprived depression.

These moments of judgment or criticism sent me into shame spirals on several occasions, until I actually looked into research and found that not only is it perfectly safe to co-sleep after a certain age (or, as safe as any other kind of infant sleep provided you follow recommendations) but there are many experts who believe in various psychological and developmental benefits to co-sleeping.

I’m not trying to say parents have no agency or that we can’t change. I have made changes based on all kinds of data and information. In fact, like most of our innate strengths, there are times where we need to seek greater balance by acting against our inclinations. It would also be dangerous to suggest that people cannot change harmful or abusive parenting behaviors because it’s just “who they are.” I know that that is false.

However, for most of us, I do think our parenting style is a reflection of who we are on the deepest levels. I do think parents should be freely and fearlessly who they are.

All of this is mostly just an observation. But I do think it has these takeaways.

1. Unless you think a child is being actually mistreated, neglected, abused, or harmed, let’s not criticize each other’s choices as moms.
2. Do your research, but also allow yourself to be yourself as a mom. Stop letting other people make you feel bad because they do it differently.

As various research-based authors have pointed out in parenting books, there are many styles of parenting and the data suggests that most of them are pretty good. Let’s all go with that.

---

Thanks for reading. To get posts straight to your inbox, subscribe below: