When dd1 was a week old, silly us, first time parents, had her up till 10 thinking she'd sleep longer! Doh! Exhausted baby and parents! A helpful soul said,"the first mistake you've made is you've got her in the bed with you." Well, I eventually figured out that our babies like to be sleeping (except for bf) pretty much 7 pm - 7 am til about age 3 - but I never did take that advice and our babies shared our bed until they were at least 6 months old.

But then, later, while our dd was learning about sleeping at night, in her own sweet time like babies do, someone else helpfully supplied us with a copy of 'Babywise'.

Now if you really want to see steam out of my ears and froth from my mouth, just get me started on that.

But I am ashamed to say that even though I revolted at the premise of the book, at that time, I was impressionable enough that some of it *stuck*. And my baby was the guinea pig. (I've since apologised to her.) I left her to 'cry it out' a few times. (Cringe, blush of shame). Then we threw out the book (and kept the baby hah hah). Since then, I have collided with a plethora of authoritarian, violence promoting, legalistic, formulaic parenting books but Babywise sure inoculated us against falling for any more of the same ilk.

We stumbled along trying to trust our instinct against the tide of our upbringings and the popular doctrine surrounding us until we came across The Baby Book by Sear & Sears and found out that what we were trying to do by instinct had a name: attatchment parenting.

To be honest we are not 'there' yet. When I see parents who are truly practicing gentle parenting, I feel ashamed and realise so many of our ways are still impatient, dictatorial, abusive and insensitive. We agree with having clear and consistent boundaries, but those can be gently set and maintained. Chatting to dh the other day we realised that when we yell, it's because of a failure to gently, calmly teach & train on our part. We yell out of frustration because we know we haven't taken the time to effectively communicate with our kids.

Compared to where we were we've come a long way and parted company with a lot of people who believed they were Right - and we hope to continue to grow. It's good to surround ourselves with people setting a compassionate example - (we know where we WANT to be) - even though sometimes it's confronting as we have to once again dismantle an assumed belief or value from childhood or society around us.