image: getantsy.com
It can sometimes feel like a lot of parents these days follow the same script, with only tiny deviations. Perhaps it’s because we’ve all read the same books. We all had the same sense of indignation at Tiger Mom, the same vertigo while watching Russian Yoga Mom.
And then comes a comment like this from PrimalMama this weekend, in response to our Lena Fokina interview, a comment that glides in from an alien planet where babies are… well, read for yourself:
To all the horrified American mamas:What about the terrible tradition of FORCING your baby to eliminate waste on themselves? Do you ever stop to consider how terrible and harmful that is to the baby? You don’t think that the baby would be much happier and less stressed if you would communicate with your baby and allow them to eliminate waste away from themselves like any respectable human wants?Should I go as far and say that any mother who forces her child, be them 1 day or 1 year, to wear a diaper should have her child taken away and charged with inhumane acts to a baby?Get over yourselves and see the big picture….
My God. What I have been doing to my children?
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You, sir, are history’s greatest monster.
Especially because my bairn is such an… active user of diapers.
A guy told me during a “disagreement” online the other day that I was a fat bastard lacking in compassion and was a !*%&#@ arrogant hypocrite because my wife and I gave birth to a child rather than adopting. I know, right?! I’m no hypocrite! I support adoption and am even considering the option for a 2nd and/or 3rd child. I will admit he had me on the fat, arrogant bastard part though.
You make a good beer, Arrogant Bastard, whether or not you adopt a child.
As someone who did diaperfree (and modified diaper free for my second and third after my first went on strike shortly after 1) I fully agree with PrimalMama.
I’m just not sure why we all get super pissed at people swinging their babies around when we have babies right here at home who will be living in abject poverty because we are fearful of some fictionalised socialist states.
Dogma, in any form, is arrogant. We each could pick apart the next person … kids’ diets, lack of exercise, crap that the masses feed ’em from McDs, grocery stores, multinationals.
It was a really interesting story, managed to keep big media afloat for a few days so that we don’t have to think about the babies in Pakistan, Iraq, First Nations reserves …
But you know, I just keep my big trap shut.
Oops.
Agree about toning down the dogma. I was just a bit surprised that there even was dogma about ‘elimination communication’. Sounds like an awesome thing if you can pull it off, but I’m not sure I’m damaging my kid by ‘forcing’ him to crap his pants. He actually knows pretty well where the bathroom is, if he (as he hopefully will be soon) ever gets inclined to use it.
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I have found that any conversation I attempt to have, no matter how middle-of-the-road I feel about it, or frame it, is tense. What is it about childrearing?!
I did my own modified diaperfree for extremely selfish reasons. I didn’t like cleaning poopy diapers when I babysat for some 8 years. I was grateful to myself when preggers and nauseous and not having to do anything but inhale the shit 😎 It made toilet training a breeze, comparatively speaking. But I was exposed to it when I was living with locals in a small Indonesian village, and again as I observed the kind and sane citizens of Hong Kong holding their wee ones to pee curbside as I was stepping out of a cab in my John Fluevog togs …
I don’t think I would necessarily pass the mustard on the whole EC movement because of how I modified the dogma, but then, I’ve been pretty bitter about following peoples’ dogmas since my mom forced me to sit in my own poopy diapers. I’m quite sure I’m damaged goods.
Karen,
I’m curious to hear more about your modified dogma and methods! I only recently heard about an alternative to diapers (hadn’t questioned the idea of them at all) when reading Jean Liedloff’s ‘The Continuum Concept’ (EC seems to work like a charm in a a secluded village in the Amazon). And a colleague mentioned seeing babies running around kibbutz in Israel free to pee wherever they like and parents cleaning it up if it is indoors…. Certainly seems like it would save money and time! Not sure that diapers are as damaging as the Continuum Concept alleges (I don’t yet have any little ones of my own, I just do birth and parenting research for a ‘living’…) but I’m curious about your more middle of the road ideas/methods for when you’re (I assume) not living in a village.
Best,
CB
Camera Bird,
You can email me at yeepoa at telus dot net and I’m happy to fill you in a little … Whilst I have lived in a village in the middle of the jungle, I live in the wilds of Vancouver now, and it killed my sisters/parents that my kids were peed curbside in our fair city, uptown and down.
karen
So when I shit myself over some of the stuff parents do and say, then should I blame my mom for preconditioning me to respond in such way by making me wear diapers until I was 10–I mean 3? Sheesh.
Yes, blame your mother. As Freud (maybe) pointed out, she controls your colon.
I like to shit myself. So there.
sigh. they always blame the mother. i personally blame my dad, but that’s just me. and him. definitely him.
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