There are many people who say that parenting comes naturally and that when you have a baby, you will simply know what to do.
This may be true for some people, but for me, and many others, parenting is a learned skill. This is why people such as health nurses, lactation consultants, parenting experts, and more exist. They exist to teach parents the skills they need to navigate life as a parent.
As mentioned before, I was an undiagnosed autistic & ADHD parent. I became a parent at 24 years old, after nearly 4 years of marriage (two weeks off if we’re counting). I thought I’d be fine as I had spent most of my life around kids, being the oldest of 4 kids, taught Sunday School, been paid as a babysitter since I was 12, and generally been around kids and babies my whole life. I knew how to do things like change a nappy…
But nothing prepared me for the relentlessness of being a parent, especially when I had a baby who screamed for the first 3 months of his life.
There was so much to learn, from tired signs to caring for nappy rash, to so many other things.
Then there was the conflicting advice.
Feed on demand, but also have a schedule.
Have the baby sleep in his own room, or have him in yours, or co-sleep.
And on… and on….
One thing I realised after I was diagnosed and reflecting on all of this was that so much advice assumed the whole family was neurotypical.
A lot of the baby care information was pretty standard, but as the kids grew, more and more information was aimed at a neurotypical family, and I did my best to follow it all.
I was told this information was ‘best practice’ and following it would mean I would have happy, healthy kids.
Because I didn’t know better, I believed them and struggled to follow it – from toilet training to sending the kids to school, to packing lunch boxes and sitting up for dinner, to homework tips, and so much more. Everything was aimed at a neurotypical family as that is what I thought we were (spoilers, we weren’t).
I was terrified that if I didn’t follow the parenting lessons I’d been taught, I would somehow set my kids up for failure.
The fact our family didn’t follow things due to health issues didn’t help either… but that’s a post for another day.
So many of the lessons I was taught, from the pregnancy & birth classes onwards, were aimed at neurotypical families and didn’t leave any wiggle room. We were told in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t follow their advice, we were ‘bad parents’, and no one wanted that.
As an undiagnosed AuDHD parent, with crippling self-esteem issues and being terrified of failure, and being taught not to trust my gut, I tried to follow those lessons.
Sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if the lessons were different, if they weren’t so prescriptive and taught some other methods to try, or if the trainers were open for discussion, if things may have been different. As it was, I did my best to follow those lessons to the letter, and I saw other parents who have since been diagnosed do the same.
One thing we all had in common was we desperately wanted the best for our kids, to make their childhoods easier than ours had been, to protect them from the battles we fought, but not really knowing what they were… so we followed the lessons we were taught as parenting is not always natural and, for many of us, it doesn’t come naturally.
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