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The Family Business News
  • Have Babies; Will Travel
  • Kelley Shields
  • baby careparenting
Have Babies; Will Travel

When your new arrival arrives, EVERYthing will change--and I do mean everything. Which is why you might want to consider incorporating the baby into an existing schedule as much as possible as opposed to creating an entirely new--and rigid--one around their care, for both their benefit and yours!

Brian and I went about things this way and experienced terrific results without compromising any of our daughters' needs. They were both well-adjusted infants and toddlers, easily and happily adapting to myriad environments and stimuli.

Parenting requires what can feel like at times to be an unattainable stamina. Doing the job well will require  constantly renewed levels of patience, courage, compassion and innovation. The day-to-day for long stretches of time involves a lot of repetition. We are all familiar with the adage about all work and no play producing dullness. We believed and applied to our parenting style the notion that keeping ourselves operating at our highest levels of well-being was going to produce the best parenting we were capable of. And our well-being absolutely required and still does, sufficient stimulation and variety of experiences to keep us engaged with our lives.

What this looked like practically was that the girls, who were in Brian's primary daily care as I worked full time, were in tow with him in museums, galleries, parks, libraries, stores--where ever his work as a father and artist might take him on a given day. We knew he was completely capable of creating the appropriate napping and feeding conditions on-the-go and in this manner both girls developed an ease of being that might not have manifested if they were only put to sleep and eat on rigid schedules in specific environments.

Tamara Jeffies discusses the pros and cons of this topic with experts in the parenting.com article, Starting The Right Schedule.
  • Kelley Shields
  • baby careparenting

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