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Vaccinations

Before I even get started with this hot topic, let me make myself perfectly clear, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that vaccinating your child will cause them long-term harm. However, there is plenty of scientific evidence that not vaccinating your child could not only cause real harm to your child but to any child your child comes in contact with. Now that we’ve gotten that out in the open…

I have purposely avoided writing about vaccines because, as with many controversial topics, you will offend someone. Just like discussing politics at dinner, it is generally in bad taste to bring up topics that polarize people unless you are specifically looking to start a very heated dialogue/argument.

There are many people in my life, that I respect, who do not agree with my view on vaccinations. Life experiences, influential people in the media, or maybe just misleading information has led them to believe that the benefits of vaccinations are not worth the risk to their children’s health. Unfortunately, science does not agree with them.

Of the vaccination myths, one of the biggest misconceptions is that vaccinations have contributed to the rise in number of children with Autism. With 1 in 68 children being diagnosed with Autism in the United States, the danger is real for parents. However, the doctor that published the finding connecting Autism and use of vaccines has admitted to misconduct within his medical trials and was later striped of his medical license. Despite his research being debunked, his theory remains popular and influential. Why has this information been allowed to flourish and grow without the scientific evidence to back it up?

Parents are scared. And trust me, I am sympathetic to the fear because as a parent, the recent news regarding vaccines has been terrifying. In contrast to the fear of the parents who decide not to vaccinate their children, I am scared that their children could infect my vaccinated child with diseases that most generations now have not had to worry about.

Equally terrifying is where the children in the news have been getting infected. Are places like Disney Land out of the question now? Should I have to be scared to take my child out in public because someone else made a conscious decision to play Russian roulette with their own child’s health? 

When you have a child of your own, the idea, the thought that the world could exist without them in it is unfathomable.

Please, vaccinate your children.

CCC

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The Terrible Twos

We are now moving into the stage of the “terrible twos.” My once darling daughter has now been replaced with a much whiner, increasingly independent and hard-headed version of her previous self. While I still believe that she is far happier and easier going than most children her age, this new stage has brought about new… we’ll call them challenges.

One of the biggest issues I’ve encountered is how to discipline this new child of mine. The old tactics, sternly worded discussions, no longer seem to work. She either finds my anger amusing or just plain ignores me and continues to do what she was doing. This would not be such a big deal if I was only disciplining her for not picking up her toys or screaming at the top of her lungs. Unfortunately the times when my toddler really needs a solid show of discipline is when she puts herself in danger.

My daughter has recently taken to jumping off the couch, climbing on everything, and playing with electrical cords, all things that put her in very real danger. What avenue do I use for discipline when the words no longer seem to matter? Is spanking the answer? As many people would say, I was spanked as a child and I turned out just fine.

If I’m being honest, something about spanking just seems wrong. I tell my daughter not to hit when she is frustrated so why can I hit her when I am frustrated/scared? Would I ever forgive myself if I actually hurt her? What am I actually accomplishing?

Unfortunately for other parents in this same situation, I have no advice for us. I am frustrated with my inability to meet the needs of my child but unwilling to resort to violence as the answer. I am secreting hoping that someone out there with more experience and wisdom will enlighten me with a tactic to reach this new child of mine. If that doesn’t work, at least the “terrible twos” if usually over by the age of four. Only two and a half more years to go…

CCC

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Critical Medical Conversations

Medical treatment fads tend to come and go quickly with the evolution of public opinion. One such trend, that I expected to already be on its way back out, is the idea of the "all natural" birth as the only "real" means of giving birth. What "all natural" birth means has different definitions depending on who is using it- varying from no epidurals, to no pain meds, to no medical interventions at all. Specifically the latter, can have dire consequences for both mother and child if not properly monitored and managed.   A couple that my husband and I are very close to recently had an experience with this dilemma. This couple had decided that they wanted the big kahuna of "all natural" births: no epidurals, no pain meds, and no medical interventions (aka no c- sections). Unfortunately, it seems that they did not have this important discussion with their doctor ahead of time. Instead, this critical discussion came when the wife was already in a medical emergency after her placenta prematurely detached. Her doctor tried recommend a emergency c- section but fell on deaf ears. The couple did not understand the seriousness of her condition nor why the doctor would not stick to their original birth plan. Frustrated, they tried to leave the hospital against medical advice, endangering both the mother and baby's life. Regardless of your personal stance on the idea of a "natural birth," it cannot be said enough how critical it is that doctors and patients have an open and honest discussion about the benefits and consequences of any and all medical interventions. When you or your baby's life is on the line, that is not the time to be questioning your doctor's judgment. Luckily, this story has a happy ending. The wife eventually went into real labor and had a healthy baby boy with few complications. However, there are more and more cases where the family does not receive their "happily ever after." Here's my plea for anyone expecting a child- please make your wishes regarding your care perfectly clear to your doctor before any medical emergency. This discussion should not be put off, emergencies can and do happen. But more importantly, regardless of the birth plan you design with your doctor, please understand that your doctor has one mission on the day of your child's birth- get mom and baby through delivery alive. To accomplish this, sometimes requires doctors to stray from the original birth plan. You need to trust that your doctor has the expertise to properly navigate through these deviations with you and your child's best interests at heart. If you cannot, you need to find a new physician. CCC

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Potty Training: The Next Frontier

Our current house in Philadelphia is nearly impossible to properly child proof. Instead of things like proper baby gates, we are full of half fixes, like chairs blocking the stairs to the basement and teaching my daughter that she does NOT go upstairs without an adult. Since the safety of our house is compromised, we have had to make certain sacrifices to our normal routines in order to keep our daughter safe.

One such change has been to the idea of privacy while completing normally private tasks, for example, the bathroom. This obviously an overshare, but at home, I have to leave the door of the bathroom open so I can keep an eye on my daughter. This has turned the bathroom into a team event. My daughter gets so excited when she knows I’m in the bathroom. She runs in, the moment she knows I am using it, cheers me on and waves. This lack of privacy between the two of us has increased her fascination with all things bathroom related.

Toilets. Gross, right? Not if you are my daughter. Even at her babysitter’s house, my daughter sees the children’s toilet their youngest son is learning to use and is intrigued. Who knew they made toilets just her size?

I know what all this adds up to. Toilet training and big girl underwear are just around the corner. This is the next big hurdle with my daughter and if I am being completely honest, I am terrified of it. I have visions of ruined carpets, mountains of soiled laundry, and clumps of my hair littered around my house.

Potty training is another learning experience that can prove difficult for parents to manage. Not only is the task itself a little abstract but its introduction is supposed to be carefully timed.  I’ve read that you are supposed to wait until your child is at least two years old before you even begin to try potty training. Others argue that as soon as children, like my daughter, begin to show interest in the toilet, it is okay to start trying. Who is right? How do you even begin?

I hear horror stories from parents, more about potty training little boys than little girls, but even so, the parents are half traumatized from the experience. Every once in a while I hear a story from a parent whose child basically potty trained themselves. Jealousy fills my head, of course we won’t be that lucky.

Here’s the thing, I know I cannot stop progress, and I wouldn’t want to. My daughter cannot stay in diapers forever. These developmental milestones, no matter how imitating they seem now, are good things. Potty training is just the next frontier for us, with many more to come later.

CCC

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Expectations

When I hear the word expectation, it elicits a certain visceral feeling in my stomach and my mind drifts to clichés about expectations. “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed,” Alexander Pope. I think this is a dangerous notion to push on parents. If I could pick one piece of advice to offer to new parents, it would be to establish clear expectations for the standard of care for your child and to not be afraid to make them known.

Setting expectations does a couple different and productive things for parents. The most important, in my eyes, is it allows parents the peace of mind associated with knowing the standard of care their child will receive in their absence. This should not be under appreciated. Even something as simple as, “when my child spills water all over their clothes, please change them into their spare clothes,” sets a standard that can be depended on. There is something so reassuring about trusting the environment you leave your child in and knowing that when you return, you should not be caught off guard.

Setting and explaining clear expectations is necessary in many common sense child situations such as from interactions with your in-laws, the babysitter, and other care takers. However, it is important to consider discussing expectations in a perhaps less intuitive situation like with your spouse.  As a mostly stay at home mom with a husband who travels out of town for extended periods of time, my daughter and I have fallen into a set of routines that we follow pretty strictly. We have clear set boundaries and expectations for what our life is like. When my husband returns home, it is easy for these well established, and if I may say, successful, routines to be disrupted. But all kidding aside, as important as it is to set expectations with outside influences on your child, it is equally as important to come to a spoken consensus as parents. A good general rule is to leave any notion of assumption out of expectations because, as the saying goes, “when you assume, you make an … out of you and me.”

I speak from experience when I say that as parents, we set ourselves up for frustration and anger when we are not clear about the expectations surrounding our children. We are able avoid unnecessary conflict when the people involved with caring for our children understand the level of care we expect.

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Breaking Down Gender Barriers

As a teenager, I took great pride in breaking down gender boundaries. I played on an all-male football team, I never wore makeup and you could almost never find me in a dress. From the moment I knew I was having a daughter, I wanted this freedom to not conform for her. My daughter could wear blue instead of pink, play with little green army men instead of dolls, and play in the mud, if she wanted to. While I’ve tried to never push her one way or the other, I always wanted her to have the option to follow her own instincts. As I get ready to have my son, I have come to realize that he does not have the same allowances to break outside of his expected gender roles.

This is an internet meme that makes the rounds on social media every couple of months. It speaks exactly to the point I’d like to make. While women who step outside of their gender roles are pioneers, ground breakers, challenging the social conventions of their time, boys who do so are risking their masculinity. This meme plays to the insinuation that if you allow your son to take on a typically female role, he will somehow become less of a man and/or become *gasp* a homosexual.

My question is, why is it socially acceptable for my daughter to step outside of the typical gender roles but not my son? My daughter’s sexual orientation or femininity is not directly linked to her love of the color pink or unicorns but my son’s love of the color purple and baby dolls is?

I think it is important that as a society we continue to push past the historical gender boundaries and allow our child the freedom to develop individually, as a whole person, with the freedom to make decisions outside of the norm.

CCC

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Growth on her own terms

Milestones.A fairly simple word that quickly becomes a part of every new parent’s vocabulary from the very first appointment with a pediatrician. Milestones allow us to track our child’s developmental steps and gauge progress. What I never expected was how much anxiety I would feel about my daughter’s physical developmental milestones.

My daughter is skinny. Since she was about 4 months old, my daughter really didn’t carry around the “typical” baby fat. It was remarkable how many strangers and acquaintances alike felt the need to tell me how something was wrong with my daughter. “You should really talk to her doctor, maybe she’s not getting enough nutrition.” I actually had, on more than one occasion, someone ask me, “Are you even feeding her?” While they may have been half joking, I never saw any humor in their comment. No, I am intentionally not feeding my daughter. Seriously.

Appointments with the pediatrician all begin the same way, measure every bit of your child’s body and plot it on a chart. This chart not only tracks the growth progression of head circumference, weight, and height on its own curve, it also compares her to her “typically developing peers.” My anxiety level would get so high, I would hold my breath waiting for them to plot her current numbers on her growth curve. After all the comments from others on my daughter’s weight, I was convinced that they were moments away from telling me she had fallen off her curve and needed some sort of medical intervention. It never happened.

It is hard not to compare your child’s perceived progress off of other children. There will always be some children who will grow fast, walk early, speak young and that’s okay. Children all develop on their own timeline. While my daughter is on the smaller side, she has remained constant on her growth pattern, which is what actually matters. As long as she continues to make progress and remains happy and healthy, I am doing my job.

 CCC

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The Price We Pay

Now let me put this out there right now- I would not trade being a mother for anything in the world. Period. -However- As a parent, I often find it hard to find the time for myself. The things that used to seem so normal, that I took for granted, have now become frivolous luxuries that are nearly impossible to find the time for. When I can find the time for these luxuries, there is an enormous amount of guilt associated with completing them. What has been surprising for me, is what I have allowed to fall into the unmentionable desires category. Some items seem more understandable, like taking the time to get my hair *gasp* professionally done, to less understandable, like taking a shower. I give up these things and others, often unconsciously, for the ability to prioritize my children above all else. While this may sound honorable, I was given a good dose of perspective this week as to why putting everyone before yourself is actually probably a really terrible thing. On Thursday of this week I found myself in the ER with apparent heart palpitations. I have never had heart issues in my life so let me tell you that being 24 weeks pregnant with multiple premature ventricular contractions is terrifying. It feels like your heart is momentarily stopping and forces you to catch your breath. At its worst, I was having a PVC every 6 heart beats. Not good. After spending the better part of the day in the ER, we found out that my palpitations were a result of being severely dehydrated and a low blood glucose level of 56. I had to receive 2 bags of fluid (that's a lot) and a decent amount of food to even begin to feel like a real person again. Two days later, I am still exhausted from everything that went on. What is the moral of the story? I put myself, and by extension my daughter and son, in danger because I was not taking the necessary time for myself. Yes, there is a difference between allowing myself to get my hair done and remembering to drink enough water or eat throughout the day, but they both stem from the same problem. While it is important for parents to prioritize their children, it is equally important for us to take moments for ourselves. IT IS OKAY and it does not make us bad parents. We can only care for our children if we are still around. CCC

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To circumcise or not to circumcise?

As a mother who is expecting her first son early this summer, I often think about the choices I need to make for my son and his future. Where will he go to school? What activities will he participate in? How will I teach him to be a strong, confident, compassionate person? These questions, all carry varying degrees of significance, sneak in my brain, plague my every thought. Until recently, I had considered one of the major decisions we make for our sons to be fairly easy. Will we circumcise our son? Sure, why not? It’s what normal people do, right?

Maybe it’s because I am expecting a son but I feel like I have been seeing the topic of male circumcision everywhere, from social media to the news. The hot topic of female genital mutilation has even shifted to include male circumcision. It had never even crossed my mind to consider male circumcision as anything other than the socially acceptable way that many individuals alter their son’s genitals following a tradition deeply rooted in religion.

Taking religion out of the equation, the argument becomes: why do we need to circumcise our sons? Some argue that it is more hygienic to have the foreskin removed, however, science is proving that to not necessarily be true. As with all things related to hygiene, with proper care, retaining the foreskin can easily be as hygienic as having the foreskin removed. I’ve also learned that the foreskin is full of nerves that play a vital role in sexual intercourse. Removing the foreskin not only removes some of the nerves responsible for sensation but also risks permanently damaging the penis. The process of circumcision irreversibly alters the male genitals but, is it mutilation?

We must decide, can circumcision still be considered a valid practice or is it merely male genital mutilation in the guise of a historically relevant covenant? For this mom, the jury is still deliberating.

 CCC

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Should women be allowed to openly breast feed their children in public?

This is a topic that comes in and out of the media’s radar on a relatively consistent basis. What always strikes me about discussing this topic is the wide range of reactions from women not only about what is appropriate, but what rights do they have to their children, their bodies, and public places.

I will start out by saying I am a firm believer in a woman’s right to openly breast feed her child in public. Now this statement could mean different things depending on the reader’s point of view so I will try to dissect through what this means to me. I believe that any woman has the right to breast feed her infant, regardless of the nature of the venue, with or without a cover-up and without being ostracized to less than desirable locations. Let’s consider this to be my bill of rights for the breast feeding mother in public. While it is not completely comprehensive, it addresses some of the major concerns I see brought up when breast feeding in public is discussed in the main stream media.  

Let’s continue to dive deeper into what this bill of rights means.

“I believe that any woman has the right to breast feed her infant.” This is probably the simplest aspect of my bill of rights. If a woman chooses to, she is within her rights to breast feed her child. Studies are constantly linking the health benefits of breast feeding to the development and well-being of the infant. Interestingly enough, researchers are also finding many health benefits for the mother when she decides to breast feed her child. Now, just because I believe that every woman should have a right to breast feed her child, this does not mean that I think every mother has to breast feed her child. If a mother chooses not to breast feed her child that is within her rights.

“…Regardless of the nature of the venue…” This is where I often begin to lose people. Everyone can come up with their favorite venue where breast feeding seems inappropriate. The locations unsuitable for breast feeding can range from church service to their favorite restaurant to an airport. However, I completely disagree and challenge us to explore, why are these venues inappropriate for a mother to feed her child? At least twice in the recent news, Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church has encouraged mothers to feed their children, if hungry, even inside the revered Sistine Chapel. When we examining the restaurant’s inappropriateness, it is often said that it could be considered unsanitary to allow a mother to breast feed her child in a venue where food is prepared for others. Why is it unsanitary for a mother to breast feed her child in a restaurant but not to bottle feed a baby in a restaurant? Ideally, the mother is not behind the line where the food is prepared to begin with so sanitation really does not seem to be the issue but rather personal comfort. I believe a lot of society’s issue with breast feeding, in any public place, can be dissected down into our feelings on the female body and what the female breast has come to represent. But we will examine this more in the next segment.

“… With or without a cover-up…” If I didn’t lose you at breast feeding should be allowed in any location, this is another aspect of my bill of rights that may be difficult to swallow. I do not believe any mother should HAVE to cover up her breast when breast feeding in public. If the cover-up provides the mother with some comfort and allows her to feed her child more successfully, then by all means, use it. However, I do not think that a cover-up should be the expected norm. My daughter hated the cover-up and it made it almost impossible to feed her. It also made me more uncomfortable fidgeting with the thing while trying to keep myself covered then if I had actually just been exposed. Plus those cover-ups can be uncomfortably hot. Why do we think mothers need a cover-up? What is wrong with a female breast feeding a child? Society, unfortunately, has turned the breast into an object of lust rather than function. A woman who has her breast out in public is seen as attention seeking, regardless of the nature of her exposure. The fact that I instantly thought of the word exposure to describe a woman’s breast shown in public is a testament to this phenomenon. When we learn to see the breast for its function in breast feeding, purely as a means to feed a child rather than a sexual organ, I think society can begin to reevaluate its stance on the cover-up.

“… And without being ostracized to less than desirable locations.” As a mother who breast fed her own child, this is a hot point for me. There is nothing worse than needing to feed your child and the only location deemed acceptable is a public restroom. How many grown adults would happily take their own lunch into a public restroom to eat? I am going to venture to guess that there are very few people who would enjoy their lunch in a public restroom. The question then becomes, why would a baby? Babies at least have the benefit of not understanding what happens in a bathroom nor any concept of what germs are, but that is not the point. Public restrooms are not an acceptable place to herd breast feeding mothers into so they are not seen feeding their child.

Although I know that we, as a society, are not yet to the point of accepting my bill of rights across the board, I believe the conversation must be started. By beginning a dialogue and debating these issues with each other, we give ourselves the opportunity to grow and hopefully, make this world a better place for everyone.

CCC