Continuing Your Parenting Growth as Your Little Ones Get Older: TBSTP Perspective

We’ve noticed as an admin team that we are getting increasing numbers of posts from parents wanting help and ideas for managing their little person’s burgeoning personality, growth and push for autonomy. People are wondering how to best handle tantrums, discipline, boundaries and new challenges and often, this is the first time these have featured in this parent’s journey. As a result, they have often defaulted to the engrained, mainstream practices that come to us quite automatically as a result of our own childhood experiences and what we have seen as accepted parenting standards around us in society.

This is where we’d like to take pause for a moment.

Just as we seek to see a shift away from the dominant sleep training culture, we believe that it is right and fair that a critical eye should be cast on all ‘accepted’ parenting practices as our children grow to ensure we make our decisions with an informed light, not just following the status quo.

This group will always have a sleep focus but we would like to lend our weight to some resources we believe will help people develop an informed approach to parenting as an extension of what you already know from here about sleep.

Many mainstream parenting practices focus heavily on control and coercion to ‘make’ the child comply to behavioural standards that have been set.

Timeouts
Isolation
Ignoring
Yelling
Ultimatums
Rewards
Punishment
Shaming
Even smacking/spanking

All feature in the mainstream parenting toolbox. An ‘us versus them’ mentality full of battles and winners and losers.

In many ways, this is similar to how Sleep Training works and is why, these practices seem to naturally spawn from the Sleep Training experience and the way parents choose to keep managing their child.

But there are other ways.

Ways that honour all of the humans in the relationship. No winners or losers. No battles to wage and win.

Just people working and living with people with respect for the developmental level of the youngest and most vulnerable person in the relationship and the very real need to be understood and feel connected.