Attachment Parenting.  Free Range Parenting.  Ferber Method.  No Cry Sleep Solution. Happiest Baby On the Block.  Dr. Sears.  Vaccination wars.  Pediatrician approved versus parent approved versus grandparent approved methods for feeding, sleeping, disciplining, bonding, and separation.  Lactation specialists and nursing clubs.  Formula feeding dos and dont's.  Cow’s milk or goat’s milk or almond milk or no milk when babies become toddlers.  Approved sippy cups and preschool mandates about how your kid should suck liquids and when and how your kid should poop and pee.

At a time of excitement and uncertainty, we seek community.  We want insight, advice, and support.  Breast or bottle?  Attached or removed?  If I intervene too much, I’ll become a “helicopter” parent.  If I try “free-range,” will I get arrested?

For many of us who eagerly greet parenthood, we are slapped in the face with well intended and sometimes not so well intended people, advice, judgments, and labels.  Others judge us as mothers and fathers, and they judge our kids too.  And most of us are even harder on ourselves.

And it all changes so fast.  What was once the way to introduce peanuts to your child isn’t the way to do it five years later.  What once seemed reasonable science is retracted.  What once seemed sound parent-to-parent advice is publicly damned.

And just when your children are becoming more independent and you're feeling more comfortable, there are daycares and preschools to choose.  Your choices are scrutinized not only by you but by a surprisingly high number of people you didn’t think would ever care so much about where your child attends school or receives care while you’re at work.

As your child enters elementary school, there are new variables, new families, new teachers, new rules and standards, and new ways to engage or disengage with different parent groups, systems, and institutions.  

With regard to our daughter’s educational and extra curricular choices, I often find it hard to determine when she would best be served by me and her dad getting out of the way versus us advocating or strategizing on her behalf.  And our daughter is only in second grade!  I don’t pretend to understand the world of uncertainty that awaits us as she enters adolescence and her teenage years.

Parenting is awesome, and it’s hard too. We all know this. We all get this.  As a fairly privileged white woman in a predominantly affluent community, I know I have it pretty good.  

The labels and systemic stuff that I confront as a parent are a small drop in the bucket compared to what many people of color face, or those whose first language isn’t English, or those who struggle economically, or those with children with diagnosed medical, behavioral, developmental, and psychological conditions.

With this Blog, I hope to share with you some of the lessons I've learned (and many more I am still trying to learn) about acknowledging and also releasing fears related to being a parent and person in this wonderful and sometimes terrifying world. And I hope you will share with me too~