Do mommies have to be perfect?

Have you ever been judged by anyone or have YOU judged a mother for:

• Not Nursing/Bottling

• Offering screen time

• Feeding healthy/unhealthy food

• Going back to work or staying at home to take care of your baby

• Not reading to yours much as you should

• Holding/Nursing her to sleep

• Baby not sleeping through the night

The list goes on. As for me, I have experienced both positive and negative judgement. Positive judgement is more like criticism towards something that is actually good: “oh, you don’t allow any screen time, I will see how that goes when she is older” or “oh, you don’t give any sugar, she is never going to know taste of ice cream?”

Negative judgment would be something like “you have to nurse on demand, otherwise your milk supply will never go up” or “isn’t she cold? You have to put a pair of socks on” or “she is old enough to sleep through the night/in her own room"

When I look back, there are so many things I have done some thought I should not have. For example, people thought I should not introduce formula yet I did. And I am not sorry about it.

And there are so many things I did not do that I should have according to others. For example, I did not rush my baby to walk. I simply wanted her to achieve at her own pace. (She is 15 months and still not walking, expert in crawling though:))

Along the way, I learned that unless it is my doctor who provides a comment, I will not listen to it. It will go from one ear and out the other. I just do my own thing.

Society rules by perfection though. People around us expect perfection most of the time or they want to see things are done in their way. If we let them affect the way we parent our kids, it means we play the game by others' rules. Then it is not fun. Parenting is supposed be fun, not all the time obviously but for the most part.

And do we really have to be perfect? Do mommies/daddies have to be perfect? Should we really strive for perfection when it comes to our parenting style?

For me, the answer is NO. Easy NO for two reasons:

1- Every family is unique. Every baby is unique. Dynamic one family has or struggle another family goes through is incomparable to any other. Decisions are taken based on these dynamics. Moral of the story is, let's try and avoid judgement as we do not have a full knowledge of the whole story. We cannot just spend a few hours with a family and come to conclusion. It is just not fair.

2- A mother or a father knows her baby much better than any other person in this world ever could. So let's trust that. As long as a baby is LOVED and CARED, that is really all that matters.

Babies raised with LOVE is all this world needs...