this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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In case this is ever useful for someone to read:
It is OK to just put a child down and leave the room if you can't handle them for whatever reason. It doesn't make you a bad person. Just leave the room, get some space and call someone for help if you need it.
Update: was not expecting a meme/prank about porn to generate such a thoughtful and valuable discussion about child safety and cultural attitudes to parenting. Thank you Piper Perri.
As a parent of two young autistic children, breaks are very important. You will parent better and they will react better
Wow. No kids here. But this is absolutely not the narrative I’ve picked up through mostly American media. In the back of my mind is this pull that essentially says that if a baby is awake—especially if they’re being frustrating—it should not be alone.
The wow is because 1. I wasn’t even aware I felt that way, and 2. because it’s in conflict with what sounds like helpful advice.
I'm a parent of four, at least two of whom are autistic, and I can confirm. A child is almost never in danger in their crib; and if you are unsure of your ability to control your anger, they are potentially in danger in your arms.
American popular media has a fairly rosy and tidy view of kids. Even when they're portrayed as difficult, they're still lovable scamps. And, to be clear, kids are great; I love being a dad more than almost anything I've ever done.
But they're also very difficult; and no matter how even-keeled you are in normal life, you find yourself in a pretty dark place when they're still crying and you're on your third night in a row with only two hours of sleep. Sitcoms never show the end of the frayed rope.
I haven't ever shaken or otherwise harmed my children. But I have often been horrified by the dark intrusive thoughts that come into my mind at 3am; and four kids in, I'm much more comfortable with leaving them in bed.
My wife and I joke about this all the time — how the hell can we become more like Daniel Tiger's parents!? We swear right off-camera in the other room they're ripping a massive bong or something to remain that chill.... And Daniel, that kid is perfect, listens to reason all the time, and pretty much never has a tantrum!
Just once I want to see Daniel lose his shit followed by the parents who are exhausted trying to hold it together. I want a realistic portrayal of parenting and childhood tantrums. I want to see the parents break down and over-punish or say something wrong but then retract and come back and say sorry, etc.
That being said, we take our own deep breaths, try our best to comfort our kiddos when we can and ensure that all their needs are met. And when all else fails—gas, diaper, food, play-time, teething, checking for cold symptoms, holding them in a low-stimulus room, etc. — we give them a little time to try to calm down or take a nap. On the flip-side, we're not fans of the CIO method and aren't just going to let them go on and on for a half hour or more. A reset after that tends to reveal whatever the problem is.... But anyway, we're still learning.
Yeah, I'm often amazed at how the closest thing to realistic anger I've ever seen Daniel's parents fall into is when Daniel used his dad's sock to make a puppet. And the closest thing to a real tantrum that Daniel himself has ever had was when he was...like, over-exhausted or something?
Same with Bluey. That dad is setting expectations way too high.
That never worked for us either. The kid definitely escalates. Resets work way better.
Bandit models a lot of good parenting, but he's way too much of a pushover to be an actual role model. Also, I'm sure you'd look like a super parent if people only got to see your absolute best moments.
Oh, that's a good point. My nine best dad minutes every week probably compare significantly more favorably to Bandit's than a randomly-selected nine minutes.
Bandit has unlimited energy and a team of well-slept writers. He's a good role model as long as you realise he is as unrealistic as any other cartoon animal.
I hear you fellow dad. I doubt anyone wants to admit it but we all have limits to our patience, kindness and responsibility, especially, like you say, when deprived of sleep and getting screamed in the earhole for long periods of time. Kids (and especially babies of course) don't understand that. A couple of times I've been so strung out and stressed that I've had to put the baby down and go outside and beat the earth with a stick. This was much easier to do, having previously been given the advice by a midwife. It's too easy to think you should have infinite patience, which is why I think things can go tragically wrong in some cases.
No kidding. My outlet is a long bike ride, but that assumes my wife is home and not also feeling at the end.
I seriously can't wait to go out for a guilt-free bike ride!
+1 here, bike rides are just the perfect way to cool down. Somewhat heavy sustained physical activity just takes you away and drains from any anger
Trampolines work wonders. Even one of the little ones. Jumping rope is good too, if you're good at it. Your leg muscles are your biggest muscles and engaging them will burn off the most stress hormones the most efficiently.
Yeah, there's a totally inflexible cultural expectation of parents to be there for their kids no matter what, with no regard for bedrock emotional and psychological limitations or even common sense. Incidentally, I think this is why so many people are shocked and appalled when they become adults in the big bad world and discover that it isn't devoted to them. It's a tough gig for the best of us but if you've been brought up with an illusion of god-like figures who can unfailingly be summoned at all times to protect you from everything then I think adulthood is a wake-up call that probably never ends.
Ow, well that hits me right in the childhood hah.
I think it's important to note that this kind of parenting not only sucks once the kid reaches adulthood, but can be actively abusive to the kid as a form of control tied to an expectation of ownership. By being the one to meet every one of their child's needs, the parent can make that support very transactional and conditional in private. I'm thinking of a particular model of parenting common in rural Christian communities in the US, which is echoed in "parent's rights" rhetoric.
In that environment, not only is a parent expected to meet every single one of their child's needs, but a child is also expected to not have needs their parent can't meet in the moment. If they do, too bad, they don't and are really just being ungrateful of how hard their parent works to raise them already. Children are isolated from each other in highly car-centric communities where their only way of seeing another kid is by asking to be driven, which allows a parent to decide who their child interacts with. Boys are expected to be especially unemotional, so even things like suidicidality and SA are swept under the rug and the child has so few other people to bring that to other than their parents. Girls get their own flavor of emotional negligence that I can't speak to but I think few would be shocked at the themes of reproductive control inherent there.
As an adult this has all sorts of knock-on effects, one of which can be an overinflated sense of how much the outside world will serve them - but the reverse can be true at the same time, one can also learn that the outside world will never rise to meet their unmet needs, which makes relationships pretty difficult among other things. It can also lead to alexithymia as one learns to only feel how others expect them to feel.
You leave your baby in a safe place, usually their bed. They will survive the time you pipe down.
Your advice isn't bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren't so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381308/
The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn't intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.
And obviously you can't trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it's clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. "Fell down the stairs" is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.
The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren't related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don't do well in prison.
Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.
When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn't need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic "experts". New parents don't need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.
I don't think that harming babies because you're frustrated is an excuse, whether it's shaking, beating or whatever. I agree with you that there shouldn't be a distinction in law and definitely agree that new parents need less anxiety foisted on them. As others in this discussion have pointed out, there is a huge implicit expectation in our culture for parents to have zero limit to their patience. Combine that with the suggestion that you might randomly flip out and kill your baby and you have a recipe for yet more anxiety, if not disaster. Letting people know that it's OK to just leave the situation for a few minutes to calm down recognises parents limits and offers a release valve to parents who have been told that there shouldn't be one. It won't make a difference to anyone who is simply cruel or falsely accused of child abuse but that's not who the original comment was addressed to.
I think a combination of reasonable laws/justice and reinforcement of common sense for new parents would be really good.
I understand the comment comes from a good, conscientious place, but from context it's clearly talking about the shaken baby thing, which I think is misinformation that originated in a moral panic and has never really been demonstrated to be a thing.
And I agree that frustration absolutely isn't an excuse but that's really my point, I think you need to have something deeply wrong with you to shake a baby in the way that "shaken baby" actually means. Like as a new parent I remember seeing a demonstration by a nurse on this topic, and the way she shook that doll's body was obviously intended to be shocking, but it's not something you do just because you're frustrated. It's clearly violent. Like, I can confidently say I don't think anybody in that room needed that demonstrated any more than they needed to be told, "Remember, don't repeatedly punch your own baby in the face." If you're gonna do that then no amount of warning will change it I don't think.