The Great Parenting Re-Brand

While listening to the radio at work the other day I heard a woman called Bea Marshall promoting her new parenting style: YES Parenting. It’s about saying yes to your children so they’ll become independent decision makers, because you know, children have never grown up to become independent decision makers before, ever. This will probably change the world.

 

Yes, I rolled my eyes throughout as she extolled her brand of parenting that seemed to involve jargon speak about connection and intimacy, gratitude and so on. If you want to know more you can pay Bea to counsel you on how to be a better parent and have better children.

 

It’s not that I think everything she said is nonsense, more that I’m sick of parenting being repackaged and resold as a brand or a style. Attachment parenting was the last style of parenting to really irritate me. Mostly due to the phrase ‘baby wearing,’ which has to be one of the most horrific and ludicrous phrases mankind has ever come up with. For centuries people have worn clothes, now we are to wear our babies. To me it conjures up an image of a Cruella de Ville type with loads of babies draped round her neck like a cloak.

 

Let’s be honest, baby wearing is just carrying your baby whilst feeling smug. Mothers, as far as I can remember, have been carrying babies for eons. I don’t know if you’ve ever met a mother with a newborn baby, but in general the mother is usually holding the baby. It’s just the way it is. Sometimes the baby is in a vehicle known as a pram, where it might sleep or in a cot where it might also sleep. This has the benefit of allowing the mother to wash, eat or go to the toilet, not entirely outrageous or selfish actions.

 

What these parenting styles do is glob on to a bit of common sense, pretend they discovered it for mankind and then make that bit of common sense a tad more extreme and dogmatic so they can sell it to their followers.

 

As for me I’ll continue as usual, sometimes carrying the child, sometimes not, sometimes saying yes, sometimes not. Does it have a name? Yes it does. Parenting.

 

Daisy Wilson is a freelance writer who lives and works in West Cork. Mum to an almost-teenager and a toddler who is striding through the terrible twos with a glint in her eye, life is noisy, fun and covered in fingerprint marks.

 

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