When the stepkidlet returned after 9 weeks in Europe this summer, she was full of stories of cultural differences in child-rearing. Her relatives in Spain, according to her, don’t have any bedtime for their toddler, and allows the little girl to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning with the adults. The girl is hyper, fussy, and doesn’t nap well or at all. When mealtimes come, the girl is placed in her high chair, and then one adult immediately clasps the girl’s forehead and chin, forcing her mouth open, and the other adult shovels food in the girl’s mouth. The girl isn’t even given a chance to decide whether she will resist the food. It’s all force-fed immediately. This toddler is also fed soda in her bottle and eats junk food all the time. In telling us these Spanish habits she’s observed, the stepkidlet mentioned that Allie’s nanny Jayne had said that she doesn’t know how she would care for other babies if she decides to nanny professionally after Allie, because if the parents don’t have a healthy napping/eating/playing routine established for the kid, she isn’t sure she could handle it. Jayne calls Allie the exemplar baby, and considers herself spoiled by the regular, predictable breaks she gets when Allie takes her hour+ naps twice a day. (I’m pretty sure I’ve warned her that Allie will naturally drop the morning nap sometime in her first year.) The stepkidlet said thoughtfully that when she has kids of her own, she wants to raise them the way I’m raising Allie, which unfortunately means that her kids can’t be around her own mother, who raises children in the Spanish-culture way. I’d thought she was being facetious.

Today, the stepkidlet joined Mr. W, Allie, and me at the Lake. During Allie’s lunchtime there, the stepkidlet helped hold Allie and hand her the sippy cup while I fed a chicken and carrot puree, a purple yam puree, and red Bartlett pear puree for dessert. The stepkidlet was full of questions about the steps it took to make each vegetable item, and then she said she definitely wanted to follow my parenting style for her own future kids. I laughed and told her I’d be here, she doesn’t have to memorize everything now. She said again that she wants to learn this because she won’t be able to bring her kids around to her mom if she wants them to be raised healthily. We chatted about nutrition and early established healthy eating habits.

It didn’t hit me until earlier, while I was reading a parenting book about infant nutrition and having dinner on my own (Mr. W was playing Diablo III), that the stepkidlet paid me a HUGE compliment. They say that emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when that emulation is of one’s parenting style, I don’t think it gets bigger than that. Everything I put into raising Allie is the largest amount of effort I’d put into anything, with what feels like the most significant consequences. I’ve had many people roll their eyes at me and tell me I’m making things too hard on myself, I should stop breastfeeding and pumping and let her go on formula; I should make her adapt to my social routine and just let her crash in the car or in strollers for a few minutes here and there if she’s tired enough to do it; I should feed her commercial jarred babyfood to free up time for myself to do my own things. Yeah, a lot of what I’m doing is less than perfectly convenient, but I’ve known since pregnancy that if 100 hours of pain and effort yields even a smear of advantage in health, development, disease-prevention, etc. for Allie, those 100 hours are happily worthwhile spent for me, disproportionate to the advantage gained or not. I’ve had 35 years of doing whatever I wanted to pamper myself, I can give the next few to Allie to make sure she starts off on the right foot. I know this doesn’t guarantee that she won’t eat fast food here and there on her own, or loooove full-fat cupcakes, but I hope that she’ll also be healthy enough to eat fresh fruits and veggies and whole-grain superfoods and learn to surf with me from a young age. 🙂 And hike with her dad, and bike-ride with both her parents, without crying too much about the TV show she’s missing at home.

So yeah, when the stepkidlet observes my parenting, Allie’s behavior and habits, and observes the way other relatives raise their kids (her own mother included), and then on her own asks me to teach her what I’m doing so that she could pass that on to her own future kids, I think it’s worth a blog post. 😀


Stepkidlet: “I spy…an Allie Cat!”
Allie: “I wanna see an Allie Cat!”