How to (Not) Mess Up Your Kids for Life

You cannot mess up your kids for life if you:

• 1. Have pain relief during labor and delivery
• 2. Have a caesarean section
• 3. Don’t use a doula or midwife
• 4. Give birth in a hospital with a doctor
• 5. Don’t breastfeed
• 6. Bottlefeed formula
• 7. Breastfeed and give formula
• 8. Don’t pump your breast milk
• 9. Give a pacifier
• 10. Let the baby “cry it out“
• 11. Don’t let them sleep with you
• 12. Don’t make your own baby food
• 13. Let them watch TV
• 14. Don’t use organic products
• 15. Give them occasional sweets
• 16. Give them apple juice
• 17. Work outside the home
• 18. Get divorced (but don’t divorce the kid)

You may mess up you kids for life if you:

• 1. Obsess over, feel guilt or shame about your caesarean or not breastfeeding
• 2. Are often preoccupied with something else while you are with them
• 3. Are unhappy being home all day with a baby/child
• 4. Don’t teach them manners
• 5. Don’t make them feel like the most important thing in the world to you
• 6. Don’t have realistic expectations of them and yourself
• 7. Do their homework
• 8. Spoil them by giving them everything they want, when they want it
• 9. Don’t read to them
• 10. Don’t admit your mistakes
• 11. Expect them to live the life you want for them or would have wanted for yourself
• 12. Want to be their best friend
• 13. Don’t teach them to clean up after themselves
• 14. Don’t discipline consistently, firmly, and kindly

You will mess up your kid for life if you

• 1. Fail to impose order on the chaos that is their world
• 2. Don’t immunize them
• 3. Don’t use a car seat
• 4. Humiliate or diminish them
• 5. Withhold your love (which is not the same as withholding your approval)
• 6. Ignore their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs

Remember: You’ll make mistakes. Lots of them. It’s OK. Luckily, resilience is hard-wired in kids. Don’t be hard on yourself.

Also remember: You will be the one with gray hair. You will never see a kid with gray hair that their parents gave to them.