Gentle Parenting isn’t religious

We’re Christians. I won’t hide it or apologise for it. Our faith means a lot to us, it directs us in so many ways. The way we parent is an overflow of our faith and our understanding of respect and love. But at the same time, our parenting style separates us from many other Christians of our persuasion who choose to take literally the scripture “Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children. Those who love their children care enough to discipline them.” (Proverbs 13:24) as an instruction to use violence to “train” their child (we’ll get to this in a minute).

However, Christianity isn’t the only faith that teaches respect, and neither Christianity nor any faith are essential to the fundamentals of BackRods Parenting. If you search around the internet you will find that there are many BackRods Parents who are pagan/new-age believers.

I think the crux of the matter is that same old recurring theme here, respect. When you believe something that teaches respect, whatever that may be, and you start applying that to your children, the natural conclusion is a respectful parenting style. The best bit is that in our modern, connected age you can find other people that think similarly to you and that leads you onto other related thinking and methodologies.

That’s how we started, I can’t remember the exact starting point, but we’re down the rabbit hole now and it just keeps on going now. We just keep on learning and growing. We find something new and we think it over, we research it as fully as we can, we make an informed choice: “Does this work for us or not? Does this fit with what we’ve seen before? Does this fit with our worldview?”

It doesn’t take faith to make those decisions, but for us our faith definitely influences those decisions. Our faith is our starting point and is a major part of our worldview. We’re all about informed choice.

So you don’t have to be religious to make yourself some BackRods, but what if you are Christian? How are you supposed to parent in a Bible-honouring way and in a gentle and respectful way, when the bible contains statements like the one above? Here’s how we see it: the book of proverbs is very symbolic in the way it tells its wisdom, like those sorts of sayings often are (after all, we don’t all carry around a bird in the hand as much as we might agree that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”).

Have you ever seen a middle-eastern shepherd? They don’t push their flock onwards, they stand at the front and lead their flock. They call the sheep to follow them, this works pretty well because of the natural herding mentality of sheep but occasionally they’re going to need to deal with an individual. This is where the shepherds crook comes in, you can hold it at arm’s length to help direct sheep, you can use it to save wanderers, you can even use it to get sheep unstuck out of difficult situations. And I think this is the rod that Solomon is referring to, not a rod of whipping but a rod of guidance.

That to me fits in much better with my overall picture of respecting life and loving my children. But it is most certainly influenced by my overall worldview.

BTW. This subject leads in nicely to discipline, but that’s a whole other blog post... Watch this space!

The Bible is full of wisdom on how to treat each other, Jesus particularly raises the bar in how we respect each other and how we live in a generous way. If we are to love our enemies, our household needs to be totally immersed in that same love and respect. Of particular interest to me is this verse from Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “Fathers, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged.” (Col 3:21)

Our purpose as parents is to protect our children and teach them to become “good” adults, but there is a temptation to focus our efforts on side issues. We personally believe that we should be teaching our children to make the same informed choices that we try to make (not necessarily the same outcomes, but the same stringent decision making process), this means that if it isn’t a “health & safety” issue then they can make their own decisions. We wouldn’t let them play on a motorway, because that would be dangerous; but if, for instance, they want a tattoo or they want to drink alcohol (which we aren’t for) we will educate, inform, give our opinions and enable them to make an informed choice, cos that’s how we roll.

And one last thing. If, going back to the previous illustration, they get a tattoo and regret it in 3 months time, we won’t be saying “I told you so”. We’ll be sympathetic and supportive, but we might leave them to deal with their own consequences.

The future of BackRods Parenting

When I started BackRods it was, in all honesty, a business venture. It was an attempt to see if I could tap this demographic for a little bit of cash. We are, however, honestly trying to follow gentle parenting techniques, we are honestly parenting in a way that makes people talk about making rods for our back.

As a business venture it didn't work. I went all out to try and use social media as an advertising tool, Facebook, Twitter and this blog. However the products I was trying to sell just weren't really appropriate to the market nor did my target audience have much money to spend.

In the meantime, I've come to see that it's quite important that people share about this kind of parenting. We need to support each other and we need to promote these choices as valid and indeed fulfilling choices.

Domain

So when the domain backrods.com came up for renewal I let it slide. I wasn't so bothered about branding now, just about keeping the blog etc. going. The main website is now at http://twinklebob.co.uk/backrods and it'll probably stay there for the foreseeable future, this blog is now at http://backrods.blogspot.co.uk and again, it will probably be staying put.

In terms of branding, I've changed everything from "BackRods.com" to "BackRods Parenting". This is a way of life for us, this is our parenting technique, we're doing BackRods Parenting.... :-) Intentionally making rods for our back in the interests of our children!

Shop

The existing shop at SpreadShirt will be closing down. The designs aren't that great, the products aren't all eco-friendly, the printing process almost certainly isn't.

In future I will be finding other ways to monetise the site, but I'll be linking to existing great products and businesses that are absolutely inline with BackRods Parenting. If no one ever buys anything it won't be the end of the world because...

We'll be becoming more personal

I've tried to keep this site free from my personal life and kept it generic. I've left out my wife and babies name. But this is a very personal journey, not everyone's BackRods Parenting would look the same as ours. We'll be talking more about our choices, our struggles and our experiences. I'll also try and get Lucy more involved in this blog.

Be prepared to see more pictures and hear more about us. I hope it will bring the site to life and add flesh to the bones of our parenting ethos.

And what does our BackRods Parenting look like?

• We baby-wear (use slings, never a push-chair or pram)
• We breastfeed (or at least Isaac and Lucy do, I don't get involved in that bit...)
• We do Baby Led Weaning (to us it seems the most gentle and natural way to introduce food)
• We don't use (and won't be using) the words "good" or "bad" or "naughty" to describe Isaac or his behaviour
• We won't be punishing, either using physical violence or timeouts
• We will be respecting our children's rights to have their own opinions and feelings
• We will be unschooling, probably radically

There's probably more, but that's a good start!

More

I'll be continuing the series on what Gentle Parenting is (probably looking at some of the above points as part of that), and how it affects us and I'll also be updating the main website in the next few weeks.

If you're still reading, thanks!

Dave

Gentle Parenting starts before birth

This is (hopefully) the first in a series of "Gentle Parenting is..." posts. Quick disclaimer, this is what Gentle Parenting is to us, it's not necessarily a be-all-end-all definition. The crux of Gentle Parenting centres on the concepts of respect and informed choice not any particular technique, and those themes will come up again and again!

Baby BackRods is now over 3 months old, but we became Gentle Parents way before that.

For us, the two things we find most important in our parenting choices (especially when deciding what we will do) is to respect our child as a human with rights and feelings and then to do some research and make an informed choice. So how does that apply before birth?

Birth is already pretty traumatic for mother and baby (they don’t call it labour for nothing) and we felt it didn’t show respect for the process if we allowed any intervention, where medical professionals feel they have to get involved and hurry the process along. The baby will come out. They have to.

Informed choice does come in here, though, because the odds of something going wrong do increase with time - when you think about it, that's quite an obvious statement. At the same time, the dating process that doctors use is a little odd. It assumes a 28 day cycle and a gestation of exactly 40 weeks starting from the end of the last period. Neither of those are rock-solid assumptions. We chose to let nature take it's course unless something was obviously wrong.

We felt it would be disrespectful to our child to force them out with sweeps, inducement and instruments. It was either natural and normal and we could take our time over it or it was an emergency and it had to be quick. In all our research we could find no benefit (to us) to the heavily medicalised compromise between the two. Not everybody feels that way, of course, but it's why our son was born at exactly 42 weeks gestation without any undue intervention.

Unfortunately things exactly didn't go our way and eventually Baby BackRods was born by emergency c-section. But we had prepared for that, we had counted that as one of the options, we were open minded that it might happen, so we didn’t feel like failures. We didn’t need to, our son was born!

What I'm trying to say is, it doesn't matter how much we wanted a water-birth, how much I wanted to cut the cord, how much we wanted the placenta to be completely drained before the cord was cut, what matters is that we made our choices and we made our plan before the event. We had our birth plan to cover home or hospital birth, even our requests for the possibility of c-section. We were informed.

But it’s not just the birth itself, but then you also need to consider feeding, sleeping arrangements, transportation (i.e. pram or sling), and start to think how you will parent the child as they grow up. You can't just wait until you have a baby to think about these things, you need to start Gentle Parenting as soon as you become a parent (or even before) and not wait until you have a babe in arms.

I’ll probably come back to some of the other points in the future, but just for a quick rundown...

On feeding, we believe that formula is the 4th option for infant feeding:

1. Breastfeeding
2. Breastmilk in a cup, syringe or bottle
3. Donor milk
4. Formula

I won’t get into the Formula arguments, at least not now, but I want to make it clear that formula is an option, but not one we wanted to consider from the outset. It made more sense to Baby and Mrs BackRods to go for Breastfeeding and to do it on demand rather than to a schedule.

On sleeping, we co-sleep as this makes life generally easier, especially when breastfeeding.

On “transportation”, we babywear. Sometimes even when we’re in the house!

On parenting, we’ll be gentle and respectful...

As a couple we discussed many of these things whilst we were trying to conceive, we had discovered all these wonderful “alternative” parenting choices and ended up seeing how far the rabbit hole would go, and we’re still going! But that won’t be the case for everyone. Gentle Parenting can start any time, it can start before your first child or you can make the decision to change your parenting whenever. All I’m saying is that it can start before birth, not that it has to. :-)