Oh Crap! Potty Training

pushing a child. And yes, it was horrible and abusive.
Then came Dr. Spock and a new wave of thought about child
psychology, which introduced the notion that children are actually
little humans with the capacity not only to feel pain, but to grow up
with that pain into maladjusted big humans. The next fifty years gave
slow birth to modern parenting philosophies, including the recent
rise of attachment parenting (which isn’t a new concept at all,
actually). And so the pendulum began to swing. I believe that at
present, we have swung about as far as possible from the parenting
philosophies of the 1940s.
Thanks to stupid, jerk Time magazine and the infamous breast-
feeding cover (April 2012), some modern parenting practices and
philosophies have peaked in bitter controversy. Personally, I followed
the tenets of the modern incarnation of attachment parenting,
mostly during my son’s first year. That is to say, I “wore” him in a
baby carrier almost constantly, breast-fed on demand, and coslept.
Then I stopped reading books and paying attention to “rules,” and
started to wing it based on what felt right. An excellent resource,
which I’m not even sure uses the term “attachment parenting,” is The
Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. The major point I took away
from this book is that children should be at the center of everyday
life, so they know their place in the world. In this way, they learn
that they are one of a whole, be it a family or a community, and they
learn about the goings-on in daily life.
Through my work as a potty trainer, I see that things have gotten
out of balance in many current parenting trends. In many cases, the
child has become the center, rather than being in the center. The
child gets all the focus and, often, gets a case of terminal specialness.