Labeling

Alright, mommy moment.

It is very obvious to anyone who watches my family, and I really don't suggest it for long periods of time, that we do not fit in any sort of mold. I'm 4 feet ten inches tall and my husband is six feet tall. (Dancing is a struggle.) And our little one has a projected growth curve at around five feet six inches tall. I have black hair, my husband has blond, and our little one has brown. I have brown eyes, my husband has green, and the little one has blue. It goes around and around this way.

I would venture that as varied as human beings are, so are parenting styles. My husband and I parent differently then our parents did us. There are many reasons why we have chosen a different path. We have different priorities, struggles, environments, and life experiences. I do not think less of my parents simply because they did things differently. I have faith that they did the best they could under the circumstances. As I also feel about other more contemporary families.

However, there has been great buzz in "mommy cyberspace" about attachment parenting theory and other Catholic models of parenting. I have to be honest, I had never heard of such a thing till recently. I'm not a psychologist, but as a teacher, as a mom, as a fairly academic person, I think this is an open-ended war. Parents are running into dangerous territory.

It is healthy for different theories to present themselves and to also be academically evaluated. However, I do not think that it is healthy for parents to criticize each other over the theories that they prescribe to unless there is harm done to the child. When the issues are boiled down it seems to be a case of labeling. Parents want to label their parenting styles and their children so that others can easily contrast them to the greater public. In education, as well as in life, labeling can be a dangerous action. It can be good to label, to a degree, such as labeling a child learning disabled so that the child can receive services to better the learning process. However, the danger comes in the prescribing of the same services to that child no matter the need. Services are provided to the child based on an individual education plan. Then there comes the stigma. The stereotype. Labeling can hurt.

I firmly believe that each child has an individual education plan as well as an individual parenting plan. Sure there are some generalities that can be drawn for some families, but as varied as a humans physical appearance, so is their emotional, social, and spiritual needs that we as parents must tune into and tune out of all this right way/wrong way nonsense. Even if you do not verbalize it, parents still fell the implications.