One of my favorite moments of being a mom in Tribeca was sitting in Washington Market park of an afternoon and bumping into other moms and having true and real chats with them. One mother frankly told me that if her 4th child had been her first child, she would not have had 3 more kids. She thought she was a great mother, and it turns out she had easy kids, because when she got her tricky one, she didn't feel so great at all!
And I often get new moms coming to me, full of anxiety for this new precious soul and fears that they will somehow destroy them. So they read every book that comes out and some really work for them but some really don't. And I say, it's because every child is different. Some will respond super well to gentle parenting and some will become fascist dictators under the same regime. Some kids just jump into empathy and appeals to empathy really work with them, and some kids really don't care that yanking the toy away from their friend made that friend cry.
So it's not that the advice is necessarily bad, it's just that it worked on many kids but is not working on yours. Or that it worked on your eldest kid but really isn't working on your youngest. Well, the environment is so different now - you were dealing with a single child, now you are dealing with the third child. There are many reasons why things that did work, don't now.
So we calm down and stop blaming ourselves, stop blaming the kids, and look for new books, new ideas, new tools. What we just need to remember is that most of us really love our kids and want the best for them.
