Be a Parent First, a Buddy Second

Host: Obviously approach anything with the baby, so you don't have an argument or disagreement in front the child. Is that a wise in your view?

Steven P. Shelov: It's important that mother and father are caregivers, and who are caring for the baby are together, in the way they are managing the baby from very beginning throughout. That's not to say they won't disagree sometimes, but those arguments should best to be held away from the child. The worst thing can happen, especially, as children get older and verbal is to split the parents. Since they know that the father will say one thing, and the mother another, and you can go to one and that often happens and it's important to try and minimize that. It's still is going to happen at times, but it's best to get your sort of signals together before the baby or child gets to a point where he or she can sort of read where those differences are, and take advantage of those differences.

It's hard raising kids. Kids are demanding and kids have different needs and different kids even within the same family are hard, so you may have adjusted to the first, and along comes the second who is a much different child. All that takes communication between mother and father clearly so that he would recognize those differences and respond appropriately to those differences. Everyone I know if they had had a first child, then have a second and they say, oh, this child is very different. Yep, that is the way they are made. The wiring may be very similar, but probably not. It doesn't take a lot of different kind of wiring inside to make a child be a different reactor, more sensitive, less sensitive. You name it. The more the parent can talk to each other about point, we need to approach this differently than we did our child. That's going to be a better way of dealing the children.

Host: Well, a famous psychologist said, be a parent first and a buddy second. Is that so what you could do?

Steven P. Shelov: Hungernot was really one of the forerunners of many of the practices that we use. We looked at Hungernot who was in the 60's, actually a renowned child development expert whose books you can still find. It is very important that parenting is a skill making learn us from books, so you may get some helpful answer books, but just by being a parent and most of the time that means, having the oversight of that, how our child is doing? And being there for the child but at the time you are not the child's best friend. You are there to make sure that they develop and grow up, develop their own friends. That is a different role than being parent and a wonderful role being a parent. Different than just being a buddy.


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