“Children thrive on routine. Make sure you establish a routine early on if you want a settled child.”
“Be led by your child – don’t try to enforce a routine.”
In my first year of parenting, I pendulum-swung A LOT. I’d read all the latest stuff and knew that feeding on demand and listening to your baby’s cues were all the rage. I thought middle-of-the-road ‘baby-whisperer’ Tracy Hogg with her mantra about ‘routines not schedules’ sounded appealing, and for quite a long time tried to do her recommended pattern, E.A.S.Y. (eat-activity-sleep-you time) but my baby was determined to do E.S.A. (eat-sleep-activity) so it didn’t go that well. We had a brief flirtation with Dr Sears’ lovely gentle advice (just feed whenever and co-sleep until they are ready to move on, etc.) but then a few months in, in a haze of sleep deprivation, I admitted defeat and turned to Gina Ford in desperation.
Gina Ford is not for the faint-hearted. For one thing, she is very big on expressing which I am now almost phobic about (see this blog https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-appreciation-of-dairy-cows ). But plenty of people swear by her and my baby did fall into her nap pattern without too much work (I say ‘without too much work’ meaning that for a week I pushed him round in the buggy for two hours, once in a torrential downpour, in order to encourage the required long after lunch Gina nap). It was then kind of funny for me to observe that my mum friends who all took very different approaches to structuring their days, all still ended up with the long afternoon nap anyway, so maybe Gina shouldn’t get so much credit.
Nearly a decade in and I’ve still not mastered this ‘how much to schedule’ thing. I’ve written previously about the need balance the different needs of my family (https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-balancing-needs) , and it seems routines is another area which requires thought and compromise in our family. Like the introvert/extrovert thing, different family members are at different ends of the routine/spontaneous continuum.
Me, I love a schedule and a plan. I love a new teacher planner in September and writing in lessons and figuring out when to do what. Outside work, I like to know what and when is happening this week and account for all the spaces. Over breakfast, I announce the plans for the day. I have established a household with lots of Alexa alarms and routines and rules about what time you can get out of bed, how you have to get dressed before you’re allowed downstairs for breakfast, that you need to have practised piano and done your chores before you’re allowed screen time. Even as we look ahead to our seaside holiday and hours of unstructured time on the beach, I am mentally preparing: we might get a couple of hours out of digging, but then they’ll need a rest so I’ll read to them, and after that it would be useful to…
But this clearly does not suit everyone, as the collective groans sometimes suggest. Besides, I don’t want the boys to look back on their childhood as being a military academy where everything has to be done to a schedule. Lockdown has taught me a whole lot about the benefits of downtime, unstructured time, and whether because of their experiences in lockdown or just because of their ages, the boys are getting better with filling this time - a sort of virtuous circle which means I then don’t need to say, “Right, well, we’ll have lunch, and then once you’ve had some quiet time in your room I’ll take you for a bike ride, and then after that…” because they are now happier with an empty chunk of time ahead of them. But neither am I ready to abandon the security that comes in routines.
Tracy Hogg’s book (her again – but I’m going to be more positive this time) has a chapter about ‘loving the baby you gave birth to’. It’s actually super helpful to acknowledge that some babies are ‘angels’ who smile and settle well, and some are ‘spirited’ or ‘grumpy’ or whatever, and our job as parents is to love and nurture our particular baby with the temperament they’ve got. I suspect the same applies to a child of any age, or indeed a relationship with anyone of any age. We work with what we’ve got; we try to love and meet the needs of the individual in front of us. And then when there’s a bunch of us in one family, that’s when we learn all about compromise and respecting other people’s needs.
And just to make sure I’m nice to Gina Ford too (she gets a bad rep for someone who many parents would consider their ‘saviour’), having read a lot of her books, the line that sticks out most and that I (mis?)quote most frequently is from “The Contented Baby with Toddler Book” and goes something like: “there is nothing in life more tiring than caring for a new baby and a toddler.” From which I take to mean, parenting is jolly hard work therefore it’s ok to do what it takes to make things work for everyone’s needs (I don't think that'd exactly what she was getting at but never mind!).
And I may not still be at the little children stage, but I reckon it still applies – it’s ok to have some schedules if that’s what it takes to keep me and one son in particular happy. But maybe for others it’s good to have the freedom of a lack of schedule too – especially as we look forward to holidays, isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about, the escape from the school bell and the set routines of the day?
So like with so many other areas in life, maybe I need to train my pendulum to settle somewhere a bit more central.
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