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Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. — Dr. Benjamin Spock, American pediatrician
Raising kids is really more art than science, although scads of parenting books would prefer you think otherwise. But the truth of it, raising kids is fairly instinctual. It has to be, otherwise how would anyone have ever grown up to write a parenting book in the first place?
Of course, in the past, people had a gaggle of kids in case one of them, or several of them died, but that had more to do with hygiene, food availability, farm equipment and the lack of antibiotics than it had to do with parenting knowledge. And sure, there are parenting horror stories, but you don’t need to read a book to know that beating or otherwise abusing your child is not good parenting.
And, I’m not saying that all parenting tomes are useless. It can help quite a bit to turn to a book like The Teenage Brain to figure out that your kid being sassy or sullen in the teen years is a fairly normal developmental stage that is mostly linked to a still developing pre-frontal cortex. And yes, most of your parent friends are going through some version of it, too.
But, for the most part, raising kids isn’t that complicated.
