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Sparkle (1)
Parenting milestones – they are always a hot topic in the parenting set. Is your child talking, walking, potty trained, and so on? When can we expect it to happen? Should we be worried? Should we not be worried?
Sometimes these milestones are cause for concern. The book said Johnny would be walking by now. Is something wrong?
Other times, they are beacons of hope in the midst of troubled times. Johnny isn’t sleeping through the night yet, but the book said he absolutely should be by X months. And because it is in print, we believe it – or more precisely, we believe it because we want to believe it. Nothing gets you through a sleepless night with children like the thought that eventually this stage will end. Your child may be 5 months and sleeping horribly, but because the book says that by 6 months most children sleep well, you think it is possible. And then you pass the six month mark and think, “It will happen any day now.” It’s not until your child turns two that you begin to come to grips with the fact that your child is the exception to that particular milestone rule. Because the thing about milestones that every parent knows is that they are meaningless.
Take potty training, for example. Your child uses the potty for the first time, and you are over the moon. You write this milestone down in the baby book. You tell all of your friends. You start reworking your budget to include the new influx of cash you will have since you won’t be spending massive amounts on diapers anymore. But here’s the thing – this milestone may mean nothing. You may have countless potty accidents in your future. You may have a potty training regression in your future. You may have a whole host of issues pop up that you hadn’t anticipated back in that shining glory of the first use of the potty. Could you even imagine then the panic it would inspire when you were in bumper-to-bumper traffic and you heard the scream from the backseat, “I have to go potty NOW!!!” That’s the way it is with milestones.
Sleeping through the night for many parents is the holy grail of milestones. Again, the first night it happens, parents feel elation. Again, notes are written in the baby book. Again, it could well be meaningless. My daughter slept through the night at 6 weeks. She was a champion sleeper. Until she turned two. Then she started having night terrors and being afraid of the dark. Baby B used to be a champion sleeper. Until HE turned two. He is now following in his sister’s footsteps and has started having night terrors. With Baby A, I recall (barely) walking back and forth trying to get him to settle down at all hours of the night for months on end. He is now a champion sleeper. For each, we celebrated the first time they slept through the night. For each, we have been awake in the middle of the night in some form or fashion, on a regular basis, since we got excited about touching upon that first milestone.
And then there’s walking. Walking is a funny little milestone. At first you so desperately want your child to reach it, and then when they do and you realize what it means, you want to take it back. With our first child, we bought one of those developmental toys that teaches children how to walk. We cheered her first steps with glee. With the twins, it was almost cartoonish. One of the boys would start playing with a walking toy, and my husband and I would exchange a panicked look and redirect them to another toy. We knew by that point what walking meant, and it was nothing but trouble. And with twins, it was trouble times two.
There are other milestones as well. I have countless pictures of my children eating their first solid food. Even today, one and a half years later with the twins, I sometimes daydream about the ease of the bottle feeding days. As I sit through mealtimes with fights over who has what on their plate (even though it’s the same thing), clothes covered in applesauce and whatever else was on the menu, and various food ick in the babies’ hair, I think that maybe it was a milestone we should have put off – say…until they entered kindergarten and didn’t think it was the funniest
