Having a child is never an easy thing to do. You get the enormous amounts of advice from nearly every single person in your life. Even people who haven’t had a child before are telling you things. You have people who have had kids and your parents who you may have been their last child 20 some years ago when you were born. Enough things change in any realm of the world let alone the parenting one. And things certainly do change in terms of how you do things from decade to decade.

Growing up you would hear that parents used oral-gel on a teething child’s gums. Not anymore. Something as simple as that you are warned not to as it can numb their throat and they can essential choke on their own spit. Another thing that has changed is straight out just letting them cry it out. This seen as barbaric and horrible parenting now you have gentler methods where you go in after 5 minutes of crying, or go in after 10 minutes of crying. Oh, and did I forget to mention the whole sleeping on their back vs sleeping on their front. Every child basically was put on their belly even myself and my siblings. Now they urge you not to do that and place your baby on their back due to a choking risk and a higher percentage of children dying from SIDs. Also there are sleep sacks that you can use on your child instead of putting blankets in their crib since you know, another suffocation risk there too! Do you remember the bumper pads that were also in cribs? Nope, Not allowed either! All of these things were pretty normal when I was growing up and a baby to have around. However now they are so frowned upon.

In speaking about this, I will mostly be referencing myself and a friend of mine who has a child that is 2 months older then my own son. We both go to different doctors and the advice can be quite differing. To the point you really don’t know what to follow! This is a few circumstances where advice has been so different.

When it comes to sleeping our son used to be a great one! Then something happened and he wasnt sleeping so great. We had asked our doctor about whether or not we should change anything or what have you. She asked if he had a soother. We obviously said yes he did. She said to get rid of it. At the time our son was about 6 months 7 months old. She said the reason why he wakes is because he searches for his sookie and cannot find it. Crazy right? Now on the flip side I was mentioning what our doctor had said to a friend of mine. She said her doctor said the sookie can be a good thing, Here is why. When your child teeth they want to shove, and I mean shove their hands in their mouths. It is a lot easier to remove a sookie from the picture then their hand. If they get used to sticking their hands in their mouth and sucking their thumb it can be quite challenging to curb that habit as apposed to removing the sookie. Obviously we choose to follow that advice which is something that we never had thought about either!

Another thing is how you are supposed to drop bottles. Apparently as babies age you are supposed to drop bottles. This is part due to the fact that you are moving up their real food intake and introducing meals and things. The problem with this is that you are not giving as much milk as you once did. Our family doctor said that we should be doing the same amount of ounces for our son and that food is only for play before the age of one. A friend of mine who has just recently had her 4th child also said her doctor said the same thing. However a friend of mine is just ending their bottles for their one year old son as well too. They have been moving down certain months and things.

Another thing as well would be how quickly to start solid food. We have been doing puree for a long time however when my son was at his appointment for 9 month check up, the doctor said he should be having more chunky things. My son is nearly 12 months old now and is just starting to get his 2 bottom teeth. Which is great! However my boyfriend and I were very weary trying to start really chunky foods since he had no teeth! We started to do a bit more chunky things though for his foods at different meals. Our concern was that he would gag and yes, we know gagging is a part of leaning however it seemed like a lot. I think because the doctor had said this we were so worried and panicking that we never gave ourselves credit. Our son was doing just fine with mashed bananas and different fruits that had different size pieces of skin from being blended a touch. He was getting used to textures he just wasn’t physically chewing anything. He had textures that he gummed and we can even see this by his mouth moving also. We just were so worried we were somehow failing our son that we didn’t realize how well he was doing.

Even something as simple as this can be supper concerning when doctors are giving different advice. I think the best thing you can do is if you hear this from friends and different advice from their doctors, that you just follow your own. It can be really stressful and overwhelming hearing everything and such drastic opinions on things that you really just have to do your own thing though. No one can really make these decisions for you, only help you decide!

What are some things you heard from your doctor that differed from other friends doctors? Was there anything totally out there that you are wondering why their opinions are so drastically different?

Let me know in the comments below!

-StaySeeJ

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