Reading never comes to any good

This is a lesson I must learn time and time again.

I don't recall how Tom Hodgkinson's The Idle Parent ended up on my reading list. I tossed it into my hold queue at the library and was surprised as anyone when I received the pick-up notice several months later.

I won't lie: I'm a nervous parent. It surprises me just how much I hover. My daughter slept in our room - in a bassinet beside our bed - for her first 4.5 months. I held her for the majority of my maternity leave. (She hated being put down for tummy time, and I hated to hear her cry. So, figuring that she'd figure out the walking thing sooner or later, I wasn't religious about letting her touch the ground.)

I actively struggle against the hovering. I deliberately sit on the couch while she tears around the house, leaving her unsupervised for minutes at a time. I'm usually slightly fearful that she'll get into something dreadful and poke her eye out while I'm not looking, but I still leave her to it. Not only for my own sanity, but also because I want her to be a kid who can amuse herself, a kid who feels freedom to explore and attempt things. I attempt to bite back at least half the instances of "be careful!" that rise in my throat. Some parents do this and call it "benign neglect". In my case, it's "nervous neglect" and I wonder if the effect is the same.

@ is not wild about my penchant for knitting in one room while the baby hides in the kitchen cupboards. I even let her in the cabinet under the sink with all the chemicals. (Though I don't let her do that if I'm not in the kitchen with her. There's a limit, right?) He finds it alarming, hazardous, and he wishes I would engage with her more rather than leave her be. We have an uneasy agree-to-disagree arrangement on this point, because while he's as nervous as I am, he's completely okay with that.

So anyway... reading The Idle Parent was intended to be reinforcement of the idea of letting the child alone. I was surprised to find that it's not so much a manifesto for leaving children to be. It was more a treatise on engaging with your children further, but in different ways. The book seems contradictory: exhorting parents to play with their children on demand that the kids will eventually run off to play on their own. Avoid the television (advertising drives children to want which drives parents to earn more to buy) and play music, dance, and roughhouse with your kids. This is not the kind of "idling" I was hoping to find support for. And I think this means @ is right. Again :)