"Going back a handful of generations , mothers were hand washing cloth diapers. Do you think they had time for endless sensory play bins....I think not."
While I don't recommend washing cloth diapers by hand, I do recommend taking a step back and reminding yourself that sometimes doing less is more.
There seems to be this incredible pressure placed on modern mothers to constantly have some activity or experienced lined up for our children. Meanwhile, the boomer generation was still tossing babies in playpens with lead painted toys and calling it a day.
The concept of time is a beautiful thing...we can learn from past generations and make better choices. Skipping the toxic painted toys and allowing for free roaming babies is a great improvement. That being said, as time moves along it seems to have added an unrealistic pace of life that we just can't sustain.
Our goal shouldn't be to keep our children entrained all day, but instead take a step back and let them lead the way. It's easy to accidentally interrupt our children's natural learning process, when we don't give them time to explore independently.
Sometimes just watching our children, holds more value than trying to fill their schedule with endless activities. Sometimes the project in the house we wanted to start can wait a few days. Sometimes having sandwiches for dinner is acceptable. Sometimes playing with rocks outside is more educational, then the cut and paste activity we had lined up. Sometimes skipping soccer practice is fine too.
We need to allow ourselves to do less as mothers and not feel so much guilt surrounding it . Going back a handful of generations , mothers were hand washing cloth diapers. Do you think they had time for endless sensory play bins....I think not. Throughout history mothers didn't have the time to fill their children's schedules with learning based activities from dawn till dusk. They were proabably busy hauling water for all those cloth diapers.
Although we might not be hauling water, motherhood is still exhausting. We have other tasks that take up time in modern society. We shouldn't be adding stress, by dwelling on the lack of art projects we did with our toddler this month .
There are enough outside stresses in the world to worry about . We are parenting through a pandemic that is never ending and have less support than past generations. We do not need to make our situations more stressful, by worrying about our children's development 24/7. A stressed out mother is certainly not going to help them in anyway.
Simply put , we need to do less and absorb more. We need to slow down and appreciate, listen and nurture our children. The non stop pace of our modern day society isn't sustainable for motherhood...so why are we trying to keep up with it?
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