RIE Made Me a Confident Toddler Mom

I am SO lucky to have stumbled onto the RIE approach to parenting. I did some babysitting in my early 30s, and at first I felt put off when, at a meet-and-greet with a little boy’s nanny, suddenly I’m getting a large binder — a “how-to” manual for taking care of him — thrust at me and am being instructed to basically read and memorize the whole thing. The babysitting from my North Carolina youth had usually entailed a young, single mom running for the door, passing me a snotty-nosed toddler with one hand while she put on her high heel with the other and shouting, “Here’s my kid, bye!” And then me just winging it — which kind of went like, “No, y’all, please don’t jump off the bed into laundry baskets … Seriously, don’t do that, it’s dangerous. I mean it. Oh, you’re still— well … just don’t hurt yourselves.”

The kids all lived, the mom got some time at the club, and I got paid, so that’s the important thing, right?

Cut to me in LA babysitting for a movie star’s kid, and here’s this binder being thrust at me, and I’m all, “O-kaaaay, this is a little much …” But it wasn’t long until I became a believer. I witnessed firsthand how cool this two-year-old was — how easy-going and secure — and how well the approach worked for establishing a framework that he felt safe inside, allowing him to explore while knowing where the boundaries were — not to mention how easy it made things for me as his babysitter.

So when I got pregnant with my son, my husband and I wolfed down as much RIE as we possibly could. We read Magda Gerber’s book, Your Self-Confident Baby, we read Janet Lansbury’s No Bad Kids, I devoured everything on the RIE website, and now that my son, Sam, is almost two, I’ve been bingeing Lansbury’s podcast, Unruffled, and becoming a better parent every day.

It’s not how I was raised – I don’t think it’s how most of us were raised — and although I’m naturally empathatic (way too empathetic now that I have a child, but that’s another topic for another day), I just wouldn’t think to do things this way. But I’m so, so glad my husband and I have had these tools ever since Sam was born. It’s gotten us on the same page in a major way, and Sam is happy, secure, curious, and sweet. He’s calm and easy-going. Meltdowns are minimal. (KNOCK ON WOOD.)

So, since I’m starting a blog about my experience parenting, I felt like this would be a good place to start — since this has been the foundation of my parenting so far.