Parenting Baby to Sleep

In starting this post I know this area of thought is huge, well studied and well documented.

My own Mother has spent years in this area teaching many people about this subject from the police, victim support, mental health personal…the list goes on.

My own Father has also helped to pick up the pieces of other people’s lives who try to dull down what has happened to them with drugs and alcohol or their own expression of violence against others.

But for my own views in this post I want to look at War, and mostly the larger wars that have affected many people and their families. If we visit any of the War memorial museums we can see the hundreds of stories from both the people at the front but also thoughts left at home.

The peoples at the front who have seen unimaginable horrors who have had to move through their lives at the time, the best that they can would/will often involve blocking out emotions. With dulled emotions, with minds that have seen what they have seen, often these people have placed themselves out of their lives – to become distant and unfeeling – so that they can live.

The peoples at home are often forgotten and that they also had to have a part of this emotional blocking. Whole families were lost with the Mother, the Wife or the Sisters left wondering if their loved ones where ok…minds making pictures which might or might not be true.

Families living in environments which could have been in the middle of these Wars. Houses gone, lives gone…everything. The stress the hunger and the confusion of what will happen next as well as the confusion of weather their loved ones would come home.

Most of us do not have to deal with this kind of War today though we do still have Wars and we do still have problems with our emotions. Often when people come home from War they are unable to switch on their emotions or what they have seen is so bad that nothing else they see or hear can equate to what they have been through.

What seems to happen many times is that families do not know how to be families they just go through the motions of survival with a dullness of caring or an unsureness of what to do when something really does happen.

How does this affect us today? Why do I want to talk about this horrible time in many of our families lives which we have been trying to leave in the past?

It is true the time for many of these Wars have past and the time that it is affecting us has gone….right?

For many of us it might have been our Grandparents who were in the War – for some – as now days we are more generations removed it might have been our Great Grandparent. But there are also Wars today as well

How does that affect us now?

Most of us listen to our Parents and often our Grandparents advice especially when it comes to an unknown subject or new venture like raising children.

As I often do in this blog is link back to the emotional health, style and methods we use to raise our children, treat our children…or train our children to sleep.

Much of the information we are using today in the forms of “Baby manuals” comes from a time where emotions were not ‘in use’ so to say. The books that a written today can and often will be written by people who have been raised by parents from the war times.

People living through the war had to block their hearts off to any feelings which often meant their own children’s suffering. Possibly not suffering as in physical injury but emotional injury….they in turn past this on to our parents (for some their grandparents) who in turn past it on…..

The idea of “It didn’t kill me” is termed and the idea of emotional harm is puzzling to many…as they themselves have actually suffered from emotional harm.

Today we do not live in that type of life.

Today we know what emotional harm can do to a person.

Today we can move on and learn a new way of treating the people we love with love…it’s ok to show that we care and it is ok to give a child (or anyone we are close to) who is in need to give them their need, so as to grow up and move on emotionally strong. We do not need to switch off our caring heart as our child goes to sleep and if they cry for us we have moved on enough in time and education to know that going holding and comforting that child, it will be better than leaving that child to its own demons.