Our daughter was born nine weeks early because I was going into kidney and heart failure. At the time, we were young and trying to do all the “right” things until her neonatologist said, Feed her when she’s hungry. she won’t go 8 hours. Then we started learning and then teaching Natural Family Planning and she began to sleep with us and I was nursing her long past a year. We had family members judging and even my grandmother asked our daughter “Is she still giving you that old tit?” My husband said, “Those are the only ones she has!” We stood together against all that because we truly believed it was the best. My mother asked if I thought I was better than she was and I told her everyone tries to do the best they can with what they know. No judgements on this end.

Good thing your hubby saw that in the letter. How cruel to scare parents like that. I can’t even imagine the toll it took on you.

I would have been too! OMG! Happy it all ended well.

When we got the letter, there was no threat of taking him away, but my husband saw that. We spent part of our Christmas holidays figuring out escape routes to Canada (maybe that was just me.)

Whew! What a relief when I got to the bottom of your comment. I thought you were going to say they took the baby away from you. I’m sorry you had to endure all that. Nice to hear he’s a great kid and still yours!

Forcing yourself back into a groove before you’re ready is cruel, though not unusual. Three words: Do, The, Minimum. Sending loads of compassion your way.

Luckily we live in a very “free-range” friendly part of the country now. Kids are outside all of the time here, and no one thinks it’s odd or concerning. I kept trying to get my almost five-year-old to go play in the front yard (he likes to roll his cars down our steep driveway, but won’t do it unless someone sits with him). My other kids (14, 13, 12, and 9) have an all access pass to the neighborhood, and the town beyond for the older three. The moms that helicopter are seen as kind of weird; I’m in the normal mom camp. I don’t always know where my kids are at because they are off playing with friends. They’re around somewhere and will be back when it gets dark (best part about summer is that it doesn’t get dark until 9pm) or they get hungry. They need water? There’s a hose outside. Need to pee? There’s a bush. Okay, not really on the last one, but the park has a bathroom.

I don’t really have any tips. I guess it helped that I stopped reading parenting magazines and visiting parenting sites. I don’t interact with a lot of parents offline because they work, and I don’t–we live in different worlds. Also finding Lenore Skenazy helped a lot: Free-Range Kids