Nature cannot design it in such a way that it would be difficult to live with children. Think about it, how can it be that raising children can be a heavy burden that brings constant problems? If this were so, then at some period of its existence humanity would have died out: either it would have stopped giving birth, or it would have thrown children away to certain death. And now we have 1-2 children, a bunch of household equipment, and do not suffer from a lack of food. But before they gave birth to 5-15 children and raised them all. And there was no such general hysteria about the severity of motherhood. So why is it difficult with children now?

I am deeply convinced that motherhood and fatherhood are a joyful side of life, full of happiness and love, one in which natural difficulties and difficult periods are lived easily, because strong love gives strength and inspiration to move on. Just us we have forgotten how to treat it this way, we are too stuck in captivity of our selfish desires, fashion trends and times, we have forgotten how to truly sincerely and unconditionally love children, family and friends. That is why parenthood has become a heavy burden for modern people, a battlefield, and not a harmonious world. That is why children are becoming more and more disconnected from us, leaving earlier and earlier from under our natural protection, taking a path that is unsafe and undesirable for us.

In my opinion, we have moved away from nature, from the intended plan, thanks to which raising a child is a natural process, organically integrated into the rest of life. Nature designed it so that raising children would not be difficult, but natural.

Why is it difficult with children? Two Most Important Factors

Parents' happiness

The main factor which I believe we have lost in the modern world is constant feeling of happiness, calmness, regularity of life. We are very nervous, constantly in a hurry, constantly dissatisfied with something or someone, we are constantly in conflict with others, then with ourselves. We always think that we are missing something. We have forgotten how to enjoy and be grateful for what we have.

We have forgotten how to enjoy every moment, every moment of our lives, we have lost the feeling of calm happiness, we have forgotten how to see in every situation (even bad) some lesson or positive moment. What does this lead to? Our children are becoming just as nervous . How can a child be calm if mom is nervous ten times a day: sometimes because she hasn’t washed the dishes, sometimes because there isn’t enough cabbage for soup, sometimes because dad is late, sometimes because she’s tired.

Tell me, did you think when you were pregnant that, finally, a baby would be born and there would be happiness, you wouldn’t have to go to a job you don’t like, communicate with unpleasant people, finally, get rid of all this burdensome stuff and a baby is our salvation . The baby will bring this very happiness. But this is fundamentally wrong. We can do this anyway It is advisable to be happy and give happiness to the child, and not him to us.

Of course, children bring pleasure and joy, but this is not necessary. How can a little person be calm and joyful if the mother is nervous, tired, exhausted, with a lot of problems, complains about life and everyone - but how could this little one save his big and adult mother from suffering. And when the baby is born and grows, it turns out that we are left with the same set of feelings, although the circumstances have changed, and the baby does not solve problems, but sometimes brings them.

In a calm, happy state, the so-called resource state occurs, in which we have a lot of strength and energy, more patience. In this state, we are able to easily endure difficulties, to relate more easily to pranks and whims, sometimes without even allowing them to develop. In this state it is easy with children. Therefore our The task is to make yourself calm and happy, satisfied and confident. It is useless to work on the symptoms (the child’s behavior), you need to work on the cause (your life).

What can we do to make things easier with children?

• Take care of yourself
• Ask for help
• Don't fall into idealization
• Find what makes us calm and happy
• Put away everything unnecessary, at least temporarily: unnecessary worries, depressing communication, books, TV.

2. Second factor. Sociality

It is so conceived that man is a social being. We are designed to live in interaction and communication, especially women. Children are created to see a large number of close people, relatives from birth.

Community life (in the good sense of the word) is the basis for a child’s growing up. It is designed so that the child is curious, he observes the life of adults and imitates it. At first he just watches everyone from his mother's arms.

He sees mom who is preparing food and wants to participate in this process, he sees dad who is digging the ground for planting and trying to help him. He sees Uncle Petya, who is mending boots and also wants to pick up an instrument. He sees a grandmother washing clothes; an aunt who nurses a baby; brothers and sisters running in the grass; neighborhood children collecting sticks. He watches everyone and learns something from everyone. And from a very early age, first in his mother’s arms, then crawling around the house and grass, then running.

Now think about how your child satisfies his curiosity? Does he regularly see these grandmothers, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters, acquaintances, neighbors, his own, safe, family people, whom he can watch and who are interesting to learn from? A How then does the baby satisfy his need to study everything if he sits only with his mother at home? After all, then he spends all his irrepressible energy on his mother, demanding that she constantly entertain him and give him these impressions. Instead of learning from many, the baby exhausts his mother, he has no other options.

What happens if the mother does not fully satisfy all the curiosity of the little man? He begins to whine, be capricious, demand, show aggression because he feels an unsatisfied need. It becomes difficult with him.

In community life The baby is always with adults, but not always with his mother. He can be with other people close to him, be protected and calm, but not with his mother. Mom can rest at this time, mind her own business, and get distracted. The child does not feel discomfort if another adult, but also close and familiar, watches him for some time. After all, they lived in large families, and every day, relatives and neighbors were together for long hours, everyone was in plain sight. The children perceived them as their adults and were very attached to some of them.

What now? Mom is with the child all the time; at best, she sees dad for half an hour in the evening and grandma a couple of times a month. The rest are even rarer.

What's the way out?

Do not limit your child’s social circle. Giving him the opportunity to see other people from his mother's arms. Walk not while the baby is sleeping, but when he is awake, hold him in your arms, in a sling, so that he can see the world and people. Yes, for the first month or two, for safety reasons, you need to be less in crowded places, but then go out a little, invite friends home, a little, sometimes go to visit your mother friends with other children. Let the child communicate with other adults, relatives, give birth to a brother/sister, finally. Improve your relationships with parents and other relatives, finally.

Very We often artificially limit children’s communication with close adults. And then you will agree, this is already your responsibility that you do not have a very good relationship with your parents (your own or your husband’s), that you have moved somewhere where there are no relatives, that you have not created a circle of people around you whom you trust. And it is your responsibility to create your own social circle or not to create it, but to accept the natural consequences.

In contact with

Over the past two centuries, women have tried to combine work and family in different ways, and very often this happened to the detriment of children, says psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Modern mothers, it would seem, have a much simpler life - but for many it is still difficult to sit with a child. Why? What did we inherit from previous not very happy generations? How can we change our relationships with children so that everyone feels good? Are work and children really incompatible? Let's read one of the chapters of the book “#Selfmama. Lifehacks for a working mom."

How to combine children and work

Big cities

Simultaneously with industrialization, urbanization took place - young people were renting and moving to cities to study and work. There, young people started families and gave birth to children, while grandmothers remained in the villages, sometimes thousands of kilometers away.

In the village, a child grows up as if on his own, runs around somewhere, anyone will look after him, help him if something happens, or cut him short if he starts to misbehave. At the same time, from an early age he is useful - herding geese, weeding grass, rocking a baby.

In a big city everything is different. You have to “watch” a child in the city. Especially when old-style city blocks, with closed courtyards, begin to give way to residential areas - and now you can’t let a child out on the street alone. You cannot involve a child in work - parents work outside the home. For a long time it remains more of a problem than an extra hand; it consumes resources, but cannot be of any use.

It is not surprising that, moving to cities, people immediately begin to give birth to much fewer children, and those that do have have to be placed under the constant supervision of specially hired (by the family, corporation or state) workers.

But even when the excesses of the industrial era in general became a thing of the past, women's maternity leave was extended, society's ideas about what "should" were changed, and mothers were returned to babies, it turned out that even a single child in a big city puts his mother into a situation that is very difficult to cope with.

Within four walls

Living in a world commensurate with a person, in a large multi-generational family, among well-known neighbors, after the birth of a child, a woman’s life changed little. She still had the same worries, the same joys, the same social circle, the same daily routine. There was just a child somewhere nearby, they carried him, rocked him, fed him, and by the age of two he was released into the yard under the supervision of slightly older children.

In the world of a big city, the birth of a child changes a woman’s life completely. Her day consists of monotonous and rather boring activities for an adult: packing, pushing the stroller, putting toys away. She feels thrown out of life, and if before that she lived passionately and variedly, as if forcibly stopped in her tracks and locked in a trap.

Mom writes :

Every time at the end of summer, returning from the dacha, I understand how much easier it is for me there with the children. Simply because they can go out into the yard on their own, and there are no long preparations for a walk: I dressed one, the other ran away, while I was catching the first one was sweating. Simply because you can look after them while lying in a hammock under a birch tree, and not sitting on a stupid bench on the playground, and you can cook lunch and write a text at the same time. What can I shout to Aunt Tanya over the fence, and she will look after me without straining while I ride my bike to get milk. That it doesn’t matter how they dress or how I look. That you don’t need a stroller, you don’t need an elevator, you don’t need to cross the road. It seems like little things, but they cause constant stress. That there isn’t this crazy urban pace that doesn’t seem to affect us directly, but still affects us. It's good to be mobile and free in the city. And with small children in the city you start to go crazy.

At the same time, there are no older children or old people nearby who could be asked to look after and play. And the woman herself also did not grow up in a large family, where by the time she came of age she would have taken over a dozen brothers, sisters and nephews, bringing many skills and abilities to automatism, learning to understand and feel the needs of a baby, imagining what a child of what age can do and what you shouldn’t expect, not seeing anything difficult in washing, feeding, distracting.

No, this child may actually be the very first baby she holds in her arms. He is so small, so incomprehensible, and all the responsibility lies with her.

Even if the woman is lucky, and love for the child comes immediately and strongly (and this does not always happen), by the age of three or four months the first joy has passed and all this begins to weigh heavily. Then irritate. Then infuriate. Then drive you crazy.

From questions at meetings :

Why is it so hard for me to babysit? My grandmother raised five children, washing in an ice hole and heating with wood, I have all the comforts, and by the evening I am ready to sit under the door and whine, waiting for my husband - because I simply can’t stay alone with my child anymore, with this beloved beautiful child. I can’t coo and roll cars, I can’t see Luntik or hear the sound of a musical toy.

Yes, for all of this listed above. Because a woman is not designed for this, it never occurred to anyone to lock a mother alone with her baby in isolation, unless it was the evil machinations of the weaver, the cook and the matchmaker of Baba Babarikha.

Because, most likely, it was already hard for her mother, too, and she always heard that raising children is not a pound of raisins for you, “live until you give birth” and all that.

As a result, “sitting with a child,” despite all the miracles of everyday progress, became difficult. It turned out that it is easy to break the patterns of raising children, but to restore them later is not so easy. It is impossible to simply “take it back from where it came from”, giving the mother the opportunity not to go to work.

Maternal behavior is inherited from parents

There is often debate about whether there is a maternal instinct. Does a certain set of unconscious actions and reactions automatically turn on when a child appears? Or we take care of children as well as we understand what we are doing and know how to do it.

I think the answer lies in the middle. In successful motherhood there is and should be a lot of unconsciousness. You can go crazy if you think and control yourself all the time. But models of caring maternal behavior are not simply given to us at birth. We get them from our parents.

Holiday to care for the child

I will never forget one episode: when my daughter was about a year old, she had not yet walked, I looked into the room and saw that she was busy with a very strange thing. She had a basket with small plush toys. The child sits on the carpet and performs a strange ritual. She takes a toy from the basket, presses her nose to it, then runs it over her stomach, and then places it next to her on the carpet. He takes the next one, and everything repeats: face into it, towards his stomach, onto the carpet. When the toys in the basket ran out, she grabbed them again and started all over again.

I stood there, not breathing, trying to understand what this strange ritual was, what was the point? And then it dawned on me that she was simply repeating the way I took her from the crib. This is how we take the baby out of the crib: we kiss him, hold him close for a second and let him crawl. The basket looks like a crib. That is, she sits for a year and practices how to take the baby out of the crib. So that someday, when it becomes necessary, you can do everything without thinking (we will say: “intuitively”).

That is, unconscious parental behavior is “started up” in childhood by one’s own parents, like a spring. And years later, in a situation where the former baby has her own baby, the spring begins to work.

What if she wasn't brought in?

What does parental leave depend on?

And here, when you remember how our mothers and many of us spent our childhood, it becomes very sad. In the USSR, only at the very end of the 60s, women were allowed to look after their children for up to a year, maintaining their seniority and place, but without pay. Someone could afford such a luxury if they had a husband or parents who supported them. And before that, almost everyone (with the exception of nomenklatura families and some village families) was sent to a nursery at two months old. And somehow I doubt that in these nurseries the children were kissed and hugged, taken out of their cribs.

Paid leave for up to one and a half years appeared in the 80s, due to expensive oil and a decline in production: there was money, but not enough jobs. Then in the 90s it virtually disappeared - it became cheap. The childhood of today's young parents fell precisely during this period, when their mothers had to run to all possible part-time jobs in order to somehow make ends meet. And the children were left with their grandmothers - those same grandmothers with a military childhood, often either very tough or anxious and suspicious.

Work and children

In the situation of expensive oil and a non-developing economy in the 2000s, mothers again got relief - vacations became more significantly paid, and in this regard, the situation in Russia is better than in some more developed countries. Today, most families in which there is an earning father can allow the mother to look after a child up to three years old, and at the same time live modestly, but not from hand to mouth. It is unknown how long this will last, in light of our state’s ongoing dumping of all social obligations. However, for now it is easier for him to pay benefits depreciated by inflation than to create jobs.

How to raise a happy child

It was thanks to this “well-fed” period that young mothers had the opportunity to begin to remember and restore the practices of raising babies. And this turned out to be difficult, since their mothers simply had nowhere to take models of natural, relaxed, joyful, without a feeling of “hard labor”, treatment of the child.

That’s why for many young mothers it doesn’t come naturally. We have to replace missing models with knowledge “over our heads,” read books, ask friends, sit on parenting forums on the Internet, and contact specialists.

And everything that is conscious and conscious requires attention and effort. And motherhood “over your head” turns out to be tiring.

Mom writes :
I grew up on a five-day school day. It’s no one’s fault, my mother raised me alone, she worked at a newspaper, sometimes they rented out a room until the night. The kindergarten was far away, on Monday morning we got up at six to be on time and had a long tram ride. It was very hot in the fur coat and I wanted to sleep.
According to my memories, nothing so terrible, just an understanding that you have to rely on yourself. What if you wet yourself, you need to have time to put your pajamas on the radiator, then no one will notice and they won’t spank you.
Sometimes my mother would come in the evening in the middle of the week and bring fruit. This was the best thing.
But when my child appeared, it turned out that I was terribly infuriated by his helplessness. When he cries, he can’t do something, he doesn’t know - he’s just ready to kill him. Is it really not clear that we must be patient? We have to try. We have to do it right. What does he want from me? It seemed to me that he was just mocking me. And I didn’t see any connection until I started reading and listening about attachment.

Didn't inherit it? Well, that means there will be a self-made mother. And dad too. They will learn on their own. Like restorers, they will recreate what was lost or invent something new, and it will be easier for their children. They always want to work, write, speak and consult, because people who do daily conscious work for the sake of those they love, for the sake of what they consider valuable and important, are the most interesting and cool people in the world.

I want them to remember in moments when it’s difficult, when it seems like nothing is working out and you’re a bad parent for your child, that it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s not them who are bad parents and they don’t have some bad children. . Objectively, we live at a turning point, when old practices have been lost, new ones have not been developed, and there are many factors that make modern parenting difficult and nervous.

It is possible without sacrifices. How to take into account everyone's interests

In the twentieth century, rich in both achievements and horrors, it was questioned that a child needs a mother. By the end of it, it became clear that the child really needed a mother. That the relationship between a child and his parents is something that cannot be replaced by anything, no care, no institution, no developmental activities, no toys, nothing.

Now it remains to find ways to satisfy children's vital need for affection without turning their parents, especially mothers, into wounded, eternally guilty victims.

It must be said that the same scientific and technological revolution that pulled women out of the kitchen and nursery not only demanded, but also gave and continues to give a lot to make life easier. We have already talked about diapers and washing machines, but there is a lot of other things that are not so obviously related to child care.

Clothing became more and more convenient and easier to care for, until it reached perfection in the form of jeans - the ideal thing for a working woman. You can wear them in a car, train or plane, then, without changing clothes, hold a business meeting or seminar, and in the evening you can wear them to a cafe or theater. You can go straight from work to the park with your child and dog, and then go down the slide with your child and crawl through a thick bush without getting ragged to get a ball.

Working mom

What about grocery stores? Our great-grandmothers should have seen this. Today you can be a good housewife without knowing how to gut and pluck a chicken, pick and peel mushrooms, make cottage cheese and make yeast dough, not knowing that rice and buckwheat need to be sorted, and apples wrapped in newspaper to preserve for the winter. You can buy it already washed, peeled and chopped, but if you don’t have time to mix and cook, there are completely ready-made dishes - just heat them up.

What about mobile phones? Now you can help your child do geometry, cook pasta, or find ski boots in the pantry while stuck in traffic. Or sitting in a meeting.

Finally, humanity, which is very interested in our half of the brain, invented the personal computer and the Internet. Now you can write an article, negotiate, do a design project or prepare a balance sheet while breastfeeding your baby. And then send the work and get money for it, without letting him get away with it. And vice versa, you can tell him a story before bed and sing a song while on a business trip on the other side of the world.

Household progress will not let us down: even if we become very poor, we will not be left completely without diapers and plucked chickens. Rather, our own stereotypes, prohibitions, and prejudices stand on the way to parenthood without sacrifice. And the first of them is the very idea of ​​the need for sacrifice, that either the child or the parents must suffer.

But life is not so primitive. There is always room for solutions that benefit everyone. You can always find a way not to choose whose needs to satisfy and whose to declare unimportant, but to find an option that takes into account the interests of everyone. Maybe not perfect, but good enough.

The main thing here is that something changes in the head, in the daily practices of organizing life, so that this dilemma goes away in the very choice of a person and society: who to sacrifice, children or the self-realization of parents, families or the interests of the economy. It seems to me that this is one of the tasks of today’s generation of parents, and the next generation - to find a way to live that will remove this dilemma.

From the book “#Selfmama. Lifehacks for a working mom"

Lyudmila Petranovskaya, educational psychologist, family structure specialist

Over the past two centuries, women have tried to combine work and family in different ways, and this happened very often, says psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Modern mothers, it would seem, have a much simpler life - but for many it is still difficult to sit with a child. Why? What did we inherit from previous not very happy generations? How can we change our relationships with children so that everyone feels good? Are work and children really incompatible? We continue reading the book "#Selfmama. Lifehacks for a working mother."

Big cities

Simultaneously with industrialization, urbanization took place - young people were renting and moving to cities to study and work. There, young people started families and gave birth to children, while grandmothers remained in the villages, sometimes thousands of kilometers away.

In the village, a child grows up as if on his own, runs around somewhere, anyone will look after him, help him if something happens, or cut him short if he starts to misbehave. At the same time, from an early age he is useful - herding geese, weeding grass, rocking a baby.

In a big city everything is different. You have to “watch” a child in the city. Especially when old-style city blocks, with closed courtyards, begin to give way to residential areas - and now you can’t let a child out on the street alone. You cannot involve a child in work - parents work outside the home. For a long time it remains more of a problem than an extra hand; it consumes resources, but cannot be of any use.

It is not surprising that, moving to cities, people immediately begin to give birth to much fewer children, and those that do have have to be placed under the constant supervision of specially hired (by the family, corporation or state) workers.

But even when the excesses of the industrial era were generally a thing of the past, women's maternity leave was extended, society's ideas about what "should" were changed, and mothers were returned to babies, it turned out that even a single child in a big city puts his mother into a situation that is very difficult to cope with.

Within four walls

Living in a world commensurate with a person, in a large multi-generational family, among well-known neighbors, after the birth of a child, a woman’s life changed little. She still had the same worries, the same joys, the same social circle, the same daily routine. There was just a child somewhere nearby, they carried him, rocked him, fed him, and by the age of two he was released into the yard under the supervision of slightly older children.

In the world of a big city, the birth of a child changes a woman’s life completely. Her day consists of monotonous and rather boring activities for an adult: packing, pushing the stroller, putting toys away. She feels thrown out of life, and if before that she lived enthusiastically and variedly, as if forcibly stopped in her tracks and locked in a trap.

Mom writes:
Every time at the end of summer, returning from the dacha, I understand how much easier it is for me there with the children. Simply because they can go out into the yard on their own, and there are no long preparations for a walk: I dressed one, the other ran away, while I was catching, the first sweated. Simply because you can look after them while lying in a hammock under a birch tree, and not sitting on a stupid bench on the playground, and you can cook lunch and write a text at the same time. What can I shout to Aunt Tanya over the fence, and she will look after me without straining while I ride my bike to get milk. That it doesn’t matter how they dress or how I look. That you don’t need a stroller, you don’t need an elevator, you don’t need to cross the road. It seems like little things, but they cause constant stress. That there isn’t this crazy urban pace that doesn’t seem to affect us directly, but still affects us. It's good to be mobile and free in the city. And with small children in the city you start to go crazy.

At the same time, there are no older children or old people nearby who could be asked to look after and play. And the woman herself also did not grow up in a large family, where by the time she came of age she would have taken over a dozen brothers, sisters and nephews, bringing many skills and abilities to automatism, learning to understand and feel the needs of a baby, imagining what a child of what age can do and what you shouldn’t expect, not seeing anything difficult in washing, feeding, distracting.

No, this child may actually be the very first baby she holds in her arms. He is so small, so incomprehensible, and all the responsibility lies with her.

Even if the woman is lucky, and love for the child comes immediately and strongly (and this does not always happen), by the age of three or four months the first joy has passed and all this begins to weigh heavily. Then irritate. Then infuriate. Then drive you crazy.

From questions at meetings:
Why is it so hard for me to babysit? Mine raised five people, doing laundry in an ice hole and heating with wood, I have all the comforts, and by the evening I’m ready to sit under the door and whine, waiting for my husband - because I simply can’t stay alone with my child anymore, with this beloved beautiful child. I can’t coo and roll cars, I can’t see Luntik or hear the sound of a musical toy.

Yes, for all of this listed above. Because a woman is not designed for this, it never occurred to anyone to lock a mother alone with her baby in isolation, unless it was the evil machinations of the weaver, the cook and the matchmaker of Baba Babarikha.

Because, most likely, it was already hard for her mother, too, and she always heard that raising children is not a pound of raisins for you, “live until you give birth” and all that.

As a result, “sitting with a child,” despite all the miracles of everyday progress, became difficult. It turned out that it is easy to break the patterns of raising children, but to restore them later is not so easy. It is impossible to simply “take it back from where it came from”, giving the mother the opportunity not to go to work.

Maternal behavior is inherited from parents

There is often debate about whether there is a maternal instinct. Does a certain set of unconscious actions and reactions automatically turn on when a child appears? Or we take care of children as well as we understand what we are doing and know how to do it.

I think the answer lies in the middle. In successful motherhood there is and should be a lot of unconsciousness. You can go crazy if you think and control yourself all the time. But models of caring maternal behavior are not simply given to us at birth. We get them from our parents.

I will never forget one episode: when my daughter was about a year old, she had not yet walked, I looked into the room and saw that she was busy with a very strange thing. She had a basket with small plush toys. The child sits on the carpet and performs a strange ritual. She takes a toy from the basket, presses her nose to it, then runs it over her stomach, and then places it next to her on the carpet. He takes the next one, and everything repeats: face into it, towards his stomach, onto the carpet. When the toys in the basket ran out, she grabbed them again and started all over again.

I stood there, not breathing, trying to understand what this strange ritual was, what was the point? And then it dawned on me that she was simply repeating the way I took her from the crib. This is how we take the baby out of the crib: we kiss him, hold him close for a second and let him crawl. The basket looks like a crib. That is, she sits for a year and practices how to take the baby out of the crib. So that someday, when it becomes necessary, you can do everything without thinking (we will say: “intuitively”).

That is, unconscious parental behavior is “started up” in childhood by one’s own parents, like a spring. And years later, in a situation where the former baby has her own baby, the spring begins to work.

What if she wasn't brought in?

What does parental leave depend on?

And here, when you remember how we spent our childhood moms and many of us become very sad. In the USSR, only at the very end of the 60s, women were allowed to look after their children for up to a year, maintaining their seniority and place, but without pay. Someone could afford such a luxury if they had a husband or parents who supported them. And before that, almost everyone (with the exception of nomenklatura families and some village families) was sent to a nursery at two months old. And somehow I doubt that in these nurseries the children were kissed and hugged, taken out of their cribs.

Paid leave for up to one and a half years appeared in the 80s, due to expensive oil and a decline in production: there was money, but not enough jobs. Then in the 90s it virtually disappeared - it became cheap. The childhood of today's young parents fell precisely during this period, when their mothers had to run to all possible part-time jobs in order to somehow make ends meet. And the children were left with their grandmothers - those same grandmothers with a military childhood, often either very tough or anxious and suspicious.

In the situation of expensive oil and a non-developing economy in the 2000s, mothers again got relief - vacations became more significantly paid, and in this regard, the situation in Russia is better than in some more developed countries. Today, most families in which there is an earning father can allow the mother to look after a child up to three years old, and at the same time live modestly, but not from hand to mouth. It is unknown how long this will last, in light of our state’s ongoing dumping of all social obligations. However, for now it is easier for him to pay benefits depreciated by inflation than to create jobs.

How to raise a happy child

It was thanks to this “well-fed” period that young mothers had the opportunity to begin to remember and restore the practices of raising babies. And this turned out to be difficult, since their mothers simply had nowhere to take models of natural, relaxed, joyful, without a feeling of “hard labor,” treatment of the child.

That’s why for many young mothers it doesn’t come naturally. We have to replace missing models with knowledge “over our heads,” read books, ask friends, sit on parent forums on the Internet, and contact specialists.

And everything that is conscious and conscious requires attention and effort. And motherhood “over your head” turns out to be tiring.

Mom writes:
I grew up on a five-day school day. It’s no one’s fault, my mother raised me alone, she worked at a newspaper, sometimes they rented out a room until the night. The kindergarten was far away, on Monday morning we got up at six to be on time and had a long tram ride. It was very hot in the fur coat and I wanted to sleep.
According to my memories, nothing so terrible, just an understanding that you have to rely on yourself. What if you wet yourself, you need to have time to put your pajamas on the radiator, then no one will notice and they won’t spank you.
Sometimes my mother would come in the evening in the middle of the week and bring fruit. This was the best thing.
But when my child appeared, it turned out that I was terribly infuriated by his helplessness. When he cries, he can’t do something, he doesn’t know - he’s just ready to kill him. Is it really not clear that we must be patient? We have to try. We have to do it right. What does he want from me? It seemed to me that he was just mocking me. And I didn’t see any connection until I started reading and listening about attachment.

Didn't inherit it? Well, that means there will be a self-made mother. And dad too. They will learn on their own. Like restorers, they will recreate what was lost or invent something new, and it will be easier for their children. They always want to work, write, speak and consult, because people who do daily conscious work for the sake of those they love, for the sake of what they consider valuable and important, are the most interesting and cool people in the world.

I want them to remember in moments when it’s difficult, when it seems like nothing is working out and you’re a bad parent for your child, that it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s not them who are bad parents and they don’t have some bad children. . Objectively, we live at a turning point, when old practices have been lost, new ones have not been developed, and there are many factors that make modern parenting difficult and nervous.

It is possible without sacrifices. How to take into account everyone's interests

In the twentieth century, rich in both achievements and horrors, it was questioned that a child needs a mother. By the end of it, it became clear that the child really needed a mother. That the relationship between a child and his parents is something that cannot be replaced by anything, no care, no institution, no developmental activities, no toys, nothing.

Now it remains to find ways to satisfy children's vital need for affection without turning their parents, especially mothers, into wounded, eternally guilty victims.

It must be said that the same scientific and technological revolution that pulled women out of the kitchen and nursery not only demanded, but also gave and continues to give a lot to make life easier. We have already talked about diapers and washing machines, but there is a lot of other things that are not so obviously related to child care.

Clothing became more and more convenient and easier to care for until it reached perfection in the form of jeans - the ideal thing for a working woman. You can wear them in a car, train or plane, then, without changing clothes, hold a business meeting or seminar, and in the evening you can wear them to a cafe or theater. You can go straight from work to the park with your child and dog, and then go down the slide with your child and crawl through a thick bush without getting ragged to get a ball.

What about grocery stores? Our great-grandmothers should have seen this. Today you can be a good housewife without knowing how to gut and pluck a chicken, pick and peel mushrooms, make cottage cheese and make yeast dough, not knowing that rice and buckwheat need to be sorted, and apples wrapped in newspaper to preserve for the winter. You can buy it already washed, peeled and chopped, but if you don’t have time to mix and cook, there are completely ready-made dishes - just heat them up.

What about mobile phones? Now you can help your child do geometry, cook pasta, or find ski boots in the pantry while stuck in traffic. Or sitting in a meeting.

Finally, humanity, which is very interested in our half of the brain, invented the personal computer and the Internet. Now you can write an article, negotiate, do a design project or prepare a balance sheet while breastfeeding your baby. And then send the work and get money for it, without letting him get away with it. And vice versa, you can tell him a story before bed and sing a song while on a business trip on the other side of the world.

Household progress will not let us down: even if we become very poor, we will not be left completely without diapers and plucked chickens. Rather, our own stereotypes, prohibitions, and prejudices stand on the way to parenthood without sacrifice. And the first of them is the very idea of ​​the need for sacrifice, that either the child or the parents must suffer.

But life is not so primitive. There is always room for solutions that benefit everyone. You can always find a way not to choose whose needs to satisfy and whose to declare unimportant, but to find an option that takes into account the interests of everyone. Maybe not perfect, but good enough.

The main thing here is that something changes in the head, in the daily practices of organizing life, so that this dilemma goes away in the very choice of a person and society: who to sacrifice, children or the self-realization of parents, families or the interests of the economy. It seems to me that this is one of the tasks of today’s generation of parents, and the next generation - to find a way to live that will remove this dilemma.