Listen To Yourself. Deep Down You Know Best ...

It took me a while to start listening.
I was a very 'good' traditional [book reading] parent the first time around in the 1980s. I didn't 'make a rod for my back' & didn't think to question vaccination or allopathic medicine.

In fact, I didn't dare to listen to my instincts because I wanted to be a very different parent to my parent.
I wanted to break a cycle of what I considered neglect and I wanted to break the cycle of spanking.
I felt I couldn't rely on my instincts in case I'd absorbed parenting that would be damaging to my child, 'knee-jerk' learned parenting.  I was on guard literally 24 hours, and aware that was what I was doing.

In part I think I started to learn to listen to my instincts because of where I was living.
It proved to me that we need to be open about what we do.
We need to 'be the change', because even when people disagree with us initially we move the goal posts by exposing them to new ideas.
I was living in Hadley Massachusetts ["The Happy Valley"] and working as a Montessori teacher.
I found myself training as a Montessori teacher after becoming one by accident initially as my husband got my position whilst I was still in the UK waiting to follow him to the US & it was NOT initially the 'teacher's position' I'd asked for.
I was surrounded by friends and colleagues who co-slept and had home births, used homeopathy & home schooled and didn't vaccinate their children.

It seemed as if the universe shuffled all that into place, as I couldn't imagine what a disaster it would have been to parent my dd16 without a 'taking children seriously' libertarian perspective. If she had survived without co-sleeping I'm fairly sure we'd have damaged her irrevocably with traditional parenting & we'd have had a HELL of a time in the process. As it is, she has turned out to be a very stable, reasonable and deeply intellectual person. Almost her first word was "Self!" and we would have been seeking with ODD or PDA [Pathological Demand Avoidance] for sure if we didn't find a better way to help her.
Instinctively she needs to feel absolutely free and at liberty.
She is a success story for instinct led parenting mixed with a big dose of 'taking children seriously'. [http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/].
Today she asked me to buy her Yeonmi Park's "In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom."
I can hear her now voluntarily emptying the dishwasher [we have NO chores system in our house] and telling her 10-year-old sister Yuki about the human right's issues in North Korea and the history of the boundary lines of the area.