And at some point, there is reality.

I think some people don't realize just how temporary all this is. It's so easy to get bogged down in the day to day of raising babies and toddlers, and think this is just what parenting is. Surely, you will always care what new prints your favorite cloth diaper company will release next. There's no way you will ever see a day when your choice of vaccination schedule (or lack of) doesn't even come up in conversation. There will definitely never come a day when it won't matter that you kept your kids rear-facing in the car until they were three or four years old.

In reality, not only will that day come, but it will come a lot sooner than you think it will. Kids grow up fast, and the more you have, the faster they seem to grow. This is not to say that the decisions you make when they're babies and toddlers aren't important. They're hugely important. It's just that the day will come when the result of those decisions will be turned out into the world, and you'll have to just kind of sit back and see how the result of your hard work fares.

Will the child who was breastfed for three years really be healthier than his peers? Will the child who was parented non-violently carry those ideals through all of his interactions? Will the child who was fed nothing but organic foods continue that, or will he have a penchant for McDonald's?

The truth is, nobody knows the answer to any of this. We just have to do our best with everything while we still have so much influence, and hope some of it sticks, because this is not the big picture. The big picture is that eventually, these kids go out into the world, and that's where our decisions as parents really get put the test. I find that many within the natural parenting community get bogged down in minutiae, as if what we are doing now, with our babies and toddlers, is the final exam, the culmination of our parenting ability. In reality, it's not even the midterm. We are laying foundations now for the things that really matter long term. This stuff we do now is important, but it's important because of the long term implications it has, not due to the choices in and of themselves.

Instead of getting caught up in crunch nazi details, why not think about the outcome you want long term, and how the choices you make today can help that.

I want my kids to have healthy immune systems. That's really important to me because I have a really healthy immune system, and it makes my life a lot easier. To that end, I don't give them too many vaccines, because too many vaccines will mess with immune response in a negative way. I also feed them good food so they learn what real food is like. Of course, breastfeeding is also part of this.

I want my kids to have a high regard for human rights and freedom of choice. They have watched me choose midwifery care instead of obstetrical, and birth at home when everyone else willing went to hospitals. Hopefully, the lesson they take from that is to choose things based on your own priorities, not what society wants you to do. Our anti-circumcision views come into play here, too. We left the choice to our sons even though society tells us we didn't have to do that. Hopefully, from that, they take away that human rights are something we are born with, and that it should be the freedom of the individual to choose for themselves.

With all things, I guess the biggest lesson I want to impart to my kids is that they should make well informed decisions, and not be afraid to go against the grain of society. I hope that they have watched me deliberately research topics relevant to our family, and to make choices based on that research, not based on what is popular. Aside from being healthy and conscientious, I would hope that my kids learn to be deliberate, and to do what they believe in.

All of this could blow up in my face. My kids could grow up to be completely mainstream. Obviously, that's not what we want, but ultimately, it's their choice. Parenting in these early years merely sets the stage for the big picture. It isn't the big picture. Do your best, of course, but I guarantee you that in ten years, nobody will care that you kept your kid rear facing in the car until they were four, and when your kid hits school, nobody will attribute his intelligence to having been breastfed. These things are very important in the here and now, but they are so quickly forgotten as you move into the next phase. I think it's important to remember that our biggest job as parents is to make sure that the next generation has more cool people and less assholes than our generation has. There is a lot to that, and this stuff is barely the beginning.