The overarching idea of parenting should not be the specific choices that define a style, whether Tiger Mom or Natural Parenting, or even the goals. Parents who use harsh methods want the same for their children as parents who use positive, nurturing methods: Both want their child to grow up to be a functioning member of society. But each approach has its own unique mindset, too, and that perspective drives how parents treat not only their children but themselves and their spouses and everyone around them.

Parents who use harsh methods are parenting from a mindset where they feel children need to be controlled, punished, and coerced. Research shows that these methods, such as spanking and yelling, are not only ineffective as a discipline method but actually harmful to that child, the parents, and the family as a whole. What we want to see is parents moving toward a warm, nurturing parenting style. The mindset that comes with this approach to parenting removes all manipulation. It’s based in trust, empathy, affection, unconditional acceptance, and joy.

For some parents, a nurturing style of parenting comes naturally. They may have been raised in the same kind of environment, or they were able to work through and heal their emotional childhood wounds before becoming a parent.

For many parents, however, a nurturing style of parenting is difficult to achieve. These parents didn’t identify their emotional childhood wounds before becoming a parent, and a child’s very nature has reopened these wounds. Even if a parent has resolved to raise her children in a nurturing way, there will be many moments where she will regress back to how she was raised unless she finds a way to heal those childhood wounds.

I talked with a father today who struggles in his family relationships. His relationships with his children are mostly warm but discipline is almost non-existent. His relationship with his wife is fraught with tension. His wife parents the children in a nurturing way and tries to apply the same principles to her marriage, but any sign of conflict causes the husband to “freeze.” His reaction to conflict with the children has historically been to ignore the problem, but he has gradually begun to address his children’s behavior with his wife’s guidance. Still, the husband lives in a constant fear of conflict—from anywhere, whether at home or at work.

My role in talking with this man was to help him identify ways to strengthen his relationships with his children, but it’s what he revealed about his childhood that particularly struck me: He grew up in a home where he was in constant fear of his mother. His mother wasn’t abusive, but she was often angry at something. All he wanted was for her to be happy. Because children are designed to emotionally attach to their parents and because anger and sadness and fear prevent this attachment from occurring, naturally this child blamed himself for her unhappiness. And he carries that false guilt with him now as a 30-something-year-old husband and father and employee and coworker and friend and in all of his relationships. And while there are many factors that contribute to his tendency toward depression, research shows that how we were parented influences how our genes are expressed and that would include genes that predispose us to mental illness.

Many parents find that learning to parent in a positive, nurturing way helps facilitate healing of their own childhood wounds. At the center of these parenting principles is the core of healthy relationships: emotional sensitivity. One must have addressed his childhood wounds in order to become emotionally sensitive to others. One cannot give what he does not have, and for example, if the father I described above wants to become truly emotionally sensitive to others, he has to learn how to not have his entire world colored by the guilt that he couldn’t make his mother happy and that would require meeting that unresolved emotional need head-on, working through it, and healing.

Parenting in a nurturing way requires changing the mindset—the overarching way a person views how relationships function—from a place of pain and disappointment and fear to a place where children are born “good” and where parents have the responsibility to nurture this innocence in a positive, nonjudgmental way. This change in mindset demands self-healing and the development of new coping skills and often a complete shift in how parents see both their children and themselves, and this encourages parents to seek professional help if needed to resolve hard-to-heal childhood wounds.

In this way, parenting in a nurturing way has the potential not only of changing our families and communities and society, but also healing ourselves. We need to give more credit to the value of parenting in our society, not only for our children’s sakes but for ours, as well.

This is also why it’s most important to educate these young mothers’ personal support networks. Unlike older mothers and mothers-to-be who look more to professionals and evidence-based resources for guidance in their choices, overwhelmingly young mothers seek and follow advice from their peers, significant others, and family members regardless of whether they are “with the times.” These young mothers’ own mothers are especially influential. This is also a challenge in that the older generation raised children differently than what is now recommended.

In relating to the older generation, we are advised to say something along the lines of “We know a lot more than we knew then,” but we also have to remember that these mothers did raise at least one child in the era of “don’t pick up the baby lest he spoil,” “crying is good for the lungs,” “don’t spare the rod,” and “children should be seen and not heard, and probably not even seen”—and her child appears fine today.

Seemingly more so than any other part of society, childrearing is slow to catch up with what the research shows are the best practices. The medical community, the automobile industry, even lawn chemicals seem to advance more quickly in finding what is healthiest for families and communicating that to parents. We don’t see parents trying to treat strep throat with peroxide anymore; they go to the doctor for a prescription of antibiotics. We know that children are safest in the back seat of the car and which car seat works best for each age group. And in the case of lawn chemicals, we now know that when Dad is spraying the yard, to keep the kids in the house. But there are still so many pervasive myths alive today regarding childrearing.

We know from a mountain of neurologic research the importance of childrearing, especially in the infant and early childhood years, on the direct development of the brain. We can see brain scans of the differences. We can read about differences in levels of neurotransmitters.  We know that what was once thought as “normal” non-physical discipline can now be classified as emotional child abuse—that while invisible, the marks left emotionally often far exceed the damage of physical abuse, linked directly to many mental health issues from anxiety and depression to personality disorders and others. Yet, despite all this knowledge, our society is still struggling to change the way parents relate to their children.

There are a lot of factors, but I feel a strong one is that childrearing doesn’t have its own profession associated with it. Parenting advice comes from so many angles that it’s impossible to have a clear picture of the situation, a solid front of information. Many parents get information from the medical community, which relies on the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization, two great organizations that address many issues, but not all of them, and in just the past year, at least one recommendation from the AAP was based on sub-par research. And then parents also get information from teachers, child care providers, religious organizations, and peer support groups, all of which tend to have their own agendas, not created from sound science but rather from personal opinions. Many parents can tell of their family physician giving out advice based on his personal opinion, too.

Fortunately, parenting advice is becoming more solid for children once they begin school. But as the Zero to Three National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families reports, the early childhood years are still a hotbed of countering childrearing advice, and the importance of infant mental health is still largely unknown among families. And yet, the earlier abuse—whether overt or “normal”—occurs in a person’s life, the more impact it will have, certainly because the brain is growing at the fastest rate during a child’s first three years of life. This is well-researched and organizations like The Urban Child Institute and Attachment Parenting International work to get this research to parents through professionals and peer counselors as well as direct parent education materials.

One organization, the National Parenting Education Network, is working toward making parent education a globally recognized professional field so that parent educators would become a mainstay in medical centers, schools, and other locations in recognition of the vital importance of healthy, evidence-based childrearing choices from before birth (because prenatal care counts, too) and on.

But first, we as a society, have to get to the point where we recognize the vital importance of parenting as a major contributor to lifelong mental health, and therefore demand a change in how society views mental health and the value that should be placed on this part of our lives. Our society is very much on board in terms of physical and sexual child abuse prevention. These forms of child abuse, as well as neglect of physical needs such as food and bathing, are very much looked down upon. Most of us wouldn’t turn and walk away with a clear conscience if we saw such a thing in our neighborhood. But emotional neglect and abuse prevention still requires a lot of public education; there are still whole generations who believe that it’s OK to shame, humiliate, insult, ignore, and yell at children, especially infants and toddlers. They may not have the ability to recall physical memories in these young years, but their emotional memories are there for life. Emotionally abused children are affecting our society in profound ways as adults, and we should be giving more notice to that as a whole.

Recently, a woman told me that she’s glad that she held her babies when they were younger and coslept with them and breastfed them on demand, even though they were clingy, because it was only for short time that they are that small and want to be that close to Mom around the clock. Another woman in my position might have smiled and nodded, knowingly, or if she disagreed, might have rolled her eyes. Instead, I smiled and told her that her babies weren’t clingy: They were normal!

Biologically normal babies—babies who are developmentally right on track—want to be held all the time, they want to be breastfed on demand, they want to sleep in Mom’s room at night, they want to learn from the world from Mom’s physical and emotional safety. Clingy is a term that is only used for babies when their normal child development isn’t taken into consideration.

A baby can’t be clingy.

Babies who don’t seem to need a lot of attention—those sleeping through the night on their own in another room from a very early age, those who can entertain themselves all day in the playpen, those who are accustomed to scheduled feedings from a bottle—are often referred to as the “good babies.” In actuality, these are the babies we should be concerned about. They are not developing right on track.

That doesn’t mean that every baby that falls under the “good baby” category is not developing to his individual needs, but that babies who are “trained” to ignore their biologically normal needs are not better off by any means. Those biological needs are there for a reason—we may no longer be a hunter-gatherer society preyed on by saber-toothed tigers, but our babies weren’t designed the way they are just for survival reasons.

The brain develops the fastest in early childhood. And how the brain works, physically, is by forming according to the environment that the baby is placed and growing and learning in. Certainly, there are some genetic susceptibilities, but the environment is as big of an influence on how a child develops. Babies are born with the need for physical and emotional closeness to Mom, and if their need for her presence is trained out of the baby, it changes the way the baby’s brain develops. Not that those needs are actually trained out—what happens is the baby learns ways to cope without those needs being fulfilled, and the ways that the baby learns to cope sets the child up for life on how to deal with stress.

Say a baby is left to cry himself to sleep, so he doesn’t want Mom at night, and then put on scheduled feedings, so he only searches for Mom on her timetable and not his, and then left to entertain himself from the swing or playpen or bouncy seat, absorbed in his world of toys and TV, but without learning about the world from Mom’s point of view—this baby is going to grow up learning to be self-sufficient and independent from a much younger age than is biologically normal. Is this good?

Not if you think that eventually that child will be placed in a social environment—school, peers who want to be friends, his own family growing up who want him to interact, his eventual workplace, and his eventual spouse and own children. This child who was taught in his most influential years to deny his biological needs and to then be independent, will not adjust so easily to then being in an environment where socialization, teamwork, partnership, and intimacy will be expected. His brain didn’t develop for those kinds of environments. His brain was developed through “infant training” to survive in a socially isolated world.

There shouldn’t be any wonder why the divorce rate is so high, why there seems to be more bullying, why substance abuse continues to be a problem, why anxiety and depression is such a prevalent coping mechanism, why there are any societal ills. So much of what we see as problems in our society have their original roots in how we raised our children, in how we ignored our child’s biologically normal needs—the true normal of child development—as soon as they were born.

What to do when your baby is clingy? First, stop thinking about your baby as clingy. Your baby is normal! Second, give your normal baby what she needs: You. Hold her, love her, breastfeed her, cosleep with her. Do whatever your normal baby is asking of you, because the environment you’re raising her in, is the one that she will forever operate in. So, if you lead her brain development to operate in a loving, trusting, empathic, joyful, relationship-oriented environment from the get-go, she’ll be much more prepared for a social, relationship-based society than many of the “good babies” whose social needs were trained out of them.

There are no clingy babies.

Some parents, especially of the generations before me, might gasp at the idea of teaching pre-pubic children about sex, but children are learning about sex younger and younger with every generation. I’m not just talking about images of sex on TV or what kids gossip about on the playground, but even more so, what their parents are modeling to them about their view of sex.

With this, I’m not referring to whether parents keep their bedroom door locked while they’re having sex or speak in hushed codes when they’re planning a “get-together” later that night, but rather the attitude they bear toward sex, particularly its purpose.

Certainly, in time, I’ll be introducing the idea of sex as a relationship tool. But “the talk” isn’t and shouldn’t be a single event in a child’s life. As advocated by Kelly Bartlett in “Kids and Sex: Getting Comfortable with The Talk” on The Attached Family, teaching our children about sex needs to begin when they’re toddlers and is done in phases, building up in details as the child grows and is able to better comprehend the complexities of the act. At my children’s ages, the main idea I want to bring to my children about sex is its purpose in conceiving new life.

Children start asking where babies come from well before most parents are comfortable with talking about sex with them, and most of our answers fall along the lines of “a seed grows in Mommy’s tummy” or “the stork brings them” or, as in my case, “when Mommy and Daddy pray for a baby and God thinks they’re ready.” And those reasons are good enough for a while, but at some point, children start to ask about the logistics of creating a baby. Maybe they heard something funny from one of their classmates or they walked in while their parents were “hugging” or, as in my case, they learned that animals “mated” to have babies and that people are animals, too. Whatever the reason, there comes a time when we need to start talking about sex in more concrete terms than “angels delivering bundles of joy to our doorstep.”

I began by describing how mommies have a teeny, tiny egg in their bellies and daddies have a tadpole called sperm, and when they get together, a baby is created instantly. A Child is Born became a handy way of illustrating what that baby looks like—what each of my children looked like as a new baby, and that I loved them as soon as they were born, oohing and ahhing about how cute they were even as a two-celled embryo! They giggled at the pictures that showed fetuses with tails, flipper arms, and webbed hands. They asked me how big they were along the way—from smaller than we can see to the size of a pea, a strawberry, a pop can. And then we got to the pictures of childbirth, and I recounted their individual birth stories and how unique they were and what my first words to them were and how different they were as they grew into the children they are today, and how much I love them now.

And then, the question: But how does the sperm get from Daddy into Mommy’s belly?

Well, parents can explain this in any way they want. I used A Child Is Born for this, whose infrared photographs give just enough detail for educational purposes without being remotely R rated. This might be too much for some children, but as my husband and I live on a small farm, “mating” is not a new concept for my children. For other families, though, graphics may be too much. Generally, the advice from experts is for parents to give the facts at the child’s level of understanding, such as “Daddy’s pee-pee touches Mommy’s belly” or “Daddy and Mommy hug each other really tight,” and then let the child’s questions guide the conversation.

What I wanted to convey is that sex is a part of the circle of life, that it isn’t shameful or gross. I don’t want them to grow up thinking of sex as a way to self-medicate or as a single-factor barometer of relationship well-being, either. I don’t want to portray sex as taboo or as a free-for-all. And these are attitudes that will shape over time, through many sex talks through the years. Ultimately, I hope that my children will see sex as what it’s biologically intended to be: how a woman and a man were designed to experience the beauty and miracle of creation of life.

I think that it’s the parents’ job to teach children about sex, as it’s the parents’ job to teach children about anything else, and I think it’s the parents’ decision of how to go about teaching their children about sex, but I do think we should give some thought as to our goals of what we want our children to learn.

No, I don’t think that spanking has any place in an AP home. But, I’m also not naïve enough to think that spanking doesn’t sometimes happen. It may not be spanking—for some of us, our vice is yelling or sending a child to his room. We all make mistakes, and the idea that an AP parent never loses her cool is unrealistic. As importantly, we are all in different places on our own parenting journeys and just because a parent is still working on her issues and emotions doesn’t make her a bad parent.

When I work with parents, it’s important to remember that my role is not to change their minds about parenting, but rather to present them with the most up-to-date information regarding childrearing and then to support them in making their own decisions. I’m not the parenting police, so if a parent is spanking her child, it’s not my role to tell her to stop it. Rather, I can offer her information regarding the effects of punishment versus non-punitive discipline and then offer suggestions on moving toward a less punitive environment. But it is her choice, of course, to pursue that path. And it is my responsibility to not judge.

I cannot know what all goes into another parent’s choices. I may know a little, but even her or his spouse or partner likely doesn’t know the whole story. The parent her- or himself may not fully know.

It can be difficult to apply the AP mindset to our adult relationships, because after all, we’re adults and shouldn’t we know better? But once we’ve mastered what it takes to have a secure parent-child connection, taking it to the next level—with our spouse, our own parents, our friends, strangers in the car ahead of us that just cut us off, the really rude woman in line at the cash register, and so on—is the next frontier.

Of course, I’m not talking about bedsharing and breastfeeding when it comes to applying AP to adult relationships, but rather the attitude of unconditional acceptance and loving support. AP isn’t about whether or not we do certain parenting techniques but rather about the attitude that we’re bringing with those techniques. Spanking just isn’t of unconditional love; it’s of control and trying to change a person by force, rather than empowering that person to change themselves through their own choice.

It’s this attitude change that makes AP successful in families. If parents focus just on the parenting techniques themselves—to not punish, but without the AP mindset—they’re going to end up very frustrated and regressing again and again, or else confused or unsure about limits and therefore permissive.

The best way to teach AP, whether to our children or to our spouse or to another adult in our lives, is to model it. And judging others isn’t AP. We have to learn how to meet parents where they’re at in their parenting journeys right now, not where we think they should be, and to provide them the support they need to meet their goals of raising a secure, trusting, empathetic, affectionate, and joyful child.

I am a stay-at-home mom, for the most part. I work from home, and when I do go elsewhere to work, I am fortunate to be able to bring my youngest child with me while the other two are in school. Another of the principles of Attachment Parenting asks parents to ensure that their child is receiving consistent and loving care with a single caregiver for the first two or three years of life. For some parents, this caregiver is a parent; for others, the caregiver is a childcare provider. I choose to piece together multiple jobs and freelance work that allows me to remain with my children, although be assured work-outside-the-home mothers that working from home is not that glamorous and has its own set of challenges: In some ways, it’s nice to be able to skip the commute and work in my pajamas, but then again, when work is also home, it takes a bit more effort to tuck me time in the day.

The grass is always greener on the other side… I think this saying is fitting in any part of life, including mothers’ stay-at-home versus work-outside-the-home decision. It’s human nature to never be quite satisfied with our circumstances. It’s both a curse and blessing; fulfillment can be fleeting, but it also pushes us to improve our situation. That constant push and pull between career and family life – because both are very fulfilling in themselves – can take its toll on women.

That’s what I read between the lines of this summary of ForbesWoman and TheBump.com’s “Parenthood and Economy 2012” Survey. Basically, the survey shows that whether mothers stay at home or work outside the home, they’re not content with their role: Stay-at-home moms feel as if they’re not fully contributing to their family’s financial position or resentment for giving up a career, and working mothers miss their kids and feel resentment that their partners don’t make enough money to allow them the choice to stay at home. Both groups say, the recession is to blame.

This restlessness among mothers isn’t going away, and not just because the nation’s economy is still recovering. Much of how mothers view their lives results from our unique hormones: We’re programmed to want to spend as much time with our children as possible, and yet we definitely need balance; we also get a lot of satisfaction from our careers. We’re complex creatures. Fathers, for the most part, won’t feel quite the pull that women do between children and career because they just don’t have the same chemical makeup. Certainly, the recession contributes but the core of the problem isn’t money – it’s that continual, constant, never-ending search for balance and peace.

The survey results came to one alarming conclusion: Mothers, no matter their stay-at-home or working status, are unhappy. They are not balanced. They feel guilty when working but they crave me time when with their children. What’s the solution here? I’m not sure, but it probably has something to do with learning how to be more content with your choices and making informed decisions. At least that’s what helps me.

Regardless, balance is vital when it comes to parenting. Attachment Parenting, especially, demands that parents give so much of their attention and energy and presence to their children. And this can only be done if a parent feels balanced. So, whether you’re a working mother or a stay-at-home mom, it’s important that you feel peace and fulfillment. This often means making a change – sometimes a major life change like a new job, or perhaps just carving out a little more me time, cutting out an activity in your life that seems more headache than not, playing with your children a little more, sitting down for a family meal, slowing down and reconnecting with yourself, your spouse, your children.

I had asked you to let me know how you would’ve dealt with it. This was to be an exercise in looking at this common situation in a new light – instead of thinking that child needs a timeout, considering what else might be going on to contribute to the situation.

I’ll admit, sibling rivalry is difficult to deal with. But, I’ll give you a hint – the unmet need in this case had nothing to do with her sister, the bed, the fall, or their father. It was a basic need for attention.

Things are rarely as they appear, I find. I almost always have to look beyond the immediate conflict. In this case, we were in the midst of the holidays. The children were off their schedules, getting less sleep, eating more sweets, and then trying to re-adjust to normal daily life after several days of celebrating with family, playing with long-lost cousins, and watching too many movies.

So, then, how did we deal with it? Well, I commended my older daughter for her empathetic response and quick apology. And I moved my younger daughter to another room to work out some of her frustration away from her sister’s heels. She started off telling me about it being all her sister’s fault and Daddy didn’t believe her, and then broke down, crying about how she doesn’t get enough attention from me and she misses her cousins and playing at Grandma’s and she didn’t get a piece of pumpkin pie. And after a few minutes, she looked at me, said she was sorry that she yelled, and wanted to cuddle. We looked at the bump she got when she fell off the bed and I put a bandage on it. And then she climbed off my lap and went to color a picture on the kitchen table.

The point was to help her work through her frustration by talking it out, not to distract her from the problem – that she was yelling at her sister despite her apology. The clue that my daughter’s reaction was bigger than the situation at hand – that it was more about all the stress that goes with the holidays – was how big her reaction was. In her regular routine, after a good night’s sleep, her sister’s apology would’ve been all that was needed. So, another part of attachment-based parenting is learning your child’s unique way of being so you know when something is off.

All kids yell, kick, hit, lie, cry, act up and act out. It’s healthy and developmentally appropriate for all children to display poor behavior when they’re upset. But we as parents don’t need to think that the only tools we have available are punishment and manipulation, that the only emotional reaction we should be feeling or showing is anger or disappointment. Effective discipline is often, I find, as simple as giving undivided attention and a listening ear.

Last week, I posted something on my Facebook page about my parenting style:

“I do parent differently. I don’t spank, I don’t punish. I don’t use reward systems. I guide, I teach. My kids are happy, loving, and I often get compliments on their good behavior. I breastfed on demand, I coslept. I base my parent on individual relationships with each of my children, I base my parenting on that children have equal worth as adults. And, when fully embraced, it works. For me, for my kids, and for my husband. Especially for my marriage, because the attitude I take toward my kids is the same that I take toward my husband. I accept, I love unconditionally, I love our differences. It’s a different way of looking at kids, at parenting, at marriage, at the world. And it has a name: Attachment Parenting.”

I got 11 likes. But that wasn’t the point.

This Facebook post came after yet another discussion with someone who insisted that because I am parenting differently than her that I must not know what I’m doing. She couldn’t fathom that perhaps I have consciously chosen to raise my children the way I am. My Facebook post was to dispel all those myths swirling around about my personal way of parenting my children – that it would turn them into spoiled-rotten brats, that my marriage would dissolve into divorce, that a person could not possibly raise a confident, independent child without putting a hand to his backend and bribing him with stickers.

But then I got to thinking about it, and what I don’t want to give the perception of is that by parenting this way, my kids don’t act up, that they don’t do the same things that everyone else’s kids do. The difference in parenting approaches is not the child’s behavior but the parent’s reaction to the child. A more mainstream parenting approach uses punishments and rewards to control children through fear and manipulation. An attachment-based parenting approach sees children’s poor behavior not as something that needs to be extinguished but as something that needs to be reshaped as a form of communication. An attachment-based parenting approach views children’s behavior as an expression of whether their basic emotional and physical needs have been met or not.

Back to my kids yelling at each other: They had been playing on the bed and one fell off onto the floor in a most ungraceful manner. The one still on the bed immediately dropped to the floor to check for injuries and apologize, and the one who had fallen lashed out kicking and accusing her sister of pushing her off the bed on purpose. No amount of apology was enough. She would not be reasoned with.

What would you do? How would a mainstream parent react? Now, if you turned this situation on its head and took an attachment-based approach, what are the possibilities for the unmet need? And how would you then deal with this situation? We’ll explore this more in the next post.

Helping your children manage distress in the aftermath of a shooting
American Psychological Association

Talking to Children About the School Shooting
Susan Stiffelman, Parenting without Power Struggles

Talking with Children about Upsetting News Events
Massachusetts General Hospital

Resources from Mothering on talking with children about tragedy
Mothering.com

Helping Children with Scary News
PBS.org Parents

Little Listeners in an Uncertain World
Zero to Three

How to Talk with Kids about Tragedies like School Shooting
Dr. Laura Markham, Aha! Parenting.com

Helping Children Heal
Attachment Parenting International

Children and Grief
The Attached Family.com

Children and Death
The Attached Family.com

How about that their divorce is occurring because marriage is just plain hard? No matter whether you parent this way or that. No matter whether your marriage has major relationship difficulties, such as mental illness, or not. It’s just hard. Two very different people living in close quarters – more if you add in kids – and a constant balancing and re-balancing of individual versus family versus couple priorities. That’s hard!

We don’t know the reason beyind Mayim’s divorce, and it’s unfair for anyone to speculate. It could be that it was a long time coming, that they kept hoping it would work, but they finally looked at one another one night after the fifth heart-wrenching argument in three days and asked each other, Why are we doing this? That they realized that they were hurting each other and their kids more by staying together rather than being apart.

There’s a lot of blame being put on Mayim’s specific parenting choices, especially bedsharing and extended breastfeeding. But if she was parenting the exact opposite, formula-feeding out of the hospital and doing cry-it-out, would her parenting style be blamed as much? Do we ever speculate that maybe some of the divorces that happen due to parenting style are because the mom just could not bear witness to another night of baby screaming so hard that he vomits?

And, of course, the critics come down hard on Mayim for “knowing better” of what separation does to young children. Of course, she knows. That certainly doesn’t make it any easier. But she is undoubtedly, more so than many parents I’m sure, weighing the heartache of divorce.

I’m not an advocate for divorce, but like just about any married person will tell you, I understand why divorce happens. I know the difficulty of working through really tough times for months, even years, at a time and wondering, Is this healthy for my kids, myself? I can understand why divorce is appealing. And I know that the research shows that children can sometimes benefit more from parents getting a divorce than staying together “for the sake of the children.”

I just don’t think it’s right for people to start speculating that Mayim’s parenting style was responsible for her marriage’s breakup, unless she comes out and says it directly. Many people would say that, well, that’s what happens with celebrities – they’re in the public eye and therefore the object of our gossip. I say, let’s take the higher road and think about the real person under that celeb persona.

Can a parenting style break up a marriage? I suppose anything can be blamed, but what really breaks up a marriage is that couple’s relationship – all the complex, complicated, nooks and crannies of that relationship. There are a lot of happy marriages where the children cosleep and breastfeed. And there are a lot of happy marriages where the children sleep in their own beds in their own rooms and formula-feed and soothe themselves to sleep by thumb-sucking. Let’s leave the discussion of parenting where it should be – in raising children – and rather than try to guess the secret reason for Mayim’s or anybody’s divorce, give them the compassion they so need at this moment. That marriage is hard and Mayim and her husband are trying to do the best they can for themselves, each other, and their family – even if we don’t agree with it ourselves.