Automated Baby Care Is So Wrong

As an only child who had no contact with cousins, I can say that the concept of what is "age appropriate" was my first lesson as a parent. Your example would work find with older kids, but not with toddlers. The good thing about having your own kids, is that you can train them your way. I trained my then 2 year old that counting to five out lout or with my fingers (for quiet environments such as a library), meant that if I got to five, and you didn't obey, there would be a negative consequence. You seldom have that relationship with other people's kids.

That's the thing. I was raised as an only child and had no siblings or surrogates. My two close friends HARDLY count as sisters. I've never been responsible for the care of any child under the age of 6, so I wouldn't know what to do. I don't even want to hold an infant b/c I don't know how (not that I'd want to hold one anyway).

And you're right, my method only works with older kids who have capacity to reason and converse. You can't reason with a 3 year old.

In my family, kids were treated mostly like adults. My cousins never got a chance to be "just kids" so I was a bit luckier that way, but it's not like my mom really played with me. Not that she didn't do things like take me camping and to Canada's Wonderland and Marineland, but that's not quite the same as playing Lego or My Little Pony, either. Becuase most of my contact was with adults, I've always been able to converse with people 30 and older much better than anyone younger than that. I mean, on school trips I always hung around the adult and talked with them, because I couldn't relate to my peers.

The flipside of this is that from the time I was 4, we had cats in the home. I always considered our first cat my "brother" since we both literally grew up together. I can converse (body language or vocalisations) with cats relatively well. I know how to hold cats or kittens, and I know how to make the noises cats recognise as mommycat sounds. I kinda socialised myself more to relating to my cat than to other humans, so all the things I do NOT know how to do with a human child, I know full well how to do with felines. The oddest part is that I don't see that as a problem, either. lol

Thankfully, with living in the same building as my two friends and one of them having older siblings, I got the (small) social network and did get that sense of.. "togetherness?".. elsewhere. I mean there are things I learned from my best friends' older sister that I didn't learn from my mother, but there are other things my mother taught me that I didn't learn elsewhere. I loved living in our building because of that sense of community, of our three families sort of co-raising all 3 of us. :)