We made soo many mistakes with our first child. Luckily, we are avoiding most of these with child #2, thank goodness!  I wish we had been better informed when we had Charlie though, so I thought I’d write up our mistakes here. It’s kind of embarrassing to reveal all of our parenting fails, but hopefully this helps somebody out there avoid some of the speed bumps we ran into!

Here are our top five mistakes:

1) Not getting rid of the milk bottle when Charlie turned one.

We should’ve gotten rid of the bottle when Charlie turned one. Charlie is now over two years old, and he still drinks milk from a bottle!! How embarrassing. We definitely should’ve done the transition earlier. Now that he can talk though, it’s so much harder when he starts begging for “MILK!!!”

There are so many reasons that it’s good for your LO to cut down on milk consumption when they hit one: 

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* It can really affect how much solids your LO eats. The more calories they get from milk, the less they will need from solids. This can slow down the transition to solids, especially if your LO isn’t a good eater (like Charlie).
* Your LO can become emotionally dependent on milk and/or the bottle. This has definitely happened to Charlie. He’s recently started waking up in the middle of the night, crying and demanding milk. It comforts him and now it’s harder than ever to break his bottle addiction.
* All that extra milk can cause “bottle rot,” which can result in your kid getting unnecessary cavities… and even root canals!

Then there are selfish reasons, like bottles create a lot of extra dish washing. And it’s embarrassing when your LO demands to take a milk bottle with them to daycare… and drinks the bottle while walking down the street. Not that this actually happened to me. Last week.

2) Not always brushing Charlie’s teeth before bedtime.

This is embarrassing, but I always figured that if Charlie got one or two cavities then it wasn’t that huge a deal because his baby teeth would fall out and he would get new ones. But that ignores that even a few cavities require fillings… and also, Mrs. Bee blogged about how more and more kids are getting root canals these days!

After we read that article, we became super diligent about brushing his teeth and plan to start brushing Olive’s teeth as soon as they come in! I am praying that Charlie doesn’t have 100 cavities. We’ll find out soon enough… we’re scheduling his first pediatric dental appointment now.

3) Teaching Charlie how to bite.

One day, Charlie came home from daycare with a big bite mark on his back! One of his classmates had decided to bite him while they were playing. It didn’t break the skin or anything, but it left a big bruise… you could see the indentations of her teeth on his skin!

After that, I became increasingly worried that Charlie would bite someone at daycare and get kicked out… since he had recently started biting me when we played at home. So I did some research and discovered that in many cases, biting is a learned behavior. If you “play bite” with your LO, then they will often learn that teeth-on-skin contact is ok. I never actually bit Charlie, but I would pretend to “eat him up” and gobble him up by “eating his stomach.” I guess that for a toddler, they consider that to be biting.

I stopped with the play bites, and Charlie immediately stopped biting me. I mentioned something about it to a Hellobee friend, and she said that she got similar results! So for the two of us at least, we got dramatic results.

Of all the mistakes we made, this was one of the earliest to solve because we caught it early! I’ve heard that some daycares will kick you out if your kid keeps biting others! Charlie is in a great daycare, so I’m just grateful that he didn’t bite another kid and get kicked out.

4) Delaying the transition to a toddler bed

Bee posted about how Charlie’s sleep has gotten all whacky lately:

We should have transitioned Charlie to a toddler bed before Olive was born when he was 21 months old, and wasn’t able to communicate (aka challenge us) as effectively as he can now. But we were afraid of making any big changes before she was born, and no parent wants to mess with their child’s sleep when it’s good! I also know many parents that didn’t transition to a toddler bed until their child was closer to 3, so I thought that we had more time.

We definitely should have transitioned him to a toddler bed earlier. We just loved that he couldn’t climb out of the crib and cause mischief. He is just so good at creating mischief! But if we had transitioned him earlier, I think it would’ve been a much cleaner transition. As it is, I end up sleeping on the floor of his nursery a few times a week.

We haven’t totally solved this one yet, but hope to have some progress to report soon!

5) Turning Charlie into a picky eater

Bee found an article that said that there are no such things as picky eaters… just parents that don’t do a good job teaching their kids to eat. The author had a list of mistakes that parents make, and sure enough we did all of them! Here are just three of them:

1) We didn’t have a strict mealtime routine. We let Charlie eat in different chairs at different times. For a while, we were regularly feeding him at the playground.
2) We wouldn’t eat together, so Charlie rarely saw us eating.
3) We would sometimes feed him while he was watching a video. (He would often eat well because he was so mesmerized by Thomas the Tank Engine that he would just chew whatever we put in his mouth.)

The result was that he became quite a picky eater! Bee is going to write a longer blog post explaining how we’ve started to address this problem. All I know is that sometimes, Charlie will devour his meals now! That happened so rarely before that it makes me want to break out in applause!

I could probably add even more to our list of biggest mistakes, including the time I almost killed Charlie by leaving out some Extra Strength Excedrin because I assumed that he couldn’t get past the child-proofed lid! But I’ll stop there, while I (hopefully) have at least a shred of dignity and parenting pride left.

What were some of your parenting mistakes and fails? And were you able to fix the problem over time?