Hi, this is Janet Landsfrey. Welcome to Unruffled. So today I wanted to address an issue that many of us have as parents.

I certainly did when I first became a parent. And that is I was wasting my energy working at parenting in ways that were actually getting in my way and certainly could have been cut out of my job description.

We all know that we need every unit of energy we can get as parents.

So I'm going to offer a little edit to what many of us might believe is our job

description. And this edit not only benefits us by freeing up our energy and making our job a little less

tiresome, it also benefits our children in many ways. Okay, so I just want to start out by acknowledging that, as with everything that I share,

these are my opinions based on my research, training, and experience.

And you may not agree with everything I share here, and that's okay.

I love to hear your thoughts and comments, wherever you want to share them.

You know, this is just an offering.

Food for thought.

As parents, we get to make our own decisions on what we believe and what works for us.

So before I get into the things that we might consider cutting out

of our job description, I want to talk about what I believe to be the areas that we do need to put

energy into. And I call these areas where we lead, as opposed to the areas we can take off our list and just trust.

So in the lead column, the first one is that we want to attend to our child's basic needs,

creating an atmosphere that fills their needs, and we're responsive to their communication.

I guess that one's pretty obvious for most people. The second one, and this is maybe particularly a Magda Gerber inspired idea. I know a lot of

people say that they don't have time for this or they don't want to do this. But she recommended,

and I've found it so helpful because of all the things we teach while doing this, to have

attentive, connected caregiving. Meaning when we're picking up our baby, when we're feeding our

baby, whether that's breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or when they start

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