Ask Sherry: Where I am asked why I don’t read more parenting books. Uhh…..

You asked, and I am answering every Friday once I have enough questions!

You can ask any question using the form here.

Hi, do you mind showing an update of your ETFs investments? Which ones you’re currently investing at and why? Thank you so much, I’ve learned a lot about investing thanks to you.

Hi! I will do a post on this, but roughly speaking, I have 50% in U.S. index funds, and 25% in international, and another 25% in Canada. I keep it pretty simple.

Do you think it is realistic for your child to leave you alone to work at your desk all day?

No.

It is why he sits beside me, we do activity pages every 30 minutes or so, I feed him while I am on calls, and we ‘hang’ out together when we can during my breaks from work.

I also take 10 – 15 minutes to cuddle with him and a read a book, and then I tell him it’s time for me to go back to work and he lets me go.

It would be so much easier if he is in school (soon!) but it isn’t as impossible as when he was a baby baby. Omg … when he was a toddler it was horrific to work at home.

Why don’t you read more parenting books?

It is a little hard not to take this personally because I am wondering why you are even asking this question and it makes me wonder if you are only asking me this, or expecting me to be into parenting books because I’m the mother.

Would you ask a father, writing a personal finance blog, the same question?

I wonder.

Fathers never seem to be on the hook to make sure they nourish and build the brains of their offspring as much as the pressure put on mothers to do so.

That’s a load of crock in my opinion.

My time is just as valuable as a father’s, and if I choose to spend it NOT reading parenting books because I want to read biographies, fashion, style, chicklit and fiction, that’s what I am going to do because it is my time to enjoy myself the same way my partner reads philosophy for fun and not parenting books.

That said, I already read all the parenting books that were possibly interesting, from Bringing up Bébé to Raising Boys. I also reviewed them in a lot of my reading roundups that go along with my shopping roundups.

I even wrote a whole post on what I found useful: The most useful baby, pregnancy and parenting books

Frankly, they all have information that is interesting, but at the end of the day, I am going to parent the way I feel is best.

I don’t find them particularly interesting past a certain point — I don’t need the same advice repeated over and over again to me in different forms.

I refuse to be shamed or guilted by books like Raising Boys that show “clinical research” that boys up to the age of 3 need a primary caregiver and a solid presence in their lives to be healthy, well-adjusted boys.

Sure, it MAY help but it isn’t a guarantee and it just gives other smug mothers (one lives in my building) a chance to lord over me that she can be and chooses to be a stay at home mother martyr whereas I am a neglectful working mother who doesn’t care about the well-being of her toddler. (In so many words, that’s what she meant).

I have actual, personal relatives who have done this for their boys, and half of them turned out great, and the other half are resentful, troublemakers who are unable to focus on anything.

It is kind of a crapshoot, parenting. Books aren’t going to help that much.

The most I can glean from those books is just how to empathize with Little Bun when he is losing it (which is what I have done as much as possible), but when a child is shrieking bloody murder and doing the caterpillar dead jelly body wiggle, it can be hard not to lose your f#!@#ing s#%@#% on them and scream back at them.

You do the best you can, and that’s what I tell everyone. And besides, Little Bun is fine.

Still have a burning question?

You can ask any question using the form here and all of my previous Ask Sherry posts are here.