Sometimes vindication is a long time in coming. Kat was born in 1987. Kat would not sleep on her stomach and Kat was a pacifier baby. (Yes, despite the pacifier, she also was a breastfed baby. The use of the pacifier did not seem to interfere with breastfeeding at all.) Both the sleeping on her back and the pacifier were worthy of comment---lots of comment. The consensus among little old women seemed to be that I was a bad mother. A good mother would insist her child sleep on her back so she could not choke and a good mother would not use a disgusting pacifier.

But then I heard the news today. It turns out---at least for now�that the new recommendation is put the baby to sleep on its back and use a pacifier. (They also recommend the baby sleep in your room but not in your bed which we did a bit with Kat but never with Day. No one could possibly have slept in a room with baby Day as we all discovered over and over again each vacation in hotel rooms.)

I had had vindication on the sleeping-on-the-back thing long ago. I had that vindication around about the time that Day was born. Day, of course, in the way that parents do, made me a bad parent as well. She insisted on sleeping on her stomach. In her case, I would put her down on her back as the health campaign of the day required. But when your baby can roll either direction at will by the time she is a month old, the battle is a total loss. Day slept whatever way she wanted. She just waited until I left the room to get there. My pediatrician faced reality and consoled me with the thought that a baby who was that neurologically developed probably was at little chance of SIDS anyway. Whether she was right or not hardly matters at this point. No fifteen year old is a likely victim of SIDS.

Of course, that's the irony. None of it matters now. Kat did not go to college in diapers, much as I feared it. My potty training of her is not something I'd care to repeat but it did not scar her irreparably for life. Children of mothers working outside the home grew up to be secure and responsible people. Children of mothers who worked solely at home grew up to be secure and responsible people. Some of the breastfed are heavy and some are not. Some eat well and some do not. The truth is that all those burning issues of young children--pacifiers, food, potty training�none of it seems to matter now as much as we thought it would. Regardless what we did on those issues, most of my friends and I have raised reasonably together teenagers.

What kind of vindication is that, really?

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