Well, I've definitely had to deal with a lot of judgments from people regarding my parenting choices. From the very start, there were people who didn't like the fact that I was breastfeeding my baby exclusively, that I would nurse my baby in public, that I wore my baby on my body, that we were having a family bed with our baby. My family, friends, friends that had kids, friends that didn't have kids, my pediatrician, everybody had an opinion on how we should be raising our child.

Some of the things you might wanna think about when you select a pediatrician is location, location, location. I think the most important advice I give people is do not select a pediatrician that is more than 20 minutes from your house. No matter if it's by plane, train, automobile, you will be going there when your baby, for their first two years, I think you go maybe once a month and then, if they're sick, more.

The greatest gift that a parent can give their child is to help them to understand what their hum is. The hum essentially is what they're born with. What is their emotional DNA? As a parent, I know I have four children, and each child emerged and was soothed a little bit differently. One of the things that's most essential from a parenting perspective is to be able to hear that hum within your child. What soothes them? What makes them smile? What makes them stop crying? Do they like to be rocked? Do they like to be walked? Do they like quiet? Do they like loud?

RIE parenting philosophy is centered around perceiving an infant as a whole person from the very beginning. This has an affect on the way we talk to the baby. We recommend talking to babies right away, telling them everything that's happening with their bodies, what we're doing with them. Every time before we pick the baby up, we tell the baby, "I'm going to pick you up." We wait a few moments. We look at them. We start to wait for a signal that they're ready, and we might even say, "Are you ready?" And then we slowly and gently pick them up.

Elimination communication is basically not training your baby to go in a diaper. It's a lot less messy than that sounds, but traditionally, in the past 50, 100 years, babies go in diapers, when we notice we change them, and what that ends up doing, unfortunately, is training the baby that going in their diaper is okay. And then, we pick the worst time, developmentally, around two years, to train them to go on a pot and to tell them that everything they've been doing for their whole life is wrong.