Indian toddler in the USA

Today, it's 1 yr and a few days since my son has been going to a day care and he, my husband and me have come a long way since then. We're planning to move him to a different day care and we were trying to list out everything we wanted in a different day care. And it got us thinking about a lot of things. We have learnt a lot of the American ways of bringing up a child and there are so many things we just refuse to learn. And I was trying to think and logically reason out why we refuse to learn certain things.

In India we coddle our children for many many years and sometimes forever. It's just our culture to do everything for our child and love them and give give give to them. Out here (in the western world) the focus from the time the baby is born is on making them independent. We realized, being independent and being attached are not really mutually exclusive of each other. If a child is attached to his parents, it does not mean he's not going to grow up to be independent. In fact I think it's quite the contrary. But sometimes it gets hard for us to really decide on whether to go the American way with certain things.

For instance, we've learnt to move him out of our bed and let him sleep in a crib now. We did that for only one reason, the hope that he'd sleep better. And it sort of worked, he still snuggles in with us in the wee hours of morning and we love it. But he does wake up a couple of times in the night and one of us has to get up and put him back in. Some one suggested we move him to a separate room. We thought about it, talked about it and decided, we won't do that. Why? We are just too attached and afraid for him to be in a separate room all by himself. Afraid of what? Monsters under his bed? Ok maybe not afraid, but yes, very attached. Are we being selfish here? I don't think so. We believe we just need to trust our instincts here, and if that means waking up a couple of times and rubbing our son's back or picking him up and comforting him or rocking him, until we figure out a way to get him to sleep through the night, why not. We think he will feel more secure and loved. But will he rest enough?

We also taught him to eat by himself since he was 7 months old. But then we refuse to not interfere or to let him decide when he's done. We encourage him to eat more if it looks like he hasn't had a great meal. We let him take his time to finish his meal. Independence sure, but again what is the hurry? Nutrition is important too and how do we know kids are making the right decision when they think they're done with their meal? The day care though would like him to be independent soon and that meant he wouldn't eat more than a few morsels every day for lunch. So we decided we need a day care that let's him take his time finishing his meal. Will this make it harder for him down the road when there are more students to every teacher?

Another thing we have been refusing to learn is to make a strict schedule to drop him off at the day care. Now this I think is more out of finding it hard to do rather than not wanting to do. For us a day care is a place that can take care of our son when we can't. So one day I might be able to drop him off at 9:30, and the next day I might drop him off at 10:30. How big of a deal is this? Is a schedule really important to follow at this age for Atharv? He eats and sleeps at the same times, and the rest of the time he's playing either here or at the day care. But then here I always catch me doubting myself here. Most day cares have a schedule and have their activities planned in advance. And being inconsistent with our schedule means that our little one, may miss out on some activities. So this we have fixed now. But are those activities more important than spending that little extra time with us?

Time will tell. Or will it?