GD stands for gentle discipline.

Anyway, please satisfy my curiosity on one thing: In your comment on the first post, you used the initials ‘GD’. I can’t for the life of me work out what that acronym stands for – can you tell me? (And what’s the betting I then slap my forehead and groan that of , I should have realised…)

So yea, I don’t pretend to know someone’s opinions on breastfeeding or babywearing based solely on seeing them with a bottle or baby bucket. Maybe she has a good reason, and is really a huge lactivist and could teach me a thing or two about wrapping (on the other side, maybe the super cool looking sling wearing hippie mama is an anti-feminist homophobic white supremacist — true story). But what I meant with what you quoted is that sometimes what looks like a spade really is just a spade, and she’s using a bottle because breastfeeding is disgusting and not worth it, and using a bucket because holding babies spoils them. Which doesn’t make her a bad mom, of course, just not what I’m looking for in a friend at the moment.

I can’t know just by looking, and so I strive to avoid snap judgments. But /sometimes/, what we discover with further information is that our snap judgments were “correct”, and the more social signals there are pointing one way (bottle feeding AND bucket use AND gender typed clothing), the more likely that is to be true.

But it’s still wrong enough often enough that it isn’t worth it to write people off just for not meeting a checklist of superficialities, and it’s always worth getting the full story because real people are far more interesting than stereotypes. Like I said, people will surprise you.