Slightly further away than you with a 15 month old girl. Did a bunch of litterature read before she was born, as well as examined our own raising (my wife grew

Slightly further away than you with a 15 month old girl. Did a bunch of litterature read before she was born, as well as examined our own raising (my wife grew in a very strict environment whilst I grew up in a do whatever you want environment). I'd say the following principles apply for us: - Don't make your life harder. Parenting is tough enough as it is without adding behaviour because of "what will people think". For instance, the UK has very strict guidelines about sanitising baby bottles and milk. According to those (and you'll actually get told of if you don't do it), you're supposed to boil water then cool it down before you can make a baby bottle and other stuff like that. Other countries have no such rule and don't have more disease or mortality, and some actually removed those rules a couple years ago. Doing things "just to be on the safe side" leads imo to over anxiety and guilt whenever something goes wrong. - Overall Montessori-ish approach to parenting, with a lot of focus on independant play, but also providing her with an environment that will challenge her (rotating toys, giving her different type of material etc.). Similarly she started sleeping at 6 month in a mattress on the floor, not a cot, so that she can start exploring her room by herself when she wakes up in the morning. I say "montessori-ish" as there are a couple stuff of the philosophy we don't like, first of them being "no imagination base play". Maria Montessori did not want children to waste time on unicorns and so on as they are not part of the real world and can dillute their learning. But I would wager that todays world, with video games, movies etc. makes those concept just as useful as knowing what a donkey is. And we value imagination a lot. However, that stops at "pretend play", I'd rather her play by holding an actual carrot whilst I cook (and in some time, actually helping), rather than having a plastic kitchen to pretend cook with. - In terms of "limits", we treat her like we would like to be treated. No arbitrary limit that has no reason to exist, for instance, we don't try to force her bed / nap time at a specific time and try to lean on her sleepiness instead. In general that has made bed / nap time pretty smooth albeit not really predictable days in advance. That also helped a lot when travelling (plane / car / train) as she usually will nap during those time even if it's not at a "specific nap time".