Thanks for the affirmation. It took me a while to start listening. I was a very 'good' traditional [book reading] parent the first time around in the 1980s. I didn't 'make a rod for my back' & didn't think to question vaccination or allopathic medicine.
In fact, I didn't dare to listen to my instincts because I wanted to be a very different parent to my parent. I wanted to break a cycle of what I considered neglect and I wanted to break the cycle of spanking and I felt I couldn't rely on my instincts in case I'd absorbed parenting that would be damaging to my child, 'knee-jerk' learned parenting.

In part I think I started to learn to listen to my instincts because of where I was living. We need to be open and loud about what we do. We need to 'be the change', because even when people disagree with us initially we move the goal posts by exposing them to new ideas. I was living in Hadley Massachusetts ["The Happy Valley"] and working as a Montessori teacher [I found myself training as a Montessori teacher almost by accident initially as my husband got my position whilst I was still in the UK waiting to follow him to the US] and I had friends and colleagues who co-slept and had home births, used homeopathy & home schooled and didn't vaccinate their children.

It seemed as if the universe shuffled all that into place, as I couldn't imagine what a disaster it would have been to parent my dd16 without a 'taking children seriously' libertarian perspective. If she had survived without co-sleeping I'm fairly sure we'd have damaged her irrevocably with traditional parenting & we'd have had a HELL of a time in the process.

As it is, she has turned out to be a very stable, reasonable and deeply intellectual person. Her first word was "Self!" practically and she would have been diagnosed with ODD or PDA [Pathological Demand Avoidance] for sure.
Instinctively she needs to feel absolutely free and at liberty. Today her reading matter is Yeonmi Park's "In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom."
She is a success story for instinct led parenting mixed with a big dose of 'taking children seriously'. [http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/].
I can hear her now voluntarily emptying the dishwasher [we don't have chores in our house] and telling her 10-year-old sister Yuki about the human right's issues in North Korea and the history of the boundary lines of the area.