They say it takes a village to raise a child. Any new parent can tell you that the village certainly seems to think so. When you have children, people come out of the woodwork to offer you unsolicited and often, unhelpful advice.
It starts when you are pregnant. The first thing I remember is someone telling me to spend the money on a high-end digital thermometer. That’s actually not bad advice as babies are squirmy especially when they are sick. Those thermometers are fast and are certainly better than the mercury thermometers that were around when I was a child. They took forever and were next to impossible to read.
That helpful piece of advice was quickly followed by many, many other pieces of advice. Some came in the form of books. Someone gave me books about midwives and told me that birth was not an illness and should not be treated by a doctor. Those books led to one of my favorite moments ever, which involved my mother reading them for entertainment. She came across a story about labor which contained the euphemism “My husband massaged the gates of life” actually fell out of a chair laughing. The same person also gave me a magazine that recommended using breast milk to treat a variety of ailments (it also works as eye makeup remover).
I got lots of advice about diapering. The usual cloth versus disposable diapering became even more tiresome because people in Colorado like to argue about water usage since we often have droughts. Some people even chime in with helpful advice about how you can make your own baby wipes and wash them at home.
The hardest pieces of advice to take are from well-meaning people who want to help and don’t realize that they are nagging you incessantly or guilt-tripping you about problems they don’t really understand. For instance, I knew someone who had an unusually chubby baby. The baby was exclusively breast-fed and wasn’t eating constantly.. People came out of the woodwork to offer the mother advice about how to slim down the baby. I guess they assumed she was feeding it lard. Actually, it was a phase and the baby is now a thin child.
Here are some of my favorite advice assaults:
- Once, someone followed my husband out of a party and to the car talking about the benefits of breastfeeding.
- I was walking around a fair with my six-week old son (it was a warm day, he had a hat and sunscreen) and some woman told me a baby shouldn’t leave the house until he was three months old.
- A really annoying nurse lectured me about eating too much fast food when I was gaining weight during pregnancy. Of course, she never bothered to ask if I ate fast food. (I almost never do. Seriously – like twice a year.)
- A pre-school teacher told me I shouldn’t give my baby a pacifier.
- A babysitter sent me a two-page email about properly sizing diapers. We accidentally bought the wrong size diapers and opened the package by mistake. So, ONCE I sent my son to daycare in a diaper that was too big for him because I had no other diapers in the house.
- “There’s no such thing as colic”. None of my kids had colic but anyone who says this should be strapped to a rocket and launched to the moon.
Please, if you have stories of unsolicited parenting advice, share them. It’s so fun.
