On Reading Articles About Parenting

I read a lot of articles about parenting. This is a hazard of regular visits to Facebook and Twitter where the links abound. I’ve been reading articles about parenting for longer than I’ve been on social media. Way back before access to the internet was something most people had, I subscribed to some parenting magazines. At this point Ihave a long enough baseline that I can read an article and think “Ah yes the parenting trend has swung back to touting the need for discipline.” I’ve come to realized that there is one thing wrong with every parenting advice article I’ve ever read. It is the same thing that is wrong with advice in general. It is the assumption that one approach is correct for all circumstances. The truth is that parents are coming from wildly different backgrounds and cultural contexts. People have different inherent strengths and weaknesses. One parent needs to learn how to enjoy spontaneity, another would benefit from learning how to keep a schedule. This is why we get the wildly divergent parenting advice. All of it is potentially valuable, all of it is potentially damaging. It is up to individual parents to figure out what to apply in their own lives.

The trick of course is that parents are often insecure and defensive about their choices. I know I am and have been. When I read an article that tells me the critical importance of regular home cooked meals served with the family gathered together at the table, that pokes me in a guilty spot. Then I have to choose how to react. I could write an angry rebuttal so that other parents out there who are like me will know that their dinner style does not doom their children to disaster. I could humble myself and rearrange my life to make sure I’m doing the family dinner thing. I could deflect and say “That’s nice, but I do things differently.” Each of these responses may be correct. Which is why this parenting gig is so difficult. It’s all wibbly wobbly without clear guidelines.

A few weeks back there was a post that went viral. It was from the mother whose first baby was two weeks old. She said that she didn’t see why everyone claimed that parenting was so hard. She was handling it fine, still exercising, eating healthy, and keeping a clean house. Oh and her baby was simply a delight. Naturally there were floods of responses that ranged from angry to supportive to “Oh honey, just wait and see if you still say that later.” To me this young mother seems very naive. She assumes that all the weeks that follow will be the same as the two weeks she has been through. She also assumes that everyone else has the same situation as she does. Were that true, perhaps she would be right to tell others to stop complaining. In this case it is fairly clear to anyone who has been parenting for longer than two weeks (and many who’ve been parenting for less) that this young mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The thing is that I feel the same way about many parenting advice articles. They have the same naive assumption that all things are equal and the same process will work for all parents.

Of late many of the parenting articles I read are focused on special needs kids. I’ve dipped my toes into the deep waters of online autism communities and for parents of children with mental health issues. These special needs articles are still full of advice, but they seem to understand the ala carte principle. They are clear that parents should do what is best for their family and skip what isn’t. Still these articles make me sad, because I read about the benefits of particular therapies early in child development and those windows are closed to me. I have kids diagnosed in their teens and it pokes in a hurty place when I see things that would have been helpful if we’d had access to them earlier. Fewer and further between are articles that address the spaces we are in.

So why do I keep reading these articles if they are all naive or painful? Sometimes it is because I’m easily distracted and my brain is trying to avoid the pertinent work of the day. Yet I am drawn to parenting articles over a myriad of other things I could be doing. I read them because when they give advice that doesn’t fit my family, it makes me think through what does work for us and why it works. Articles introduce new ideas. Sometimes masked in the noise I find one thing that rings true to me. Then I collect that thing and it makes our lives easier, or the path ahead more clear, or it simply gives me strength to keep going through the hard stuff. Even when I feel that everything in an article is blatantly wrong or misguided, I can see past the advice to see the writer as another parent who is struggling to make sense of this parenting gig. I read because that is how I learn and get better at what I’m doing. There is not instruction manual for parenting except what we assemble for ourselves. It usually ends up being a hodge podge collection of things we’ve cut and pasted from our own lives and the experiences of others. We’re all making this up as we go, even those who want to label themselves as experts and dispense wisdom to everyone else.