You know what would make the Mommy wars go away?
If we would stop thinking that we could judge parents by one moment or one action. I'm so tired of it, and I've been running into it all over the place lately. That nice long letter to the mom on her phone about how much she's missing. Yeah, except maybe she's taking 15 minutes on her phone out of her entire day and she needs a break. Needs some kind of interaction with someone other than her children. Maybe her children keep looking at her because they're used to having her attention all the time. Or the people deciding that the dad who posted the pictures of his son crying for all the umpteen reasons that toddlers cry doesn't know how to comfort his child. (Please understand that I am not commenting on any of the other things that cause people to dislike this blog, just this one aspect of the complaint.) It takes all of a minute for me to take a picture on my phone. I can promise you that when my daughter is crying because she's mad about something that I can't fix or won't fix (like when I told her not to pull the pillow out from under my head and handed her another pillow and she decided to throw a tantrum about it) I can do NOTHING to comfort her in that first minute other than let her get her anger out. This is not our normal approach to parenting. We have never let her cry it out. She has nursed on demand. I don't believe that crying is a necessary part of childhood or that it teaches her any lessons. But I have tried every other approach to comforting her in those moments, and they don't work. I have to just let her cry. If she hurts herself, or is scared, or wakes up in the middle of the night, I comfort her immediately. And I'm good at it. When she's mad because she can't make her penguin hat fit on her head inside out? NOTHING I do will make her feel better right then.
If someone decided to videotape me for a day, they could pull out a hundred moments of bad parenting to judge me on. But if they paid attention to the whole day, most days, they'd see a pretty good parent. I think most of us feel this way most days. So why are we so quick to judge each other on the few moments we see?
If someone decided to videotape me for a day, they could pull out a hundred moments of bad parenting to judge me on. But if they paid attention to the whole day, most days, they'd see a pretty good parent. I think most of us feel this way most days. So why are we so quick to judge each other on the few moments we see?