As a culture, perhaps as a people, we love to muse over the best and worse methods for successfully raising kids. Sure, it makes sense. The future of the human race depends on how well we raise our kids. Admittedly, on rare occasion, we like to congratulate parents on their successes by approaching them after church or in line at the grocery to remark upon how well-behaved their kids are. But, for the most part, it seems we love to ridicule what we perceive as bad, misinformed, and lazy choices people make as they struggle through parenthood asserting we would have done things so much better. Well, maybe we would have done things better, or maybe there's a chance we don't know what the hell we're talking about. As outsiders, we simply can't know the kids or situation in which they're being raised, or heck, even if the behavior we're witnessing is typical.
My father once told me a story about a time when my aunt, his baby sister, had "the nerve" to criticize his parenting techniques as attempting to "program" his kids as if they were computers. She believed, it would seem, that we should have been given more latitude in the day to day, and while I'm not altogether sure what specifically she was referring to or what brought about this criticism, I can honestly say she may have been right. It's no secret that my father was rather strict with us when we were growing up. Stricter than most parents? It's hard to say. Especially when my standard of comparison is my mother, who was about as lenient as they come. At any rate, my father's feathers were ruffled by my aunt's comments, not because he recognized she was hitting close to the truth but because she, a woman who chose not to have children, felt it was her place to offer up advice on how my father should be raising his kids. He felt my aunt was too ignorant about the ins and outs of raising kids to be criticizing a parent's decisions regarding his/her children let alone promoting her own theories regarding the rearing of children. She had, after all, zero experience being a parent and was educated to be a surgical nurse, not a child psychologist or even a pediatrician. Now, I'll be the first to admit my father is as stubborn as a bull and that maybe he should have at least considered the point my aunt was trying to make, but at the same time, as a parent now in similar shoes, I can't help but wonder if he was, at least in part, justified in his response.
A good friend recently admonished me for falling into my father's line of thinking while I was complaining about another friend's acerbic remarks regarding choices I've made in caring for Mina. He stopped me short when I whined that the person "wasn't even a parent" and went on to assert that his inexperience as a parent does not negate the knowledge he's gleaned from friends who have had children, his parents, or information he's acquired on his own through other sources. He made a good point. I know I had plenty of opinions about how to best raise children long before I became a parent myself, and while some of those notions have since fallen by the wayside, I still hold on to most of them today. But then again, just as employers are skeptical of applicants lacking on-the-job experience, parents are justified in taking advice from their childless friends with a grain of salt. After all, it's nearly impossible to really know how to raise a kid until your up to your eyeballs in diapers and spit-up and actually doing the work of raising your child. And in all likelihood, unless the parent is a bumbling idiot, they've probably already considered the criticisms likely to be launched by their non-parent friends. I know very few parents who have approached parenthood with a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude. The vast majority of parents I know, and I assure you I'm among them, have spent countless hours reading parenting books, visiting parenting websites, reading the most recent research, discussing concerns with the pediatrician and talking to other parents (be it their own or friends who have already ventured down the path of parenthood) to determine what they consider to be the best methods for raising their kids. That's not to say, as parents, we shouldn't be open to the opinions our childless friends offer up. After all, they're looking in on our situation from a different vantage point and may be able to see things we simple cannot (like my Dad not seeing he could have lightened up a bit with us). But I think it falls on the person making the criticism (be it a friend with or without kids) to at least do so respectfully. To offer up their point of view as just that, a point of view, and not the gospel truth, certainly not when we're talking about how somebody else should be raising their kids.
And now, because I'm my father's daughter:
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