Yeah. So true. You’d be amazed at how much child care expert advice like Dr. Spock comes from people who have either never had children of their own or never actually cared for the children they do have. It’s different in the trenches.

In seriousness though, it’s not so much the advice that bothers me as much as it is the criticism and browbeating you get when you don’t accept it. I mean, the more ideas to try the better IMHO, but if they don’t work for you they don’t work for you. That doesn’t make you a failure as a mother or an abusive parent or whatever bee happens to crawl up these people’s trawl. It also doesn’t mean that you’re ruining your kid’s life or spoiling them.

My best advice to new mothers? Start growing really thick skin and practice breaking tenets of polite society enough to cut these people off. Because everyone in the damn world is going to go out of their way to “help” you by pointing out your every “failure” and tell you what you’re doing “wrong”.

You get almost if not as much from men as you do women, only it’s usually decidedly more passive aggressive from men.