What’s the Worst Parenting Advice You’ve Ever Received?
There are many good parenting tips out there — helpful, supportive, research-based tips to help us raise our children to be happy, healthy, and kind adults. And then there are some truly awful tips, tactics that once seemed perfectly reasonable, but ultimately manifest themselves in the misconceptions they have always been.
We’ve all received terrible parenting advice. Sometimes it comes from an older relative who did a little differently at one time, for example, “If they bite you, bite them back so they know how it feels!” Bad advice comes to us from all directions: outdated parenting books, people who have forgotten what it really is to have small children, and people who do n’t even have children.
Sometimes we even follow this terrible advice because, well, the baby’s teeth are teething and we’re tired and we scream and we feel like we’ve tried everything else. So what the heck, if a little whiskey on the gums was enough for our parents and grandparents, that’s probably okay ( it’s a bad idea ). Other times, we don’t realize the advice was bad until time passes and we look back at the experience from a perspective and context and think, “Yep. We probably shouldn’t have done this . “
For example, when my son was an infant, we lived in Arizona, where childhood drowning rates are high and teaching children to swim at an early age is a shared priority. My son was about six or seven months old when we took him to his first swimming lesson. He was not a fan and made it clear for about 28 out of 30 minutes (for the other two minutes he swam on his back, which he thought was excellent). At the end, however, noticing my worried face, the instructor showed me a thumb up and said, “Don’t worry, Mom; he’ll get used to it soon, just stick with it! “
We did so because we thought he knew more about it than we do; but my child hated the second lesson, and the third too. They kept urging us to stay on course, and each time we hoped that we were just one lesson away from everything falling into place. Guess what? He was a baby, and the giant pool of water confused him as hell, and he didn’t want to do it, and we were bad advice in creating a problem that we now regret.
(He is now 10 years old, he loves all bodies of water and the swimmer is stronger than me – so luckily we did not spoil that for him, despite our obvious efforts).
Treat me to your bad advice: What’s the worst parenting advice you’ve ever received? Did you take it or did you recognize it as a disaster? Or maybe you were a giver of bad advice before you had children of your own and saw the error of your ways. Let us know in the comments!
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