Hacks for Parents That Backfired
As someone who actively searches for and writes about parenting tricks every day, I’m always looking for shortcuts and tricks that will make your life (and mine) a little easier. But not all hacks are the same, and a hacker who works great for one parent can be a waste of time for another. Your mileage, as they say, may differ.
Sometimes the hack just doesn’t work; sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth; and sometimes they completely backfire, as Paula Cook illustrates on Instagram:
When I was writing this post and trying to choose a good option, “well, that didn’t work, but now?” An example from my own life (there are so many of them), I wrote to my husband to weigh. “What parental hacker we tried turned against us,” I asked him. His answer came almost immediately: “Cloth diapers.”
Come on, this one fell on us so effectively that I blocked it. You see, we were going to be such wonderful environmentally conscious parents. And we were going to save so much money by not buying disposable diapers for years. I did all the research during my pregnancy and bought what I was sure of the exact type of cloth diapers in a variety of deliciously vibrant colors. Hundreds of dollars worth of cloth diapers (an investment!).
We used them three or four, maybe – days before I admitted my true feelings. “I hate this,” I told my husband. “I really, truly hate them.” They didn’t quite fit. They were dirty. And they added even more laundry to the mountain of laundry that piled up every day.
“Okay, me too,” he said. “We sell them.”
We didn’t save; we lost money. We weren’t saving the environment; we broke it a little more. Meanwhile, I had friends who happily dressed and threw on several children without problems. My mileage varied a lot on this one.
We all tried something that sounded good at the time and then exploded in our face. Tell us: What parenting tactics have turned against you?