4

Other Parents Will Force Their Child-Rearing Agenda Onto Your Happy Moments

Say you decide to bypass the "official" childcare sites and just ask other parents how they've personally dealt with raising babies. After all, these guys are the ones in the trenches. You'd think that the prevailing mood would be camaraderie, as everyone bitches about the conflicting advice everywhere and talks about how funny it is when your baby farts and then sits there looking confused about farting, the realization slowly dawning on its little baby face that it's stuck on this planet for many years and it's going to be farting for a whole bunch of that.

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The horror. The horror.

3

Social Media Turns Raising Kids Into A Competition

Online parenting advice won't just inform you that you're turning your baby into a brain-damaged serial killer with bad posture. It will also introduce you to a cesspool of passive-aggressive bragging that makes a meeting between several hipsters and your overly religious aunt seem like it would be a fun afternoon.

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"I'm into Baruch, 2 Maccabees, that kind of thing. You know, the more obscure biblical texts."

Give birth to your baby via C-section? Someone will be around to tell you that they birthed a similarly sized baby using only their vagina, you weak, low-vagina-powered person. Succeed in pushing that tiny person out of your ladyparts, but use drugs to do it? Count on an old high school friend telling you that she did it drug-free while swimming with dolphins in the ocean and only interrupted her labor one time to successfully rescue a boat of refugees and an injured sea turtle.

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"I used the nutrients in my placenta to grow these vegetables for disadvantaged schoolchildren."

My personal theory is that this type of woman (sometimes called the sanctimommy) is a common female equivalent to the mall ninja phenomenon, in which online tough guys talk up their badass (and usually nonexistent) warrior accomplishments. Society has traditionally rewarded women for their child-rearing skills and men for their strength and prowess in battle. We all like to think that things are different now, that men and women can earn respect without slaying enemy soldiers or raising strapping sons, respectively. But in some dark corners of the Internet, we remain as unenlightened as ever. In fact ...

2

People Still Rely On Outdated Ideas Anyway

A lot of old parenting advice was pretty awful, sure, but it did have some positive aspects. Back in the '50s, for example, experts were pretty good about telling parents to calm the fuck down and make sure they weren't wrecking their own minds worrying about their children. Things started changing in part due to the rising popularity of Freudian psychology, which had a lot to say about early childhood: specifically, that it was to blame for pretty much everything bad. Mental illness? Probably caused by your mother either unconsciously resenting you when you were a baby or loving you too much -- or possibly both. Adult sexual dysfunction? Had to be caused by bad parenting. Hit your little toe on the coffee table? Thanks, dad.

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"I'm sorry, the flight is delayed because we all decided the plane looks too much like a penis."

Freudian ideas were eventually crushed underfoot by the advancing armored vehicle of modern science, but even that mixed metaphor couldn't completely erase their influence, and anyway, we had a new thing to get anxious about: neuroscience. In the early '90s, scientists were scanning the brains of children and noticed that an incredibly large number of brain synapses are formed in the first three years of a child's life, and that this growth could be influenced by outside stimuli.

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"But what will we use for auditory stimuli? Macklemore won't be invented for another 21 years."

1

Most Of That Newer Information Is Bullshit

Talk to neuroscientists today and they'll tell you that most of the "first three years" panic was never based on real science. That burst of synapse growth in young children? It's pretty much a thing that happens on its own and doesn't necessarily need to be egged on by parents showing a kid barnyard animal flashcards until their fingers are bleeding with paper cuts. It turns out that a depressingly large amount of IQ is based on genetics and other factors largely outside the control of the average parent. So don't worry; the reason your Cousin Pete is stuck making hats out of raccoons is probably not because his mother didn't buy him enough brightly colored toys at 6 months.

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It might have been all the meth.

This isn't to say that we should be ignoring our children or keeping them in boxes (or neglecting micronutrients), but chances are we're doing better than we think we are. And if you stop and think about it for a minute, most of the stuff modern American parents are obsessing about is kind of ridiculous. We live in the richest, most successful society the planet has ever produced. Our kids don't have to worry about war, malaria, shag carpets, or any of the myriad horrors that haunt humanity's past. Anyone with the time, literacy, and technology to look up parenting advice on the Internet is so extraordinarily privileged they should be on the floor right now weeping in thankfulness that they weren't born a peasant in 12th-century France, not beating themselves up about whether to swaddle.

But if you're an anxious person, like me, chances are you can't help but get stressed anyway. And that's why I've sworn off the Internet altogether and am now going to raise my children using only the advice of retro advertisements.

Via Grist
Drink up, kids!

C. Coville hopes that people will donate to childhood-improving nutritional programs and has a far less childhood-improving Twitter here.

The Internet is great for instructional videos on, say, tying a tie. If you ask it how to raise your kids, however, it'll tell you to make them run laps around the grocery store, as seen in 7 Insane Parenting Tips Real People Thought Were A Good Idea. Unfortunately, you're going to mess up as a parent no matter what. See why in 5 Ways Parenting Turns You Into A Dumbass.

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