Which makes me wonder. Dad’s of Lemmy…what’s the worst advice you’ve ever received about parenting?
Oh go on, share it.
The woman in question told me that in order to help my toddler through his tantrums and general toddler-ness me and Mummy should opt for a strict ‘mimic the crying’ strategy.
She wants us to cry when he cries. Won’t be trying that one. My ‘gentle parenting’ philosophy may have been abandoned at the birth of my second child, but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to traumatize my child in such an overt way just yet.
OK, she’s clearly never met a small child.
I’m not a parent, but my solution to tantrums is to send my imaginary little fucker to the local coal mine for the rest of the year. Have you tried that?
Do i need /s? :D
Just being devils advocate here, but my granny did something similar for me and my cousins. I don’t think she did it in public though, people watching and all that, and never when it was ‘real’ crying, like getting a scrape or other injury.
If we were crying, she would fake cry, like obviously fake, crearly audible ‘waah’ sound, almost like making fun of the crying. Every time I saw it when I was older, the child stopped crying and looked at her with a, “wait, is THAT what I sound like?” expression.
As I said, just playing devils advocate, and it’s not something I would expect to work every time, but it’s worth contemplating.
The thing is crying is a perfectly healthy way to express emotions.
Even if we think the reason is silly.
You can’t control how you feel, only how you express it.
Mocking a child for expressing themselves isn’t great generally.
Oh for sure, that’s why I mentioned she didn’t do it for ‘real/genuine’ crying. Like falling and scraping your knee, or your best friend saying they hate you, things like that she’s be sympathetic to.
The situations she did that to were silly tantrums like “I want juice now, I don’t want you to get it for me cause that takes time, I just want to have it now cause I should always have it!” type things. You know, the truly dumb stuff that kids do cause they don’t yet understand anything.
To me it’s just a way of teaching them what’s worth crying over. What can be helped and what can’t and all that jazz.
The old make your child hate and fear you, tried and tested classic.
My mom tried that with my sister once (30 years ago).
It made the tantrum 10x worse.
This one wasn’t advice, but one of those “when I have kids…” statements.
Our 2 year old daughter is in a phase where she’s very picky about what she wears. Purple, unicorns, mermaids, rainbows, and princesses are the generally accepted categories. Since life is hard enough, we tend to let her choose her outfits. We even go so far as to let her pick out her next day’s outfit, and then sleep in that because she hates most pajamas.
My brother in law let me know that when he has kids, they’re going to wear what he tells them to wear. I just kinda chuckled.
I pick my battles. As long as she is clothed appropriately, there are many other things I can waste my time fighting over.
Brother-in-law “When I have kid they are sleeping every night in their own bed.”
You can guess how that turned out
Good on you–my daughter just turned 4 and is very particular about her wardrobe. As long as she’s warm enough, it doesn’t matter much to me.
Your brother in law is going to learn some hard lessons some day. Try not to gloat too much if/when one of his kids visits in a tutu and dinosaur hoodie some day.
That I should “kick his ass”. Referring to my 10 year old son, standing quietly in line with me at a burger King. I’ve received bad parenting advice before but that one made me feel bad for this weird guy’s children ( if he had any)
“Don’t buy your son pink boots, thats a girl color.” some rando in the store about the snow boots my happy 5yr old just picked out and is hugging. laughed and told my kid he could pick out a toy now too.
“Don’t try so hard. they’ll always love the mom more no matter what you do, so take it easy” my dad. yep.
“don’t let your kid pick their own food” former friend without kids.
“don’t let your kid argue with you, ever” different former friend with kids.
