As a parent, I get emails from various educational and parental pages, and on social media, I follow certain parenting pages.
What staggers me is the recent surge in sources telling parents how to bring up their children. From the mild blogs on discipline (some useful stuff in some of these, don't get me wrong), to the preposterous shaming of parents for the simplest of things like asking your child a question. This simply has to stop.
The graphic below is taken from a page called "The Unconventional Parent" (who I do not follow - someone re-posted their post on social media). I realise it's supposed to be helpful, and it's well meaning, and there are a couple of ok suggestions on there, but on the whole, it's a pile of rubbish. Let me tell you why.
I find this sort of thing not only unhelpful but detrimental to parents and children. In an age where we have over 65,000 children in care in the UK, and many thousands more with social worker intervention in the family; a generation of parents who do not interact with their children; preferring to sit them in front of screens; never reading with them; never singing nursery rhymes with them; requiring specialist health workers to teach them how to play with their children (yes, seriously!), so why oh why are we shaming and damning parents for interacting with their children?
It makes me so exasperated that anyone could shame mums and dads for asking simple questions, like "Do you need help?" In fact, it makes my blood boil to the point where I've taken 20 minutes of my day to write down how furious it makes me.
The problem with these do-goody memes and graphics is that there is no age suggestion attached. There's no scientific research cited, no surveys, figures, fact of any kind. It is merely someone's opinion. It's coated as a helpful tool or tips, but actually there's only a very certain age that most of these listed would even apply to. These are not tips. These are passive-aggressively suggesting if you say the things on the left, you're a crap parent.
Many a parent who reads this will automatically internalise the message and assume they're failing as a parent for offering their child help. Asking a two year old to use a "softer voice" (unless you've explained what this is, multiple times) will have no idea what you mean. So these are all very well and good if there's some explanation behind them. We very well may have to say 100 times to our 2 yr old, that we need them to use a quieter voice because they are being too loud for us to hear the baby crying etc. All very well for us parents who know that, but what about the teenage mum who feels out of her depth and is looking for parenting tips and stumbles across this post? What about the dad who has been in care all his life, bounced from one foster family to another, in and out of youth offender's institutions. He's never had a stable family life or a role model to look up to and is now trying to be the best dad he can, because he has no idea what a parent looks like? He stumbles across this page, and assumes telling a toddler to use a quiet voice is the right thing, or tells them "you can do hard things" when he accidentally gives them a puzzle aimed at a 5 year old? These are the things real people are dealing with. This happens all over the UK.
Let's take the asking for help point.
Many young children - even many older ones - will not be able to ask for help in certain situations. Or know that they're allowed to. When we take away our direct offer for help ("Sweetie, do you need help doing those laces up?"), with the vague phrase like "I'm here to help if you need me", we sound like we're empowering our children. But in actual fact, we're removing support because many kids will take that to mean "have another go". There are many times a child should be urged to have another go. But if we're constantly removing our direct offers of help, who will the child go to when they really need help? Someone who offers it directly in an accessible form - rather than the person who never ever asks them if they need help! Parents should be the safe refuge. The place where we know we can get help, because we are always asked and heard, and encouraged. How can a 3 yr old fully understand the phrase "I'm here if you need help"? It's too vague for many children. If my husband saw I was struggling and said "I'm here if you need help", I'd honestly wonder if he was paying lip service. If he saw I was struggling, I would expect a genuine offer of help to be "need some help with that, honey?" If I said "No", then a genuine response would be, the follow up, "I'm here if you do need help".
You may think I'm getting hung up on these, but consider the "do you have any questions?"
Seriously - how can this be a bad thing so say!? Why?
Why do we need to reword it? Why do we need to word it as "What questions do you have?" Why do we need to make parents feel bad for asking a perfectly reasonable question?
Who says that wording the question in their suggested way will make me a better parent, and be beneficial to my children?
I want to take the last point because this typifies so many of these seemingly well meaning memes, blogs and graphics that are really just 'holier than thou, make you feel like crap, namby pamby, no scientific basis, modern parenting' rubbish.
"We don't talk like that" is apparently negative, and instead we should say, "please use kind words".
Now, I very often say to my own children to use kind words. But again, this is so misleading. How do our children know what kind words are, and how do they know when they're not using kind words?
Although I ask my children to use kind words, I do not leave it there. Our children need to be taught. Part of teaching is correction. Direction with no correction is useless. I will outright tell them if they have used unkind words. They need to know. Then I will tell them why they're unkind, and then ask them what they could replace them with. If they don't know, I'll give them suggestions and we'll talk about words, how they make us feel, and who knows where our conversations might lead....that's the beauty in conversations, and in correction. Correction leads to learning. Simply saying use kind words does not lead to a learning experience.
But if we start day one of our parenting using these suggestions as per the graphic, our kids will be so confused. Our kids need to hear some straight talking. They need to know why we don't talk like that, why we use kind words, and what kind words are. If we give this response as they suggest, I predict we will produce a generation of confused children who can't be told off, don't know right from wrong because their parents were too scared to do any straight talking to them. We do more harm than good when we presume our children know what we mean.
Our teenage mum, or our well meaning dad (from the examples above) will have a very frustrating time with their children using these "tips". What about the mum whose child was taken into care, she has sorted her life out, and now a year later has her 30 month old back at home, is trying her best to be a great parent. She stumbles across this post (or countless others like it), and feels frustrated after three weeks because her toddler can't answer her question of "how are you feeling?" or "what questions do you have?"
Seriously there are people who put their trust in these things, assuming them to hold the keys to being a good parent. When actually, they're going to lead to failure because they assume so many presuppositions.
Why not just let people explain to their children when they do wrong, why it is wrong, and how to do it better next time?
Why not just support our kids, and why not just support parents to spend time with their kids, instead of making parents question everything that comes out of their mouths to the point they're afraid to say anything in case it's "negative".
Can I be real here? Please! Using a negative in a sentence does not make us negative people. It does not make the world a negative place. People who make us feel like crap for nothing make for a negative world!
Why can't we just get on with bringing up our kids to be decent human beings, who know right from wrong because we taught them right from wrong, and not make people feel like a heap of dung for asking their kids if they need some help?
