Judge dread
Women who complain about ‘mommy shaming’ could be missing out on some good advice
‘STRANGER shames mom for breastfeeding in public.” “Passenger yells at mom for letting toddler cry on airplane.” “Momshamed for giving child too many french fries.” To read these headlines, you’d think we were living through a veritable epidemic of random passers-by ranting about our parenting skills. But that’s not really true.
Certainly, mothers are coming in for a lot of criticism. According to a recent study by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, 60 percent of mothers reported being “mom-shamed.” But strangers were not mostly to blame. In the survey of 475 mothers with kids ages 5 and under, more people reported being criticized by their own family members than by strangers, friends or social-media commenters.
The most frequent source of criticism was their own parents (37 percent) followed by their spouse (36 percent) and their in-laws (31 percent). So let’s start with this: Ladies, if your spouse is criticizing your parenting, that doesn’t count as shaming. That’s called marriage. People will disagree about how to feed, clothe, educate and discipline their children. Mothers don’t need to crawl under a rock and cry about it.
I’m also pretty sure in-laws have been nitpicking the parenting skills of the women their sons have married since time immemorial. Sometimes they have a good point, other times you need to nod and smile to keep the peace.
But what about your own mother and father? Surely in a world where eavesdroppers in coffee shops tell you not to schedule a C-section, you can count on Grandma and Grandpa for a little support. In the past, they would have trained their daughters to raise children. So all of the advice they’re offering now — about postpartum mood swings, sleep training, handling a baby’s supermarket temper tantrums — is just delayed and, in fact, may actually be useful.
A few decades ago, people had more children — which meant that older siblings helped with younger ones. Back then, if you weren’t watching your own siblings, you were watching cousins or neighbors. Extended families used to live near each other if not in the same house. Babies and toddlers were all around. And back before every teenager needed to be working on her college résumé, girls baby-sat regularly for money. Yes, we actually trusted 12year-olds to watch infants.
Now, even if teenagers spend some Saturday nights with a few rugrats, that’s the last they will see of them for years, even decades. Young adulthood is being stretched longer as we are getting married later, and it is also an almost unnaturally childfree existence.
How many babies do you encounter at a four-year residential college? If you later move to a metropolis like New York, tripping over a stroller in Chelsea is about as close as you’ll get to hanging out with a toddler. Between the time I baby-sat in high school and the time I had my first child at age 29, I can count on two hands the number of hours that I spent alone with a child under the age of 2.
So it’s not surprising I didn’t really know much about caring for small children. How much should they eat? What’s the proper technique for burping? How do I know when they’re really sick? When our daughter had her first cold and I was panicking, my husband called the doctor’s office and told the nurse: “She can’t breathe.”
“Through her nose!” I yelled from the next room. “She can’t breathe through her nose.” It’s no wonder pediatricians’ offices are bombarded with moronic questions from anxious parents like me every day. Our parents were supposed to teach us how to take care of these small beings. Now we just have Facebook groups for moms, WebMD and a worn-out copy of “What to Expect the First Year.”
Ironically, even though mothers today have more information than previous generations of parents, they seem to have a more difficult time figuring out what to do. “Sorting through the deluge of information mothers receive about parenting practices, products and priorities can become overwhelming,” the survey researchers wrote in the report. Young mothers today are often starting from scratch.
The grandmas and aunts and cousins who used to be there to guide us — and to occasionally take the baby off our hands — now just pop in every few weeks or months and offer some thoughts from 30,000 feet. These criticisms may not always be offered at the most auspicious times, but they are also not “mom-shaming.” Instead of complaining about these bits of advice, we should take what we can get.