Let’s Just Ban Guilt
In an article in The Age on 9 May Amanda Dunn wrote that the Simpson ‘family puzzles over when baby Maggie will remove that dummy and utter her first words’. Marge contributes ‘According to Fretful Mother magazine, if Maggie doesn’t talk by age one, we should consider a corrective tongue-extender” (!)
The article focuses on mother guilt and it did make me think about a couple of things.
The first was that one of our daughters didn’t walk until she was 22 months. As first time parents we thought this was completely normal although the maternal and child health nurse did start to give us exercises.
While we prepared and read up to a certain extent before the babies came along we sort of felt that we would be able to make decisions and work things out together. (Well we did, but it wasn‘t quite as easy as we anticipated).
If the kids seems healthy and happy then it was fair to say that things were going OK. Crawling was still OK.
The long and the short of it was that relatives started to get anxious and worry that something was wrong with her. There wasn’t luckily and I can’t remember ever feeling that I didn’t want advice from family but I do remember complete strangers coming up to me and giving unwanted opinions on all aspects of child rearing. The sort of thing that makes you feel inadequate.
There’s pressure to conform and often guilt when things don’t appear to be as others expect them to be. And I do remember receiving so much advice that all it does is just confuse matters further.
Guilt’s an awful feeling and we should just ban it. We love our kids to death and we do the best we can; we make the best decisions at the time.
It’s a lot more complicated than that, as we all know, but going easy on mums and dads is a good start.
I don’t watch a lot of TV but I’m going to mention a second TV show. The Checkout, in particular the baby products clip, is a good remedy to rid ourselves of guilt!
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