Previous entry: 
Next entry:
How often do you ask your parents for advice?
A recent book review by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker made me think about this. The review looks at how we’ve come to rely on parenting books (and, as she notes, parenting blogs!) instead of family and experience to answer our questions about child-rearing. It used to be that everyone raised kids, so that, Lepore writes, “to be an adult was to be a parent.”
That’s all changed, as Lepore says. Women have fewer babies and extended families are spread around the country, or world. So now we turn to experts or fellow parents for help.
Anyway, this has led me to a little project. I’m going to ask our boys’ grandparents for advice more often. I want to see what they suggest. We tried last night with a potty-training question about our preschooler. Stay the course, my mother-in-law said, he’ll figure it out. So simple, so true.
As many have said, our generation takes parenting seriously – maybe too seriously. So perhaps we should loosen up a bit and let our parents guide us more. You agree?
Gretchen Day-Bryant has a son in high school and a daughter in middle school. She’s lived to tell about the struggles of juggling little kids and work...
Joy Oglesby has an infant daughter and a sister 13 years her junior, whom she babies to the now-adult...
Cindy Kent Fort Lauderdale mother of three. Her kids span in ages from teenager to 20s...
Rafael Olmeda and his wife welcomed their first son in Feb. 2009, and he's helping raise two teenage stepdaughters...
Lois Solomon lives in Boca Raton with her husband and three daughters...
Anne Vasquez is the Online Editor in charge of overseeing SunSentinel.com. She is the mother of a 5-year-old boy and a newborn daughter.
Georgia East is the parent of a five-year-old girl, who came into the world weighing 1 pound, 13 ounces...
Brittany Wallman is the mother of Creed, 13, and Lily, 6, and is married...
Chris Tiedje is the Social Media Coordinator, and father of two boys and a girl all under the age of seven.
Comments
I'm realizing after reading your post that while i often bring up my parenting dilemmas to my mom i never flat out ask her for her opinion on how to handle things. I have to do that more often.
Posted by: Georgia East | July 20, 2009 7:33 PM