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?
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