I think roughly parenting advice tends to miss three points:
accounting for wide variance in resource constraints of the parent
accounting for the wide variance in skills of the parent and differentials in costs of various parenting strategies per parent
accounting for the variance in child personalities and needs
I think you basically touch on all three. I think the issue as an ‘outsider’ is that some people have experiences with negligent parenting and overfit on other people thus also being negligent parents instead of how much the above three factors play into things. I think parenting advice is in principle valuable to increase parenting outcomes but the pool of advice is heavily polluted by people skipping one of more of the above three considerations, and this is honestly kind of infuriating as a parent who is Actually Trying, like many of us are ❤️
But then again, a lot of parenting advice and views are really just meant as a ‘have you considered X for your specific situation?’ And I think this is good and high value and should be encouraged cause better parenting outcomes are really valuable for our society and just super cool thing for everyone involved ❤️
My wife brought once a home a book on parenting, it contained dialogs illustrating that when your child has a problem X, you need to say Y, and then (the book claimed) your child will say Z, and the problem is solved.
Obviously, our children didn’t react that way.
So I concluded that the book is good, the only problem is that it should be our children reading it, not us, because we already follow the advice in the book, but they don’t.
I think roughly parenting advice tends to miss three points:
accounting for wide variance in resource constraints of the parent
accounting for the wide variance in skills of the parent and differentials in costs of various parenting strategies per parent
accounting for the variance in child personalities and needs
I think you basically touch on all three. I think the issue as an ‘outsider’ is that some people have experiences with negligent parenting and overfit on other people thus also being negligent parents instead of how much the above three factors play into things. I think parenting advice is in principle valuable to increase parenting outcomes but the pool of advice is heavily polluted by people skipping one of more of the above three considerations, and this is honestly kind of infuriating as a parent who is Actually Trying, like many of us are ❤️
But then again, a lot of parenting advice and views are really just meant as a ‘have you considered X for your specific situation?’ And I think this is good and high value and should be encouraged cause better parenting outcomes are really valuable for our society and just super cool thing for everyone involved ❤️
My wife brought once a home a book on parenting, it contained dialogs illustrating that when your child has a problem X, you need to say Y, and then (the book claimed) your child will say Z, and the problem is solved.
Obviously, our children didn’t react that way.
So I concluded that the book is good, the only problem is that it should be our children reading it, not us, because we already follow the advice in the book, but they don’t.