Listening to Unsolicited Parenting Advice Makes Parenting More Overwhelming
Relax…most of the parenting advice is all theoretical anyway.
When you’re new to something and everyone else has experience with it, expect everyone to give you a piece of advice…regardless if you asked for it or not.
It does not matter whether the advice is good or not because it is coming from a good place. In fact, you can’t even tell if it’s good or not! Everyone just wants to share their own unique experience (hoping that you’d follow their example). But sometimes, the multiple pieces of advice that come from all different directions feel like noise.
I almost always hear myself saying, “I’ll figure this out on my own…the same way they figured it out”.
“Never take a learning opportunity away from another student. No matter how smart you need everyone to think you are.”
— Annalise Keating, How to Get Away with Murder, Season 1: Pilot
Teaching is for kids while coaching is for adults
Almost all the time, whenever I hear unsolicited advice, the message feels like it’s coming from my grade school teacher — “Follow this or else you’re going to be punished”.
Of course, that doesn’t entice me to listen at all. Instead, it makes me avoid listening to everything else you have to say about the matter regardless of how experienced you are at it. Teaching fails when your reason for doing it is to show how good you are at what you’re trying to teach. Simply put, you teach as a way to boost your ego, in addition to your intent to help. It feels so good to help, we get excited about it.
But sometimes, our excitement to help blinds us from seeing things through the perspective of someone we’re trying to teach.
That wouldn’t happen if you approach teaching like a coach — it’s more about motivating others to do the right thing.
A coach does not need any form of validation. Therefore, their purpose (for sharing their experience) is to help you figure things out on your own. They give you the freedom to choose (like an adult) to either follow their advice or do your own thing. That’s what I feel toward experts who coach their followers to get unstuck.
When I talk to someone who gives advice like a coach, I listen.
Listening to advice reduces mistakes, but it robs you of your own insight
I can’t blame friends and family for their urge to give me parenting advice.
Almost all the time, I look clueless. I look like someone who came to class but is unsure of what the hell is happening. When we see someone struggling, the urge to help out almost always crosses our minds. If it was a stranger, we’d be a little reluctant (simply because we don’t know how the person will react), but, if it’s with friends or family, we go in without any hesitation.
We forget that there are times when we prefer to learn things on our own.
That’s what I feel about parenting. I wanna fully experience the process by making mistakes here and there. I’m not saying I don’t need help. All I’m saying is that I’ll ask for help when I need it. Let me try it on my own first and learn from it. If I’m still struggling, then feel free to come to rescue me. That allows me to gain my own insight into the matter and not just blindly follow your advice.
The urge to jump in too quickly to help hurts more than it helps.
That’s what happened when my friends noticed how exhausted I was when we came back to the house from the playground. One of them goes, “Look at me! I have 3 kids, and I’m not as exhausted as you”. Then the other would chime in and say, “Yea, just leave your daughter be! She’s in a safe place”.
Now, I do not disagree because I watch my daughter like a hawk.
However, what they don’t realize is that I’m ok with the “too much effort” I’m putting in.
Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t complain about feeling tired and all that. What most don’t realize is that my tiredness has less to do with caring for my daughter. It’s typically from running errands and other responsibilities. Plus, I truly believe that I don’t have forever to spend time with her — the older she gets, the less time I have with her.
But I don’t bother telling my friends all that; otherwise, I’m just going to get into another long-winded discussion.
No one knows how good the advice is until later in life
At the end of the day, the goal is for our kids to grow into independent adults.
A lot of the advice that is thrown out there are guidelines — not strict rules to be followed. Regardless of how messed up our childhood is, we still have a choice to either be a victim of our circumstances or to come out as a hero. This is easier for me to say because I have not had a traumatic childhood. However, there are a lot of very successful people out there who had an unpleasant past but came out as heroes.
You cannot apply the “if-you-do-this-then-that-will-happen” approach to parenting because Life is a lot more complex than a simple formula.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not gonna be able to find out how good my parenting skills are until my kids turn into adults.
It would take me about 18 years to say, “Yea I did the right thing” or “I messed up big time”.
