Three Common Parenting Myths that Can Brutally Hurt Children
Surprising facts about some of the most conventional “wisdom”
I never aspired to be a perfect parent. I had no idea what this meant, having grown up in a wildly untraditional family dynamic where my brother and I were raised by a single mother. My father, conversely, was married six times with eight biological and three adopted children scattered amongst them. Though I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, we moved from there to Lagos, Nigeria, where we lived until the divorce. After a brief stint in Skibbereen, Ireland, we moved to Denton, Texas, where we lived with the support of my mother’s parents.
Needless to say, sitcoms were weird for my brother and me, though, being Gen X, we were surrounded by both reruns of whitewashed classics such as Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch as well as the not-at-all-controversial-at-the-time Cosby Show, our favorite. These shows educated us on this weird concept of “normal” that always seemed a joke itself.
Then came the “bad” parenting shows. The Simpsons rocked our world and to this day, I’m a little creeped out about having laughed so hard at Itchy and Scratchy and Homer physically assaulting Bart when Bart faked his way into a gifted school because he wanted a little more attention from Homer. Seriously…
