Parental advice

As I was walking to a tall building with an empty box this morning, I got to thinking about the wisdom some people have imparted and some not so wise advice I have received about parenting.

I have received a variety of advice from complete strangers, friends and lovers. By far the worst advice has come from lovers, but that is dues almost entirely on my choice of sketchy idiots and addicted losers and much less to do with them actually having real advice. Here is the thing about people who do not have children, their opinions are thus based on silliness and their own childhood experiences. One particularly bad lover of mine was all about withholding any sort of compassion or understanding for the kids, and all about being a mean and angry parent. Why? That's was the only parenting this person ever experienced, drunken, angry and hateful parenting, so when it came time to pretend to be a parent, guess where the knowledge was drawn from?

So it goes with a lot of advice. One of the clearest memories I have of my children when they were young is how many parents of other children would take me aside and say something to the effect of, "sure, they are fun at this age (and this age could be 1-19) but you just wait till they are (todays age plus 2). Then it won't be so much fun."

See, what I learned from these imbeciles was that they were never going to be very good parents, because they, like the addicts and assorted losers I dated, did not see parenting as a positive experience. Instead, these "rug rats" were taking away valuable adult time, and go ahead and fill in your own definition of adult time. For my addict friends, adult time lost mean either sober time or time taken away from cruising online for a hookup. Such were the sad people I was dating back then.

For the other parents who only seemed to hate whatever age their children happened to be, well, I never quite understood their animosity towards raising their own children. When we were actually making the babies, my wife and I had an agreement that one of us would find a way to stay home and raise the children. In happened that I ended up being that person, which is kind of good, my wife did not seem to have the ability or interest in being a parent.

Again though, what I always found interesting was how willing people were to give their brilliant advice on child raising, especially if they were either fractured and damaged adults, or terrible parents. The more damaged adult, the stranger the advice. When Sketchy the Addict was in our life, there was always a sense of mischief, because Sketchy claimed to have had such a dire childhood, drunken and terribly angry parents had made Sketchy mimic that same behavior as an adult pretending to be a parent.

What does this mean? Well, first, parents, even ones trying to be great, are often failing. Parenting is a tough game, pitfalls and the mistakes adults make are often times thrown right into the laps of the children. Divorce, diet, living situations and interaction with decidedly dreary Sketchy people can be as dangerous as the smoker, alcoholic or abusive parent.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that there are a ton of people who offer advice. The worst advice comes from well meaning idiots, those adults who do not have children, never raised a child, but feel compelled to offer their learned advice on any number of child raising subjects. It's almost like me offering my opinion on abortion, I may have one, it may be important to me, but since I have no ability to actually get pregnant, the advice I would have would be shallow and probably useless. Such is the advice from the well meaning idiots I have seemed to waste time with.