Mom, should I listen to the doctor or the advice I read from three new moms online? I tell her to listen to her doctor because the online advice upset her and didn’t jive with her instincts. She talked it over with her husband and they were in agreement. That should be good enough, right?
I didn’t jump in and give her unsolicited advice because she didn’t ask what I thought about the issue. She asked who she should listen to. Online advice from people she didn’t know or her doctor.
The last thing she needed was an opinion she didn’t ask for. She wanted guidance on whose advice to listen to. This wasn’t a moment to make myself look good and ensure she followed my beliefs. It was a time to guide her in how to handle all the advice that is out there and develop strong decision making skills.
Do Parents Need Help?
How much advice do new mom’s need? A lot. I look at my expecting daughter with apprehension as she prepares to face something she is in no way prepared for, just like I wasn’t.
I look at my adult children and think you have so much more figured out than I did and at the same time they need all the help they can get. I parent adults now with 34 years worth of knowledge and experience and still feel as if I have no idea what I am doing.
US Surgeon, General Vivek H. Murthy, M.D., released an advisory August 28 sharing that 41% of parents state that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and
48% say their stress is completely overwhelming.
The advisory outlines various responsibilities that put a strain on parents today, none of which is news to new or old parents.
Financial, economic instability, and poverty
Time demands
Children’s health
Children’s safety
Parental isolation and loneliness
Technology and social media
Cultural pressures and children’s futures
The advisory recommends increased community support for parents. People to come around them and lend a hand and provide emotional support.
It recommends we talk openly about challenges, recognize parenting as hard work, exchange ideas and experiences, and provide support for each other.
This feels like a vote for advice to me, yet talk to an expecting mom who is out of her mind with anxiety after someone gave her advice that upset her, or she read three blog posts that have her questioning her doctor and her own instincts and you will question whether any of us should be giving advice or taking it.
How can we provide the support parents need without causing them undue stress, or can we? Is the better question to ask, what should we do with all the advice out there?
What Parents of Adult Children Can Do
Parents need help, new moms need help, expecting mom’s need help. We all need help. I know I need help and don’t think any of us who want to help others are going to stop doing that anytime soon, yet that doesn’t give us carte blanche to help when we want and how we want.
I have been a mom for 34 years and that hasn’t earned me the right to give my adult children unsolicited advice. I may know a thing or two from the experiences I’ve had, but is the kind of support my adult children need the kind that isn’t asked for?
The goal of an adults life is not to please mom and act as her clone. Sure I’d love for my kids to come to me for advice, I’d love to share my wisdom, see them pick up some of the parenting habits I had, but I also want them to learn how to do things ten times better than we did and find ways of doing things that fit who they are.
What Can We Do With All That Advice
We can use it as a prompt for additional research. If we consider it bad advice it could prompt further research to find good advice. If there are nuggets of goodness in it we can capture them and use them as the basis of additional research to learn more.
Advice can introduce us to topics we might want to learn about in the years to come. Someone could lead us to information that will benefit us if we go down the rabbit hole and put in the time and effort to learn, we can greatly impact our lives.
Advice can alert us to where we need to make boundaries. We may discover from what people say that there are things we don’t want to be apart of or that don’t add value to our lives. This could be a place where we need to create a boundary.
Advice can be a reminder of the journey we are all on. There are days I could give someone advice that would make me sound like a wise sage and other days where I sound like a bitter seasoned mother who doesn’t have any idea what’s she is doing. Motherhood, being a woman, and everything else I am, is a journey.
“Insight is more helpful to people than advice.”
Gabor Mate
People need support and we often provide that in the shape of advice. If we look at advice as one of many pieces of information we can decide what we want to do with it.
In the end we have to earn the knowledge for ourselves to develop wisdom. No amount of advice can substitute for our own experience, but at times it can clue us in as to how to navigate life the best that we can, until we learn better.
Marcy Pedersen
In the end we have to earn the knowledge for ourselves to develop wisdom. No amount of advice can substitute for our own experience, but at times it can clue us in as to how to navigate life the best that we can.
Marcy Pedersen
