How to handle Unsolicited Parenting Advice: How Catholic Moms can handle Unsolicited Advice with Grace and Humility

Unsolicited parenting advice can be so upsetting!  It hits us right in our vulnerable spots--overwhelm and insecurity.

Isn't figuring out parenting hard enough without all the extra advice (and that judgement we feel is behind it?)

Let's talk about how to handle this inevitable rite of passage in parenthood--unsolicited advice--with the superpowers of grace and humility.

Transcript

Hey there, Mama. Today we're going to talk about how to handle unsolicited parenting advice. And this can be the absolute worst.

Parenting can already be so hard and confusing without the overwhelm that comes from all the voices around us telling us to do this or that. And you're a good mom, if you do this, and you're a bad mom, if you do that, not to mention just coming from like two different families, when you and your husband might not have been raised the same way. There can be conflict between the way your family's parented, you might think, Oh, I don't want a parent like my parents did, or Oh, I do want to parent the way my parents did, because they did a great job. And your kids might be different than you. So those same techniques may be something that does work for your kids, or doesn't work for your kids. So when you add to the mix, unsolicited parenting advice, and whether that's from people that are complete strangers, or people that you love dearly and are really close to, it can be so hard.

And why the main reason is because of first, the overwhelm. And second, it hits on all of our insecurities. Because the fact is, when we go into parenting, we don't know everything we know very little, I really thought that I would have an easy time parenting because I had so much babysitting experience and had been a camp counselor and learned all sorts of things from all that training, and had a really good time doing both of those kinds of jobs. But nothing can prepare you for parenting, no life experience is going to really train you for your unique children, and for the marathon of 24/7 responsibility for other human beings. So where do we start? The most important place to start when we're considering unsolicited advice, and how we're going to react to it is to come into it with humility, because humility is actually going to be our secret weapon here. When we are okay with the fact that we don't know everything, it isn't on us to be completely right all the time. The fact is, we don't know everything. And we can't always make a great case for all of our parenting choices, because there are great arguments out there for so many contradictory things as well. So let's talk a little bit about knowledge and morals when it comes down to this stuff. Parenting involves a lot of experimentation and learning and even changing our minds sometimes about things when we learn more. So many of these questions are morally neutral. When it comes to technique, they're just a question of knowledge. And knowledge is something that you gain over time. So there's not a particular virtue of being knowledgeable about parenting, and there's no shortcut to it, either. You have to work, you have to experiment, you have to do research, you have to listen to advice. So the virtue that is going to help us here is actually humility, and realizing that it's okay for us to be still novices still learning to not always have all the answers, that helps us to not feel so insecure, because our insecurity usually comes from this sense of needing to be right. So if we know that it's okay to not have all the answers to not know everything, we also need to be okay with knowing that we're doing the best we can. And then we need to be okay with other people knowing that and this is a little harder to accept the other people are aware we are novices. But here's here's something really helpful about that. So we don't have to be able to make a beautiful, articulate argument for why we're making these choices. When we're parenting. It's enough to say, this is what I'm trying right now. And I haven't decided yet if it's going to work or not. Because when we can bring that humility to the conversation, it stops us from having to fight for our self worth by pretending we do know everything, or that we've made a choice that's going to last forever. And we're rigid and will never change our mind, because that feels untenable. And that's one of the reasons why this is so hard, when we have unsolicited advice is because we know we are insecure. We know we don't know everything. Owning that actually helps us to be more competent. So when we have the humility to say, this is what I'm trying right now. And it may or may not be the perfect choice, but I'm testing it out. It leaves us free to be imperfect as we actually are. It leaves us free to make mistakes. And it also leaves us free to charitably listen to someone else's opinion, variance and not take it personally. When we're in that place of humility, we can weigh the advice and actually make a decision on whether it's something that we're going to take but when we're weighing that. It brings us up to another hard part. And that is we have to also be okay with not making everyone else happy people might get offended when we don't do it their way. We need to recognize that their own insecurity coming up. Sometimes people see other people's different parent

thing choices as judgment on their parenting, but we know we're not judging them. And we're not obligated to parent the way they think we should, or the way they did. It's okay to say, I really appreciate your perspective and advice. I'll keep it in mind as we try out these other things. It's enough to listen and weigh the advice you can choose if you want to act on it. And it might be you don't want to act on it right now, it might be that actually you do keep it in mind. And you try it a few years down the line, when you figure out that the thing you are doing hasn't been working the way you thought it would. That's okay. So how do we handle unsolicited advice, we handle it from a place of humility, from knowing that we are learning as we go, that advice is neutral. And our confidence comes from the humility of admitting we don't know for sure that what we're doing is the best thing, that it might be wrong. But we can have the conviction that we're trying it for the right reasons. And we know God isn't judging us based on our knowledge of parenting techniques. You know, sometimes those are moral issues. Like obviously, don't neglect your kids feed them, you know, clothe them. And there's some really obvious ones like that. But there's so much of parenting that is not a moral question. It's a true gray area, you know, it's knowledge and strategy, like, should they do ballet class or Taekwondo? Or nothing at all? Who even knows? It's going to depend on your kid, isn't it? It's going to depend on your family situation. But knowledge and strategy is not a moral question. And the way you learn it is by doing it and continually experimenting, researching and trying things, you're not more or less of a virtuous parent, because you have more or less parenting knowledge and experience. We all start as novices, and that's okay. There's a whole lot of parenting techniques out there. And some of them are going to work for your family. And some of them are not, but you are the parent God gave to your children. And he gave you the authority to make decisions for them, and for how they're going to be raised. So if you go into this knowing that you don't know everything, but having the conviction that you are going to be the best parent for your children, just keep trying and doing your best. And don't worry about the unsolicited advice that comes your way. It's just more information and information is neutral. You weigh it, you decide if you're acting on it, and you keep trying to do your best