I’ve blogged for a long time now with what feels like a million other parents. We are out in the world doing our best shoulder to shoulder with the masses. We share our stories, we share our best bits and our worst bits and all the bullshit between. Opinions are thrown out there in the hopes that someone catches it and throws it back – Hi there friend, so glad I found you, welcome to my tribe. Blissful.
The media, however, have also picked up on this, and it feels like now, more than ever, they like to pit parents, especially mothers, against each other in the comments section. To share this post about breastfeeding mothers, bottle feeding mothers, natural birthers, attachment parenting, CIO parents… and so on and so forth. But what the fuck? Seriously.
The headline will be click bate, of course, dripping with bile and designed to provoke a hideous reaction from the readers. How many times have you read a post that was so filled with hate for something that as a parent you are doing? You take offence, you defend what you are doing, someone else has an opposite opinion and lo and behold you are in the throes of a keyboard warrior cunt-off on the internet.
Let me ask you something, though. If I may… If you had met that mother/parent in real life, would you have torn her a new arsehole because you do things differently? Do you think that she would have said ‘If you were educated at all, you’d know better’? No, you wouldn’t. You’d see a fucking person, a mother or parent – just like you. In fact, your kids would probably play happily with each other, while you got to stare at your phone for 30 minutes in the park. Perfect.
The thing is the media seem to completely miss is this – We are all running around trying to raise mini-humans in a shit scary world. Where recommendations change by the hour, there are about 900 different types of parent now. Forgive me, but aren’t we all just ‘parents’? Or maybe they don’t miss it, maybe they just know that a mothers instinct is to protect what is hers. Throw technology in the mix and you have a viral article for making parents attack each other. How good it must feel.
Are we not all doing the same thing here, though? Just because I don’t do what you do, doesn’t mean for one fucking minute I can call you a shit parent and you know what, you can’t do it to me or any other parent out there either. (Yes, there are some actually bad parents out there but I am not even talking about them).
Words are very powerful tools and disgustingly misused by so many. Imagine a new mum, reading some of the trash that media outlets print? Imagine how you would feel if someone actually attacked you in person for parenting how you see fit?
Is it not fucking hard enough to grow our kids up to being semi-decent humans already without some shitrag media outlet making us into monsters?
