No matter what issues you may be having in your life, there’s an answer on the Internet. Health problem? Ask the Internet. Need legal advice? (Ill-advisedly) ask the Internet.
I’ve talked before about how everyone’s need to be right and judgmental on the Internet leads to some pretty messed up situations: public shaming, death threats, rape threats, etc.
Which leads me to a very polarizing faction online: parenting bloggers/forums.
Now, I’m not a parent. I can’t really know what it’s like and really what is right or wrong for children. I mean, I’ve never had a betta fish live for longer than six months. However, I do know that leaving your four year old in a child-locked car for five minutes on a mild day with the windows rolled down shouldn’t lead to an arrest and community service.
This is what happened to Kim Brooks, who related her experience on Salon. As a follow-up, she tells the stories of other mothers with similar stories: they locked the doors on a mild or cool day, cracked the windows, and ran into the store for ten minutes or less. When they came out, someone had called the cops – and in many cases, shamed them as they waited.
Now, this wasn’t the direct result of something online, obviously. But the shaming and the Good Samaritans’ total security in their superiority is definitely familiar to those of us who spend a lot of time online. Having information at your fingertips is a double-edged sword: I would never say having access to information is bad, but it does tend to breed a sense of superiority in certain people.
Parenting is a common thing and everybody has a different technique they swear works for everybody: breastfeeding vs. formula, attachment parenting vs. free-range parenting. There are hundreds of blogs telling people how to parent their child, and a lot of the times, how doing something different is going to irrevocably mess up their kid forever and everything you’re doing is wrong.
In the EU, it is illegal to advertise baby formula for babies under six months old. There are many groups online advocating breastfeeding only, and I’ve read anecdotes from new mothers who say breastfeeding was aggressively pushed on them in the hospital, even if it wasn’t going well and was causing frustration all around. Never mind that some women just can’t breastfeed – they’re obviously doing something wrong.
Then there are those who advocate organic lunches and never feeding your kids junk food, or those who say to supervise them at play all the time or something could happen. If you deviate from this narrative, they say you’re a horrible parent and should have CPS called on you.
The cause of this atmosphere is twofold: as stated above, a feeling that just because you read a lot on the Internet, that you’re suddenly an expert on a variety of subjects. The second is that being online makes it easier for people to connect, which builds a kind of mob mentality: a pro-attachment parenting advocate finds more and more like her, and because there are so many, she becomes convinced that everything else is wrong.
Look, every parent is different and every kid is different. There is no one size fits all solution. Unless you’re horrifically negligent, you’re probably doing okay.
