Skip to main content

Aspiring Expert

An "parenting expert" who took pause during the pandemic to consider if she had any expertise at all (great self-awareness there) and then without skipping a beat wrote another essay on her new found wisdom. My working theory about parenting is that you should have parented upward of three kids of your own and spent a lot of time with kids your whole life to even qualify for the application of parenting expert role. Kids are very different in level of effort and complexity - you could get lucky once but more than three times unlikely. Also, all your kids should be in their 30s before you do apply. Lot of disasters can take place in the late teens to the mid to late twenties. A kid may look like they are off to a running start and have problems lifting off or keeping momentum even if they do. 

Really need to make sure they are fully launched before you as a parent can take a victory lap and take on the role of telling others how to do it right. So this woman with a couple of infants and a very extensive support system claiming to be a parenting expert sounds like a sad joke.But apparently she has made a profession out of doling out her wisdom and now as we see walking some of her earlier pronouncements back. The average parent is already struggling to keep their head above the water and not screw up their kids in irreversible ways. Trading lessons from the field with other parents is always valuable and if there are parents in the expert bracket they should be sought out for counsel at all times, but treating the mother of couple of toddlers as the parenting expert is likely not a recipe for success. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more