Mommy Drive-Bys

I posted this as a comment to a Crooked Timber Post, but I liked what I said, so I'm reposting it here. If you got here from Crooked Timber, which you probably didn't, sorry to repeat myself. The subject was mommy drive-bys: unsolicited advice (often from strangers, and often nasty) on childrearing. And here's my comment:

Some of the mommy drive-by stories are probably enhanced, as some comments above allege, but I'll warrant it is fewer than you think. People really do say the damndest things to perfect strangers about the right way to raise their children. At least other mothers can justify their unwanted advice with the authority of experience; what's amazing is the number of childless people who think they know how to raise your kids.

An excellent example of a mommy drive-by (sorry, it's their damn archive...) appeared this Valentine's Day on the Times op-ed page. [You can read quotes from it on my own blog where I complained about it when it appeared.] The author, Judith Warner (who apparently repeats many of her charges against other mothers in a new book, see review and ensuing discussion at Salon) blames parents who let their kids sleep in their beds with them and "extended" breastfeeding for unhappy marriages and divorce. This is the most pernicious brand of mommy drive-by: so-called expert mommy drive-bys, indicting a whole category of parents (in this case, those who practice 'attachment parenting') at once. Entirely lacking in evidence, but lecturing from the valuable Times op-ed real estate, Ms. Warner butts into the relationships and sex lives of all parents who don't do it the way she does.

I don't blame her for thinking that; I don't know any parent who doesn't think, some of the time, that the way they're raising their own kids is the only and best way to do it. We all have days we wander around in a snug little bundle of self-satisfied conviction that we are the best parents ever. If we didn't, how could we survive the other days, when we're certain we're not? I do blame her, and all other perpetrators of mommy drive-bys, for saying it. Mommies of the world, bite your tongues. No one wants your parenting advice. On days you're sure you're best, open up a diary and write, over and over "I am the best mommy in the whole wide world," until the conviction passes.

The best response I have found to a mommy drive-by is this: "Show me the double-blind study." No such study of parenting exists, and none ever could. Raising kids is not a science. Science has something to say about it, no doubt (for example, regarding the wisdom of feeding your infant homemade vegan formula), but less than some people claim. We do not know what will become of our children, and we cannot know precisely what difference we'll make in what they will become. And who, after all, would bother to have kids if they knew in advance exactly how to do it, and how it would all turn out in the end? It's terrifying, of course, not to know, which is why I suspect we are all sometimes overcome with the certainty that we are doing it the 'right way'. But darlings, we have no idea.