Well, I guess a little fight with an ignoramus from the comment section of a blog the I LOVE and relate to is what the doctor ordered to get me writing! I don’t know what it is about this week. The ‘judgies’ are out in full force!
A close friend posted about the twin boys and the dresser video, which I’m assuming by now everyone has seen. His comment, besides criticism to the media, ‘where were the parents?’ I almost stopped breathing from the rage that I felt boiling inside.
I am so damn tired of this. I am so tired of this new parenting method where we all try to ‘one up’ each other and cast criticism over EVERYTHING! And honestly, I don’t care if you do it in the privacy of your own home, gossip away! Talk about the friends that you feel give their kids too much sugar, or sweetener or whatever the ‘toxic’ ingredient is this week. Get it out of your system, I’m certainly not innocent!
Maybe that’s a bad example. The bigger problem is judging those that we do not know. We’ve never seen or talked to, but feel it’s ok to do so because we’ve read their story in the paper or heard about it on the news. And we feel all emboldened behind our computers. Just stop, PLEASE STOP doing it over the internet!! Stop making accusations and judgment calls on situations that you know nothing about.
I never saw blame after the accident. Not one comment. I feel like that whole thing started to happen more in the years that followed. What is happening? How is this not cyber bullying-adult style? How is it any better than what our teenage counterparts are doing to each other?
Enough already!! I can’t take much more. We need to stop tearing each other down as parents. I realize as I write this that I wasn’t so good at taking my own advice with said commenter. I need to do better. We all need to do better.
Here’s a link to the blog. Every word in it is spot on.
Sunshine, Angels and Rainbows 
I was in a moms group on Facebook for the longest time. The amount of advice and ideas I got from there were great, but really I never knew until I finally left it how harmful it was for me as a mother. I was already so hard on myself with my baby because things weren’t working out as I had planned, and then I realized it seemed that every other thing I was doing as a parent was wrong, too according to all of these other moms! Once I got off of that and posted less and read less on the computer, I found my niche as a mother (and read Katrina Kenisons’s “Mitten Strings for God,” which I read each year now), life became what it should be. All about what’s best for MY kids and my sanity (fruit snacks save me many a car ride)!! You’ve made some great points and I’m so glad that in the aftermath of Bennett’s death you were not inundated with judgey comments! Maybe my own resolution this year should be to judge less, even in the comfort of my home! 🙂
LikeLike
Oh trust me, I’m no saint when it comes to judgment and it’s something that I need to work on. But to sit back and pretend that you know someone, that you judge their character based on a news story and then go and attack them from behind a screen name is sickening. There is no accountability. Most of these people would never have the guts to say these things to the person’s face. And the police are involved, if charges need to be made, they will take care of it, the internet is not supposed to take the place of that.
LikeLike
When my sister and I were 3 and 4, respectively, my parents put us down for a nap and went downstairs, where they were still in earshot. My sister and I goofed off and eventually a dresser with a TV on top of it fell on her. We are thankful every day that for whatever reason, she was (eventually – her head was split open and she needed surgery/stitches/etc.) 100% fine. And I am thankful that the internet wasn’t around to judge my parents for doing something they’d done hundreds of times, but this time something went wrong completely outside of their doing (we were breaking the rules, and it was an accident).
LikeLike
Your poor parents and sister! It’s a tough time to be a parent. People can be just awful.
LikeLike