Mothers who tell their cases and receive hundreds of criticisms about their performance, parents judged by their decisions, publications with articles of the type "10 things you must do to be the best mother or the best father" ...
You get up on a good day and at a quick glance at your facebook, twitter account or your preferred news aggregator, you realize the number of publications that are around the way mothers act and to a lesser extent, but simply because the last ones have arrived and in smaller numbers, from the parents. We have gone from a "I am your father and that gives me the reason" to be monitored with magnifying glass to each movement we make.Is our authority in danger or is it an excess of sensationalism, of wanting to sell more and more of ours?
Facebook, instagram and the dictatorship of beauty
Ok, I recognize it, see pictures and photos of babies, children, children with dogs, smiling parents, smiling parents with children with smiling dogs (children, not dogs ... well, dogs too) I like ... I like all four or first five of the day, but go swiping and see one post after another that seems taken from Cherubin HeraldWell, I'm going to be honest, it tires me. More than tired, is that it just doesn't seem real. Do not misunderstand me, it's not that I don't appreciate that kind of stimulus, nothing is further from reality, but it's that I see a serious problem with that type of TimeLine, a very simple one: Reality is not like that.
Or at least it is not 24 hours a day and the problem is that we have become so accustomed to continually see these types of scenes that we have idealized motherhood, fatherhood and family life. And it seems that if we do not live in an advertisement there is something in our lives that we have to change. It is clear that nobody likes to teach those "dark" parts of himself or his children, but It seems as if these days it was almost an obligation to hide it.
On the other hand, we have the opposite: the almost sickly need to show even the smallest aspect of our lives, especially on the good, or supposedly good, side of our lives. As if telling others that everything is going well for us, that we know how to do this or that, that our children have achieved this or that milestone were our lives. As if that "HELLO, I'm here ... I exist" It was just that, shouting to everyone that we are part of something, something that is increasingly behind a screen and less in front of someone's breath. Our attention call for someone to listen to us.
It seems that if we do not live in a continuous advertisement we have to change something of our life
As part of that interaction behind the screen, of that semi-anonymity, come the value judgments on the actions of others. If we give tit or bottle, if we collect or let them cry, if we take them to music or let them play. Nothing escapes the eye of the networks and many times all that criticism of others says more about ourselves than others. Talk more about our way of educating our children than if we really care or not what the neighbor does with his family.
The loss of the tribe
Not many years ago, when communities were more real and less virtual, we had "something" that we could call "tribe", which was nothing other than that set of mothers, because here 99% were mothers, who came together to share: experiences, symptoms, laughs, cries and of course, children.
Within that tribe, the children were educated, each in its uniqueness, but with a more or less agreed general norms. There was always a child who was more responsive, a mother who turned a blind eye, but in general, the guidelines were there. I do not enter that these guidelines were good or bad, for that there are the studies and the simple passage of time for things to change and improve. As my grandmother said: before there was what there was, we knew what was known and here we are as the best we can be.
Social pressure
I do not know any father or mother who is always sure of everything he does regarding his children, I do not know anyone who has not had doubts at some time, who has not wondered if what he is doing is the best or even If it is the right thing. To educate a child is to navigate a sea of doubts, in which every day we must face a different situation. It is true that of the bases that we agree in the beginning we will have certain guidelines marked for the future, but in my view, nothing guarantees the results 100%. How boring would be the opposite, right?
To some extent, I see dangerous all the pressure exerted on parents. It is true that in many occasions it is not something badly intentioned and that many times it is more a problem of managing the enormous amount of information that we now have and the difficulty of differentiating the grain of the straw, than of an attempt to control the way in which we exercise motherhood or fatherhood.
So for example, that your child does not sleep, does not eat, does not walk we have hundreds of manuals (6000 years since the writing was invented and nobody had given it to write a book about it in all this time), each with its method and each method with the only thing in common are parents wanting to know and a child.
But that pressure, coupled with the natural uncertainty of a future project such as educating a child, can make more than educate your child as you wish, do as the others want.
Without going any further, a few days ago we knew the case of parents who left their baby sleeping in the hotel room and went down to dinner. The first question we should ask ourselves is if we would do the same as them. In my case I would not know what to answer. It would depend on several factors that I don't know, is the restaurant room near? Am I likely to leave my child with someone while I eat dinner? and some more. But it is my case, my circumstances and my family, it is true that analyzed from the outside I see it quite different from the case of parents who left the baby alone while they were partying.
They are two similar cases at the base, in the two there is a baby that is left alone, although for me, they are very different. In the first one there is a certain "safety zone", it is true that in theory there is more distance between a hotel room and the restaurant than between the baby's crib and the living room of your house, but I put myself in his place and it would be pending the slightest hint that my son is going to wake up to go out, something that on the contrary it is possible that I would not do if I am at home, to find myself more relaxed because it is a "known" area.
On the contrary, the second case has no "safe zone", no surveillance, no pending parents. Moreover, the neighbors notified the grandparents to the baby's crying (something that may indicate that it was probably not the first time).
Other cases where you can clearly see the influence of social networks are usually with famous dads and moms. Perhaps it is precisely that characteristic, that of being famous, which makes them more visible to social networks than any of us. So, if a celebrity comes out giving a bottle to his daughter, or tit, or talks about the way he or she educates at home, there will be an endless number of followers who will think about the right or not of it. It may be difficult to separate the famous from the real person, from that father or mother who is facing many of our difficulties when it comes to educating and raising our children, with the added bonus that his life goes through being another chapter of our television programming.
Thus, we have different ways in which advertising and the world that social networks sell us affect, directly or indirectly, our way of educating and raising our children. Sometimes it will be for good, to have more information about what we can do and choose between different options and other times it will turn against us, because at the end of the day nobody is 100% the same person face to face as behind the screen of your tablet or your computer, perhaps that is, seeing the rest of the parents as accounts or profiles on facebook or instagram, which prevents us from being able to put ourselves in their place in many cases as we would before someone who is telling us their case at the door of the school, or during the break of our work.
In Babies and More | Would you leave your baby sleeping alone in a hotel room while you go down to dinner?
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