There is an old adage that says that if you sit by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. This, I think, perfectly describes how I feel about other parents.
Not that I want to see their bodies literally floating by. No, not at all. It’s just that this is the image I always amuse myself with when I find myself on the receiving end of another parent’s judgement: it is a powerful reminder to myself that it doesn’t matter what they might think (or say) about my parenting style right now, because, if I am patient enough, sooner or later they will be faced with the same decisions that I was—and then it will be my turn to judge them.
Or not. Honestly, for the most part I try really hard not to judge other parents (at least not out loud). I’d like to believe that in my best version of myself I am rooting for every parent to be successful in their parenting, no matter how uptight they are, no matter how profoundly their parenting style differs from mine, and especially no matter how many really nasty things they have said about me behind my back. I’d like to believe that, but the truth is I get a not-so-secret glee when I am down by that metaphorical river and I see I-would-never-allow-my-child-to-play-video-games float by on a bier made of Wii paddles, or My-Child-Will-Be-Raised-A-Vegan float by on a barge made of Happy Meal toys.
It’s not that I want to see something bad happen to the child—never that—it’s just that it’s hard not to experience a certain amount of schadenfreude when a fellow parent who delighted in judging you suddenly hits the same rough patch that you had to navigate, and ends up flailing just as badly as you did.
I find that this is especially true of the parents whose children are a few years younger than mine; the ones who watched my family struggling with all of the standard issues of adolescence and smugly asserted that, when the time came, their child would never act that way. The same ones who asked if I had tried giving a twelve year old “a timeout.” The ones who didn’t believe me when I replied that timeouts get a little more complicated when you are no longer able to physically pick up your child and carry them into another room. When the threat of “no more Playstation” has the same effect as “no more juice boxes in your lunch.” (Speaking of Playstation, my advice to all young parents is to GET ONE IMMEDIATELY, and make sure your kids start playing it ALL OF THE TIME. Discipline is so much easier when you still have something that you can take away.)
Of course, true to my (sometimes) better nature, there are also those times when I feel like I am being judged and there is another image that brings me comfort: it is the one where I sit by the river and watch nothing at all float by; in other words, sometimes I am sanguine enough to be able to imagine a time when we have all of us moved past the stage of parenting where we are so insecure that we feel the need to sit in judgement of others, and have begun to realize that, one way or another, we are all in this together, and it is in all of our own best interests to help other parents succeed, whether we agree with their particular style of parenting or not.
And besides, sooner than we know it none of this stuff will matter anymore, and we can all start concentrating on the really important things in life. Like sitting around and judging each other’s grandparenting skills.