Reply to Just curious: you feel judgment about the sacrifices you make for your teens?

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Reply to "Just curious: you feel judgment about the sacrifices you make for your teens?"

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[quote=Anonymous]My oldest is sort of high-maintenance teen. She has ADHD and ASD but she doesn't need 24 hour care of anything, just a lot of emotional support, appointments for various therapies, etc. I sometimes mention--not complain, just mention as a natural part of a conversation--the things I do for her, and often people respond with a bunch of suggestions about how I can do less for her and more for myself: a full-time job, more hobbies, more time with friends, etc. I also see them express skepticism that I actually need to sacrifice much, if anything, for a teen. Like it can't possibly be true that if I worked full-time, DD's mental health would suffer.

I don't remember people saying things like this when I talked about the sacrifices I made for my kids before they hit elementary school. For instance, I don't remember anybody giving me odd looks when I complained about a lack of sleep, or spontaneously telling me that my kids would be fine if I formula feed or let them CIO. I just got sympathy. It seems like it's unquestioned that you sacrifice for the earlier ages, but with teens if you sacrifice, you're a mommy martyr, trying to be supermom, whatever.

Obviously many parents do a great job parenting teens like mine while still sacrificing less, but that's true at any age. As a parent we are just constantly making judgment calls about what is best for the whole family, and sometimes that involves a lot of personal sacrifice and sometimes it involves less. Why would there be more judgment when sacrificing for the sake of raising teens?

I didn't care about these impressions I got for a long time because I know that people are going to judge you no matter what you do, and it doesn't come up often. But recently I had a long conversation with somebody about it and the question of the sacrifices we make for teens v. younger children has been on my mind. [/quote]

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