Reply to Where in the DMV are parents of young kids allowed to be imperfect?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We live on Capitol Hill. I don’t want to give many details for the sake of anonymity, but we have young kids, use the public schools, and are middle income for the area.

I feel like many people here don’t allow for any error when it comes to parenting. People obsess about childcare, school, activities. People research every parenting decision to find the error-proof, no fail option, and then proselytize extensively. It’s not that people are competitive, exactly (some are, but most find overt competition obnoxious). But many people are just hustling so hard at parenting. These are dual income families but they are making parenting extremely hard and high stakes, IMO.

I’m not like this and it stresses me out. We make parenting choices sort of intuitively. We make mistakes, figuring it will work out in the end or that we can always change tacks.

What neighborhoods/towns in the DMV have more parents like me and fewer like my neighbors? This is not a judgment of them, more and acknowledgement that this area is not for me.[/quote]

Can I ask why it bothers you? Do people make comments to you about your parenting or exclude you or your kids because of your choices? I think I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m type A by nature and definitely research things before making choices, but I try not to go overboard and I make choices based on my individual kids and our family’s needs. I guess in some ways I’m less laid back than others (my kids don’t really get screen time and we don’t buy junk food), but I honestly do not care at all if other parents make different choices. Like I have friends whose kids watch lots of tv and I don’t think it’s any of my business and would certainly never say anything to them about it. I live in Tenleytown and haven’t experienced the proselytizing you describe. [/quote]

It's never fun to be the odd person out. It's one thing if you have that one friend, or a few of the families from school, who are very intense, obsessive parents with lots of rules and very high standards around food, activities, education. It's easy in a situation like that to talk to them and just remind yourself that you subscribe to a different parenting approach and value different things.

But when MOST of the people in your neighborhood or at your school are like that, it wears on you. There was a PP in this thread who talked about moving to Philly and feeding her child a snack at the playground and realizing that unlike where she lived in DC, she didn't need to worry about someone coming up and telling her what was "wrong" with the snack. The people who do stuff like that in DC and other very intense parenting environments might think she's just being helpful, not judgmental. But when the prevailing parenting attitude is that you must be perfect, that there is no aspect of parenting that is trivial or low stakes enough to allow for a range of approaches, it becomes stressful.

I also think that while you say you don't judge people who parent differently than you, you're probably not being entirely honest. If you are the sort of parent who allows NO screens (until when? ever?) and never lets your kids eat processed foods, even as like an occasional treat, then on some level you must judge people who do those things. Because you've adopted a very restrictive parenting approach that's actually pretty hard to accomplish, so there's just no way that you have zero judgment if you see some parents planting their kids in front of Bluey for an hour with some cheeze-its and don't think "oh wow, I would never do that." There's just no way. Even if that parent only does that once ever couple months to save their sanity, I feel pretty confident that your opinion on that is not truly neutral.[/quote]

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