[blparent] Herding Cats and Children

[Jennifer S Jackson]

Please consider the implications of statements about children never having been to emergency rooms, had police involvement, or caught doing drugs as clear signs of good parenting. Sometimes bad things happen to all families and implying that never having such problems is due to good parenting implies that people who do have any of those struggles are bad parents. Of course that could be really what you meant by those statements and not an unintended implication. Good parenting can help avoid such problems, but I would argue that families who are having these kind of struggles can demand even better parenting to get through. Just as we do not want our abilities as parents to be judged only on someone's perhaps erroneous understanding of blindness, we should not judge other parents whose situation we can not know.


Jennifer