Justification Generation

This blog is centered on a young child's Developmental Hip Dysplasia journey, but today I divert.  I just couldn't help myself.

Thanks to the popularity of social media outlets such as Facebook for my generation, we have an unparalleled intimate-yet-distant voyerism into others' households.  This juicy peek not only prompts snapshot judgments, it also makes us competitive in ways that would have made our grandparents' skin crawl.  Now, the proverbial "keeping up with the Jonses" has expanded way beyond the home and car of our dreams.  We compete on the minutia of ingredients we sneak into home cooked meals... how much more we know about politics than the next guy... how multitasked our kids are... how non-mainstream we are... how much we multitask our kids during our non-mainstream workout...

Enter:  the justfication.

Not only do we feel the need to prove to the world how expertly we can breastfeed while winning a triathalon with a gourmet paleo meal cooking in the solar powered crockpot (all during that boring Wednesday conference call), we need to post on social media sites why others "suck" for not making our decisions.  Why our choices make us better than everyone else.  Why our children will turn out better than everyone else's.  Why our decisions alone are elevating humanity to that next evolution in consciousness.  And what makes this easy... or easy to pretend that we aren't being pompous- just confirming to the world that we made the right decision?

Enter:  "the link."

Nothing proves how right we are than posting a link to someone else's obnoxiously worded article or blog, ranting about how our point of view is correct and everyone else is a dimwitted oaf.  Or commenting on our own link to imply that anyone with a different philosophy or lifestyle is low brow.  Unfortunately, I have seen this apply to parenting.  We justify spending more time with our kids, less time with our kids, teaching them three languages in preschool, giving them a "Montessori" education, feeding them an organic diet... a vegan diet... an organic vegan diet cultivated strictly by quinoa-fed orphans who listened to Stravinsky at their Montessori academy...

Really, America?!

Perhaps a better measure of our parenting success would be how little we need to use others' diatribes to justify our decisions.  Perhaps our children would become more successful, well-adjusted adults if we didn't set an example of relying on virtual strangers to approve how we raise them.  Perhaps a little more self-confidence on our behalf would help them identify it in themselves.  Perhaps building character in our children would make it less necessary for us to obsess about which toys to deprive them or which classes to overschedule them with... or which toys our friends are depriving their kids of so we can execute a better deprivation on our own and then post a link to someone's blog about how people who don't deprive their children are unenlightened.

My Hip Chick drinks organic milk and eats Cheetos.  She enjoys being read to and watching Peter Pan.  She can sing songs by Jim James as happily as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  She likes pink and has a mean pitching arm in the making.  All because that is who she naturally is.  Which is one of the best parenting lessons a mother can ask for.