Being A New Parent is Hard: How Do You Handle Unsolicited Advice?

You will never be the perfect parent to your child in the eyes of everyone.

This has been the struggle of new parents when they are raising their own children. In reality, unsolicited advice should just be ignored as they do not weigh that much, however, more often than not people who give their unsolicited advice may be a parent, relative, or close friends and yes they are quite a trouble.

We all have different styles of parenting, what could have worked for them may have not worked on you, or the other way around.

I am a believer that unsolicited advice from someone comes from good intentions but they are mostly not welcome. Being a parent, we often get one advice from other people and it was quite an earful. My wife is the one who often gets those and at some point, she gets frustrated because she felt that in the eyes of everyone she is not doing the right thing.

Why Do People Give Unsolicited Advice

There are people who want to be involved in someone's life and it is a fact. Most of the time, it is the relatives who do such.
Back then April will do some Facebook stories of our daughter on her hairstyle because my wife is proud of how beautiful our little one's hair is. She was happy to share what she learned and the hair clips that we had bought back then. Until a relative commented about not using such hair clips as it is kinda rough to the hair of the baby.

It comes from a mother that never had a daughter, to begin with. So somehow the advice doesn't fit well as how can she say such if she never experienced having a daughter?

Some just want to feel that they know everything and by giving such advice they feel powerful and influential to the concerned parties.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

How To Respond to Unsolicited Advice

There's always a beauty in listening

I had been reading some books lately and I encountered a quote from Epictetus

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

I know and understand that some give advice that we don't need but before reacting have you tried to listen to what the message is? I have this thinking that if something comes up from a certain person I will never listen to them.

What I have learned is there's always something to learn from every person that we encounter in life. May it be the most annoying person on earth, they are there to teach us something. Changing perspective takes place.

Use acknowledgment statements

Working in the business process field we are required to acknowledge every concern that they want. When someone gave unsolicited advice say some acknowledgment words such as thank you for the advice, etc. Sometimes, those people just want to blurt out something out in the middle. Especially the old ones they just want someone to talk to because they don't have anything to do anymore except on playing candy crush.

Respond but not react

Each time someone will give their cents on how you are doing, at the very least try not to show that you are annoyed. You will be the villain in their story which we all don't want to happen right even if we all know that they are the ones who are not in the right way.

More often than not, arguments arise because the parent reacted negatively to the comment.

We had a fair share of that, which made us block some relatives as they gave negative remarks on how we are doing as a parent.

When we met a friend of ours that just got married. We asked them if they are planning to have a kid already and they mentioned that yes they are. The best advice that I gave to my friend was to ignore the naysayers and believe in what they know is right. They need to steel themselves as some wants to interfere with how you want to raise your kid though intentions are okay, still, some are outdated and not backed by science.