> > > What is your least favorite sterotype?
> >
> > Everything there is to know about kids and parenting magically appears in your brain when you give birth and not before.
>
> It's all just theory until you put it in practise and see how it actually works!

Like how physics doesn't really work for you until you take a course and do the labs? Seriously, you have a point, but your point is not my point. My point is the rudeness of the prevailing attitude that if you're a parent, you know all about parenting, and if you're not a parent, you don't know a thing about parenting and don't have any right to voice an opinion, because obviously it's unfounded. It happened on "Lost" just the other night -- Claire snaps, "Are you a mother?" to somebody to shut her up. That's just a show, but it's surprising how many normally considerate people in real life get rude and pigheaded in exactly the same way. It's arrogant, naive, insulting, and wrong.

Leen and I don't have kids, but we've each been around kids all our lives -- lots of them, and closely. We've studied child psychology. We've seen good and bad parenting styles and the effects they have on the kids -- over the long term, even, which is something actual parents don't necessarily have.

Most of all, we know what we *don't* know, and we know there are things we don't know we don't know. Obviously there are things we don't know. There *are* things you only learn through experience. And much of parenting is getting to know your kids and tailoring your methods on the fly for each one, because every kid is different.

My point isn't that I know all about parenting. It's that I know more than nothing and more than some people who *are* parents. Hey, owning a car doesn't make you a good driver. All you have to do is walk through the supermarket or drive down a highway to find plenty of bad parents and bad drivers. And even good parents don't know it all. Nobody does. But a lot of parents, especially young and insecure parents, are quick to snap, "Do YOU have kids?" quickly taking offense at the idea that someone without kids might possibly know something about them.

The bitter irony is that if a young parent actually believes this, they've already screwed up. If you don't know good parenting skills *before* you have kids, you have precious little time to cram before you start making irrevocable mistakes. You get until roughly nine months old when mostly all they need is food, shelter, cleaning, and physical contact. Nine months, I might add, that do NOT experientially prepare you for the times to come. After that, everything you do, every mistaken response you make to their behavior through ignorance, shapes the social behavior and world views they'll keep the rest of their lives. By age 3, the most crucial parts of that are done. By age 5, the majority. By age 10, the seeds for who they will become are planted almost irrevocably. If you screw up the terrible twos, it's uphill the rest of the way.

Do you need to have kids to fully appreciate the experiential aspect of parenthood? Absolutely. But you can be intimately knowledgeable about many other aspects of parenthood beforehand. Future parents should. Many don't, and nobody knows everything anyhow. The most fruitful course is always to keep open the doors to mutually sharing knowledge.

It is therefore pretty offensive and insulting to me when parents are so dismissive at the very thought that some non-parent might know something -- not "everything," not even "more," just *something* -- that they don't already know simply by virtue of having a child.

It doesn't do the kid any favors, either.