First of all, it's always better if you can be genuinely compassionate for those who are experiencing or have experienced difficulties. Sometimes, it is very hard to do so, especially if the other person was advised not to, say, order the shrimp cocktail at a dodgy restaurant and is now throwing up because she did, and it was bad, and now it's coming back up again. There will be plenty of times as a parent when you make a very different set of decisions from other parents, and when you see how badly it turns out for them, it may be very hard to be compassionate, particularly if you see the damage it is doing the children. I'm advocating faking compassion for strategic and tactical reasons, even if you do not truly feel compassion. Whatever we have to learn from our lives is easier to learn if people aren't piling on, going I told you so. And we will all sooner or later do something utterly boneheaded, despite warnings, and face unpleasant consequences as a result. When we then ask for compassion, we at least won't be open to an accusation of hypocrisy.
Parenting decisions that go awry cause suffering for both parents and children. A formula fed baby that is unable to tolerate cow's milk formula and soy milk formula is sick a lot, which is obviously bad for the baby, and causes a lot of heartache for the parents as well. While some women do decide to formula feed right from the beginning, very few have truly been informed of the implications of their choice, and they were likely formula fed as a baby themselves. An adolescent who was raised in a strict household that used a lot of corporal punishment and now finds solace in drugs, but also finds a lot of trouble with school and possibly the law in her altered state suffers more than the parent who beat that child. But the parents do also suffer, and they, too, were almost certainly beaten as children.
If you cannot feel sympathy for another who is suffering, consider why. Would you be heartless to someone you loved and respected when they were suffering from an error or bad judgment, just because you had made an effort to warn them ahead of time? Sometimes telling people what they should or should not do has the perverse effect of making it impossible to follow the advice. Might you have contributed to this situation by pressing too hard for them to make a particular choice and creating resistance or defiance, rather than respecting them enough to make the best choice for them? If you were in no way a part of the decision, and you still cannot feel compassion, are they too much like someone with whom you have a troubled relationship? Usually, when I feel schadenfreude rather than compassion, I have somewhere inside identified the suffering person with someone in my past or present who did me great harm and I am delighting in retribution. I understand that I am not alone in this, but I do think it is worthwhile to conceal this as it is not a response of which I am proud.
When you are holding your friend's hair back over the toilet, the two choices are not, "What kind of idiot orders the shrimp cocktail" or "Gosh, there's no way anyone could have known". It is possible to feel and show compassion in a way that comforts another without endorsing their decision. For our friend with the shrimp upchuck, something along the lines of, "Oh dear, how awful to be so ill. Here's a glass of water to rinse your mouth out with. If you can think of any other way I can help you, please let me know."
If it is impossible to reverse the decision, in this case or any future case (someone who chose to formula feed who will not be having any more children), it may not be worth anyone's time or trouble to give them information or advice that might have made a difference if they had known it in the past. If it is possible to reverse or mitigate the decision, think carefully about whether you are a good person to supply that information or advice, and about how you will go about supplying it. I tend to believe that advice can be good, recognized as good, actually followed -- and at most two of those three attributes can happen at once.
If you choose to give information or advice, presenting information and possibilities is generally more effective than "laying down the law", as satisfying as that might be in its own right. Describing your own experience as a story, or relating another's experience as a story, is a very old, and occasionally successful strategy. The more emotionally involved you are in someone else making a particular decision, the less effective you are likely to be in helping them making a good decision, even if you are right. Too much pressure creates resistance, defiance, acting out.
Pregnancy, childbirth and parenting are rife with fast 180 degree changes of opinion. Before you tell someone they had better do things a different way, check your sources. Do you know this from personal experience? Have your friends corroborated your belief? Is there any research that might be relevant? What is the quality of that research? What has been done differently in other times and other places and might those other practices apply in this instance?
There is no one metric that will always tell us we know, for sure, this truth. While I like cross-cultural evidence of a parenting practice, denying colostrum to newborns is cross-culturally quite common -- and I think infants need colostrum, although they can survive without it. Tandem breastfeeding is quite uncommon cross-culturally, and I do not necessarily think it's a terrible idea. Before pressing for your beliefs, consider the alternatives, and ask yourself what might convince you to change if you really believed in one of those alternatives. That is the answer you need to have, in order to convince another to change to your way of thinking. And if you are giving advice for some reason other than to convince someone to change, think hard about why you are giving advice. Playing I-told-you-so is a whole lot of fun, but is perhaps better done better on the outcome of professional sports tournaments than when a child's future or a woman's health is at stake.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created January 24, 2006 Updated May 17, 2006