Ew, her house is SO dirty! She must be a terrible mom!

Moms judging other moms is nothing new. We all do it. If you say you don’t, well, I just don’t believe you. I try not to but, inevitably, there is the mom who lets her toddler stand up in the shopping cart at the grocery store and I’m cringing as the kid comes THIS close to falling out… I walk away shaking my head in disbelief… But there it is – I’m judging this mom.

A new survey conducted by TODAY and Parenting.com finds that nearly 90 percent of us judge moms.

Check this out. According to the 26,000 moms questioned, one in 5 will judge you for not breastfeeding. But wait, there’s more! If you breastfeed for what some consider “too long” you’ll get judged by 43 percent of mothers.  Can’t win, can you? Continue reading »

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Lars von Trier’s gothic horror film Antichrist sounds, to put it put it mildly, like a miserable story—a couple trying, and utterly failing, to get over the accidental death of their young son descend into mutilating each other and themselves. And that’s the delicate description.

But how to interpret that story has got some critics in a debate over motherhood, sex, guilt, and misogyny.

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On one of her earlier trips out with our daughter in a bike seat, my wife got roundly told off by a stranger in a car for daring to do something so dangerous with a child.

I wish it were feasible to print up little copies of this post over at ChildWild and toss them into the windows of cars with drivers like that.

Short and sweet, and more polite than I would be, even in theory, the writer points out that taking your attention off the road to “startle, alarm, and anger” the bicycle rider vastly increases the danger of the situation.

Some great follow up comments note that the more people who bike, the safer it is (i.e., if you’re concerned about how safe it is, get on a bike yourself), and that regular biking is modeling healthy, active behavior for your kids, which we certainly need more of.

If I were actually making such an informative flyer, I would add “Oh, and by the way, it’s illegal for me to ride on the sidewalk, as I am over 10 years old, even though I do so sometimes anyway when I feel unsafe on the roads due to jerks like you. I like to follow the law. I’d appreciate it if you did the same, which in your case includes sharing the road with other vehicles.” Then I would give said informative flyer to the police among others.

It’s not that everyone with any experience in urban cycling isn’t constantly aware of how defensively they need to ride, especially with kids in tow. The point is not that it’s risk free. But it is amazing how many drivers who would never yell at parents for doing other less safe, less legal, less otherwise beneficial things feel OK letting loose at parents who cycle with their kids.

Photo CC by Howard N2GOT.

More by this author:

• Why Are People Such Jerks to Children?
• Caillou: Love Him or Hate Him?

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I want to put a sign on the front door of my house that reads: If this house is messy, if the clothes are unclean, and if the child is unkempt, judge the man of the house as much as you judge the woman.
What I’m talking about here is mother judgment. It’s when women hold other women to impossible standards of housekeeping and child-rearing. The critical part of the equation, though, is the part where we talk about one another and how we don’t approve of the way she’s doing things and point out how much better we believe we are.
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