Ridiculous parenting advice

[GreasyHairDoNotCare]

Aibu to ask you what the most ridiculous bit of parenting advice that you've ever been given is?

I can think of a few but these stand out to me

'It's good for him to cry like that, gets the air to his lungs, leave him for a while'- DS was screaming with teething pain and wanted comforting

'Can't you just lay him in the bath, he'll hold his breath obviously' - no DS will drown if I do that

"It's dangerous to completely quit smoking during pregnancy! The stress of having no nicotine can make you haemorrhage and miscarry, It happened to me at 6 weeks!"

A friend of mine was genuinely told by her HV that it would be better for her to smoke a couple of cigarettes a day during pregnancy than go cold turkey. I don't think the HV actually said that it would be dangerous not to, just that the benefits to her mental health more or less cancelled out the disadvantages.

Yes the carbonation doesn't get in the milk but the carbon dioxide reacts to create acids and they get into the milk

Do you have the science for that? I am doubtful based on my own knowledge, but happy to be proven wrong.

Carbon dioxide in the air can dissolve in rain water to produce acid rain but that's carbonic acid. It's fairly corrosive. Something's telling me the science might not be right here.

Having said that, eating grapes and breastfeeding seemed to give mine wind. No idea why.

'Pick the nap times you want baby to have and then put her down for them'

I'm sure that will work with my champion sleep fighter.

It might though Margarita. Would it not be worth trying instead of dismissing it straightaway? As I said upthread, I think a lot of the current guidelines discourage sleep. Why not try to introduce some routine - you never know, it might work.

OH's mum the one and only tome she came to visit "just put her in her cot,shut the door and turn the radio really loud" when I was complaining how tired I am and how much she cries. Also that going to the HV is a waste of time and that she never went after they stopped giving free samples/food.

I can understand people complaining about this thread to a point because advice is always changing... the main problem here is the fact that most of this advice in unwanted! And the HV giving out bad advice should know better.
DM seems to forget that advice has changed in the 30odd years since she was a mother to small babies and just won t have it when I tell her she is wrong when she keeps insisting on me giving 4 month old Ds water instead of bf'ing him in case he is thirsty science has made huge leaps and surely more and better research means we are better informed now... And as more advances are made, more advice will undoubtedly change.

Some advice would have been based on what people thought was common sense I would imagine... for instance, DS is feeding more frequently at the moment and puts everything in his mouth so it may seek he is ready for weaning. However, surely a baby 'catching' epilepsy would have been just as ridiculous 30 years ago??

Too many mistakes to correct. My phone is a twat.

Had the exact same advice about biting. Except stupidly I listened. I bit her back, a pathetic nip, she thought it was hilarious and a new game we were playing.
Thankfully outgrown by 18 months. She pinches now though.

@Linzi14 pinch her back

When toddler dd bit me so hard she drew blood I told her "no" firmly and sat her on the floor. Dd's response was to cry because she wanted back on my knee. According to my aunt this was cruel and the correct response to dd biting me was to bite her back as hard as she'd bitten me!

My great nan told me to never touch a babies feet as it scares them and to always swaddle babies tightly. None of my dcs have ever liked being swaddled, they always screamed blue murder if they couldn't move their legs properly, they wouldn't even tolerate baby sleeping bags as it restricted their legs too much.

My mum smoked and her consultant obstetrician told her that it was dangerous to stop smoking while pregnant and to cut down to 10 cigarettes a day instead of stopping completely.

Guidelines are constantly changing as our understanding changes. I was told to start weaning dd with things like porridge and weetabix at 4 months but two years later was told not to give ds anything with wheat in until at least 9 months. Some advice will always be batshit advice no matter when it's given.

My dad shouted at me for letting my then 2 year old eat 3 bananas that day, because apparently they're poisonous.

What’s annoying about advice like ‘just put your baby down for a nap’ is the fact that it’s more than likely already been tried and doesn’t work. I thought you could just put a baby in their cot and off they’d fall to sleep. Some babies you can put down for naps from birth, but no amount of just putting dd down worked before she was ready. I wasn’t sleeping 1 hour at the beginning of the night and 1 first thing for the first 3 months just because I hadn’t thought to just put her down ‘drowsy but awake’. No parent is going to have almost no sleep for want of trying to put the baby down.

My second baby is a lot more content to nap in the bouncy chair and sleep in the sidecar cot. I have even laid him down DROWSY BUT AWAKE and watched him drift off. If he’d been my first I could have been awfully smug, but would have paid for it second time round, whereas I got hazed by dd and have been pleasantly surprised.

Setting down a plate of treats and expecting toddlers to "Share nicely!" unsupervised.

OK, Donkeys, you're coming over to America and cleaning up the curry I laughed out my nose.

To keep a nappy on ds at all times or he will get sexual feelings if he is naked

This one actually happens! All men and boys who have sexual feelings have had time when they were not wearing a nappy. Therefore, it must be taking the nappy off that does it!

That it was ok to give my son (who wasn't yet 1) some coca cola, as long as I shook it to make it flat and get the sugar out this was when I asked a friend how to ease constipation in babies.

Shed, mine isn't bothered much about routines but a bedtime routine was the one routine that we religiously stuck to, 7 years after I stopped making an issue of sleeping DS averages 4.5 hours a night on weekdays. Every meeting in ms centred around somebody's opinion that a lack of bedtime routine/sleep was the cause of the difficulties in school not the Autism. I don't know where some of the ideas about autism comes from. Not sure that the school knew the difference between myth and fact.

'Don't answer his question as all the time. You're making a rod for your own back. He'll never learn any respect if you indulge him all the time" from my DM

Or very much words to that effect.

My eldest is 16. She adores him and has come to understand that times have changed but it made for some colourful conversations!

@cathf unfortunately I have tried absolutely everything. If she doesn't want sleep, she won't sleep!

Yeah, assuming a parent hasn't tried a routine to get their baby to sleep more is a bit

@ethelfleda

Enter I despair sometimes! We’ve had the same.

It was well meant, but I struggled not to roll my eyes after chatting with a friend of DM’s about how DD hates sleep, fights it to the bitter end and takes forever to settle at night. She came out with a groundbreaking idea - “have you tried a good routine?”

Wow, what an amazing concept. For the past 9 months I’ve been making sure every day is different, keeping it interesting and trying to put her to bed at random times and in random places. A routine you say? Genius

Margarita, obviously I don't know what you have tried and I apologise if you really have tried everything. I know that some babies just do not sleep.
My comment was made after being on MN for a couple of years now, and noticing that any type of routine is usually rubbished and any attempt to try to get a baby to fit in with what a parent wants is considered to be a Very Bad Thing. It's all baby-led this and following baby cues that, which frankly I find ridiculous.

I don’t think there will be many parents who haven’t tried ‘just putting baby down for a nap’.

HV told me that I mustn't let dc sleep through at 3 months, I must wake them up for a feed. Cheers, thanks for that.