To be booooooooored to death of smug PFB comments on MN. It's shite, you know it is.

[welliemum]

It's an old story. Someone posts an OP in which you can see that they?re being quite protective or concerned about their child ? maybe a bit too much so.

Within minutes, someone will ask, ?Is this your first child??

Then the floodgates open for a deluge of posts along the lines of ?Oh, you are a silly little thing - when you have TWO children and are as fabulously wise and experienced as I am, you will See The Error Of Your Ways? [virtual pat on head].

I just don?t get this. It?s like jeering at a learner driver for driving slowly. Would you want an 18 year old with a sparkly new licence to be barrelling down the motorway at 90 mph?

We live in a society where most of us have very little contact with babies until we have our own. IMO it?s absolutely right that new, inexperienced parents should have safety margins the size of Australia until they?ve sorted out what is truly risky and what isn?t. In fact I?d go further and say that that?s the ONLY sensible way to parent if you?re new to the game.

Far rather rush around madly sterilising than put your tiny baby in hospital on a drip because you were too cool to wash a bottle.

As far as I can see, PFB comments have nothing to do with giving helpful advice to a new parent, and everything to do with massaging the ego of the PFB-commentator.

Actually I think that PFB is a syndrome, not a status. The mere fact of having one child does not make one a PFB parent. Nor are parents of several children immune from the syndrome.

agree with anniemac.

and duchesse!

"personal experience " Which is precisely the point of PFB syndrome.

"The only reason people begin post with a "PFB" comment is to try and avoid the inevitable PFB responses back." Are you claiming to know the feelings of every such poster? Do you not think it equally likely that they recognise PFB Syndrome in themselves?

Of course anniemac. Goes without saying. I'd not be without anyone of mine despite the difficulties.

Katie Roiphe said, "In the 1930s, Winifred Holby, a journalist friend of the writer Vera Brittain, wrote about what she called the ?rich unrest of family life?. I think that we?re supposed to embrace that rich unrest. It evokes a different attitude to the difficulty and chaos of child-rearing. We seem to be so oppressed by all these basic aspects of child-rearing, and I wonder if it is not self-imposed."

she's the one wittering on about 'the difficulty and chaos of childrearing' which I find utterly bizarre from someone with one 'sophisticated' five year old daughter and a full time nanny. And then she has a go at people who arrange activities at the weekend to please/suit their kids instead of simply doing their own thing and 'letting the child experience life through their parents' (or something) which I know (from experience) is incredibly easy with one nicely behaved little girl who will sit in cafes and trot cheerfully around national trust properties, and and I also know from experience, is a lot less easy (and in fact completely miserable) with more and significantly less malleable children. Which is precisely why her circumstances are relevant when discussing her views.

Any woman who has even one child is extremely lucky.

'the difficulty and chaos of childrearing' which I find utterly bizarre from someone with one 'sophisticated' five year old daughter and a full time nanny.

I have a nice 20 mo and a full time nanny and I was still in tears last week because my DD was being so miserable and I could not leave her on her own for 10 seconds and had taken to taking her to the toilet with me (where she sits on my knee while I am weeing ).

If you really don't understand why raising a child on your own can be difficult and chaotic then I don't know how to respond to you.

I have never been smug about the number of children I have.

what anniemac and I and others are saying is that we all have our crosses to bear. Some bits of our life are easy. Some bits are difficult.

Using the PFB tag to suggest that someone doesn't know what real life is like is crap. As with anniemac, I refrain from saying what I went through to have DD because I know I am lucky. Some of the smuggery on here could do with an injection of this amount of awareness.

I think people are sympathetic and very helpful to the pleas for help. We can all remember being there. I cried when my first child caught his first cold. Literally wept. And my older wiser friends were sweethearts about it. No eye rolling at all.

But what people have less patience for is "Am I being unreasonable to be annoyed that a woman gave a breadstick to my toddler?" or "I can't stand the way old ladies touch my baby's cheek" and so on.

But she said HERSELF that her daughter was 'sophisticated' which implied, I felt that she fitted in very nicely with her mother's life. Also her comments about how she couldn't understand why anyone did child-centred activities (swimming? softplay? the park?) and her description of calmly playing dollies also indicated that time she spends with her daughter was not very hard work. I also promise you that a 20month old is totally different to a five year old. Anyway, that's kind of off the point, the only reason anyone mentioned KR's circumstances was because she is so critical of anyone who makes different choices to her. FFS the way she goes on about her friends who have committed the awful 'crime' of letting their little boy have squeaky trainers! She is so pissed off about something that clearly doesn't bother her friends and I wonder what those friends feel like reading about how she thinks their harmless decision epitomises everything wrong with parents today

annie - I guess it is a useful eye-opener for some of us to think about people in your position. I was very very lucky in conceiving and giving birth to my 3. And I do take it for granted I suppose. It must give you a different perspective if you had to work so hard for your child

I thought KR's thoughts were unbelievably smug. All 'well MY 'sophisticated' child fits in beautifully with my lovely intellectual life so anyone whose children don't just fit in is doing something wrong'.

I didn't find the KR article smug at all. I thought she sounded confused and as if she was trying to understand something about herself and how she's changed.

I totally agree with this. When you have your first your rational mind evaporates and you doubt (ime) most things.

StellaDallas, your post made me smile. I always wondered about the Infacol dropper and had I been on Mumsnet then, it would have been just the type of thing I would have posted about!

I didn't discover MN until DS was 2 and DD nearly 1. MN made me realise how PFB I had been with DS but as MB says mostly in a helpful way (which was a relief as I could relax a little). In my defence a lot of PFB tendancies come from reading too many parenting books (which I did).

I don't think it is at all helpful to criticise the behaviour of new mums who are doing their best and absolutely never do it in real life!

wellie think you are right . Although also agree with sallyforth that sometimes it's useful to have a reality check.

We were up A&E on Boxing Day as 6 week DS hadn't poo-ed for 24 hours and he was crying a lot.