My wife and I had our lovely daughter august of 2024. This, as any father knows, has been a significant transition. Heck, my wife and I used to watch Kitchen Nightmares, Dan da Dan, and Top Gear. Now we have favorite shows like Bluey, Mickey Mouse Club House, and Ms. Rachel (Fantastic Children’s YouTube channel by the way!).

While my wife was pregnant, we received a fascinating piece of advice from a random employee at a local hardware store: “You are going to get a lot of advice from every person that sees you, and you get to choose what advice you take and use!”

This is the truest piece of advice we received during the entire pregnancy!

I didn’t realize just how true this would become then, so I just smiled and thanked the employee and went to buy our items. I didn’t really pay too much attention to the advice at the time, but every time I received any little tidbit from everyone who felt that they had good advice (or that they knew everything there is about parenting), I would think about that random employee at the hardware store.

Of course, with our modern day where anyone who has a cell phone in their hand (basically the entire human population at this point), people who wanted to capitalize on the new parents’ panic could easily post a instagram reel or TikTok post about how to “properly” raise children, wether this information was factually correct or not.

My wife and I quickly discovered that our instagram feeds were becoming flooded with baby posts and parenting tips. At first, it was nice to see posts that seemed to be useful. Things like helping a baby sit up, reviews on children’s toys, and even things that babies could watch without parents worrying (once again, Bluey and Ms. Rachel are fantastic!). All these posts were giving us ideas on what we could do once our child was here.

I’m sure you noticed that these posts were about helping child development, and nothing about proper parenting. The parenting posts were where we began to see…. Conflicting information.

We soon began to see posts about “gentle parenting” and “proper discipline” and started feeling overwhelmed. Mainly because some of the posts we saw were directly conflicting the last one. For me, I was just worried about having a good relationship with my daughter, while also making sure we still maintained good discipline with her. I swear, Instagram KNEW that this was an insecurity for me as a first time father and was specifically showing me posts about what to do and not to do. Not only that, but it felt like it was specifically trying to give me contradicting information back to back. One comment I saw really hit how I was feeling at this point: “At this point, I’m not sure if I am even breathing next to my child correctly!”

I think the best example I can think of that highlights the insanity of digital parenting advice I saw had to deal with babies crying in the crib. I swear, the two examples im going to discuss were dropped on me back to back during one of my late-night-doom-scrolling sessions.

The first post was taking a gentler parenting approach to a crying baby. The post discussed how it was not only okay to smooth a crying child to sleep, but also was the single most important thing to do to be a good parent. The post explained that soothing a crying child would not only help the baby fall asleep but would help it feel more comfortable and would lead to the baby sleeping better. Not only this, but the post also explained that this would lead to a better and more trusting relationship with your child in the future (with no evidence or sources, of course). This post absolutely captured my attention and began to make me consider how I was going to handle a crying baby in the middle of the night. I thought to myself “of course! I absolutely should soothe my baby every single time she cries! I want to have a great relationship with my child when she grows up, and this will help!”

I then scrolled to the next post that offered the complete opposite advice.

The next post explained that soothing a crying child when they were supposed to sleep would only encourage the baby to cry more and develop an unhealthy dependence on the parents. Not only this, but this would lead to the child not being able to regulate their emotions and would develop and unhealthy dependence to anyone that would hold them when they were emotional (once again, no evidence or sources to back this up). Thus, the post recommended that new parents completely ignore their child’s cries in the middle of the night to help them develop their independence.

Now at this point, I’m sitting in my bed just completely confused. I just received two pieces of advice that completely contradicted each other, and both discussed some lasting consequences to the development of my child…. just from how I handled a crying baby who needed to sleep.

This doesn’t even cover the comments of these posts, which were full of “early childhood experts” (who, of course, had now credibility to back this claim up). Discussing how beneficial or detrimental handling a crying baby would be to the child’s development. Once again, this life-or-death decision is only about how to handle a crying baby in the middle of the night!

Looking back on this almost a year later, I can only laugh at how neurotic I was about the proper way to raise my child. Nowadays, a lot of my parenting is based on the situation. If my daughter is crying, ill go check on her if I feel it is needed, but otherwise she usually just falls asleep. That’s what works for me and my daughter. Usually she cries for a second, then falls right back asleep. This isn’t the life and death decision that I was led to believe, but rather just a simple choice depending on the needs of my daughter.

So new and expecting parents, I want to share one more piece of unsolicited advice: Take what advice you think is useful and ignore the advice that seems wild to you. Children are small humans. Like any human, they are individuals and require different approaches. Your child will be different than my daughter, and what works for us may not work with you. Like everything in life, being present and active is the best way to go. You’ll learn what works and doesn’t work with your baby after a while. Those first 3-5 months are a lot of trial and error.

And to the instagram parenting experts: just stop. I think it is wrong to post on instagram and impersonate a parenting expert. If you are just posting about what worked for you, that’s fine. If you are an actual early childhood development expert (and you can actually back up that claim) and you are trying to offer some simple tips for parents, great! What im talking about is saying you are a childcare expert and that your advice is the one true way to raise a child is really taking advantage of nervous expecting parents. And that helps literally no one.

Overall, Raising kids is not easy (no brainer statement there), and you can never truly be prepared to raise kids. That being said, it is one of the most rewarding experiences on this earth. Just do your best to be in your child’s life, and you’ll figure it out!