[twitter]David Beckham‘s daughter uses a pacifier. She’s 4.
On the surface, that’s enough to give any common sense parent a bit of a sneer. We know better. The longer a child uses a pacifier, the worse things are for speech and teeth. We know it’s bad.
I bit on the headlines coming out of the UK this week on Facebook too. “You do what you have to do, but pacifiers at 4? Hmmmm,” I wrote. Judging, while trying not to judge, but judging still.
My pal, John Kinnear, wrote a wonderful viral post this summer about ‘being a crappy parent.’
In it, he talks about parents with faces in phones, those who lose their temper at the mall, and feed their kids candy. He talks about what we see, what we don’t see, and how, all of us, at one point or another are ‘the crappy parent.’
Except we’re not. There’s a bigger picture that is never seen. You can’t judge by that cover, and yet many of us are guilty of it just the same.
So back to Becks. He has responded to the viral backlash in the wake of the photo in the most brilliantly practical way possible.
“Why do people feel they have the right to criticize a parent about their own children without having any facts ?? Everybody who has children knows that when they aren’t feeling well or have a fever you do what comforts them best and most of the time it’s a pacifier so those who criticize think twice about what you say about other people’s children because actually you have no right to criticize me as a parent …,” he said in an Instagram post.
Well said, David. And I apologize for judging. I should have known better after the ignorant backlash I received when I wrote “that post.”
We never know the whole story when we see other parents “breaking the rules,” and we should cut each other slack and offer support.
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