Correcting Bad Parenting Advice | Matt Walsh Reads Reddit Stories
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I could not go on without you Lisa. You're scaring me. You are lying. I never hit you. You are tearing me apart, Lisa. Okay, we're ready, Matt.
Okay, as we do some times here, we're going to take a look at... Go over to Reddit, where people often go seeking advice. Advice in many different areas of their life. But in particular, this is somewhere where parents will go looking for advice, which is like the worst possible place to go. And so... We're going to go through some of these questions, and they may be looking for advice from strangers on Reddit, but instead they're going to get advice from me, which, as you know, the advice that I give is at least a little better than what you'll get from random people on Reddit. So I'll say that much for myself. Okay, there's this one, says, I can't wait for today to be over every day. I'm literally wishing away my life and time with my toddler while she's still so young. I can't wait for her to go to bed every night. This is a me problem, not her. She's amazing, fun, and funny, a good sleeper, good eater, generally very well behaved, but I'm overwhelmed as a parent, overstimulated, tired, and just want to veg out every night because my brain is too full. I feel so guilty.
Has anyone else felt like this for a long time, like 19 plus months? What did you do? How did you get over it? And reading the responses, and of course everyone is saying, yeah, it's totally normal and okay to feel this way. And that's all you're ever going to get from Reddit. That's all you're going to get from a lot of people, especially the internet. If you pose a dilemma like this on the internet anywhere, not just on Reddit, you get people encouraging you to continue along a path that you obviously feel bad about.
You're going down a path I can't follow.
Because of Michael Knowles. Now, can any parent relate? Well, yeah, of course. I have found myself on plenty of occasions eagerly awaiting bedtime. But that doesn't mean that it's fine. We actually should not have this attitude as parents. So you should fight against it.
Fight back, you coward! Fight back!
It's okay to want a break. It's okay to be tired and stressed out sometimes. But if you find that you spend every day just anxiously waiting for your kid to be out of your hair, then yeah, that's a problem because you are indeed just wishing your life away. You have to make the choice to enjoy being with your kid.
All done?
We're a culture obsessed with instant gratification. We're the kind of people that we watch a movie and if it doesn't thrill us within the first three minutes, we turn it off. We don't want to expend any effort at all in the pursuit of enjoyment or more precisely of joy. And as a result, we rob ourselves of true joy because true joy requires effort to obtain. And you got to do that with your kids, which isn't to say that you have to lie to yourself and convince yourself that you enjoy being around them when you don't. It just means you have to try. You have to make the effort. And I mentioned a few days ago, on the show that we played Monopoly two nights in a row during a Christmas break. Well, that second night, I was not planning to play a board game with my kids because I was having one of those waiting for bedtime type of nights. It was like six o'clock or so. And I was already doing the math of like, my plan was always put a movie on for the kids. And, you know, if the movie is this long, by the time it's over, it'll be bedtime. But then I had to stop and recognize that
this is happening in myself, recognize that this is not the right attitude. And so I said, kind of in spite of myself, you know, let's play Monopoly again. The kids were, of course, thrilled with that. And I did. And we had a fun time. You know, we put the effort in and then once you get into the flow of it, actually ended up having fun and enjoyed it, especially because I won. Next one says, is it normal to love your child more than your spouse? Ever since the birth of our son, my first and my wife's third, I feel like my relationship with my spouse has taken a backseat.
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