3 Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Judge Each Other As Moms

1. Every baby is different. Some babies sleep well and start sleeping through the night incredibly early. Some babies would rather not sleep at all. There are babies who eat anything and everything that you put in front of them and then, of course, there are babies who hardly eat anything. I happen to have one of those babies who would rather not sleep at all – at least at the beginning, but who’s more than happy to eat just about anything that you put in front of him. Peas? No problem. You want me to take a nap? Not happening. We’ve been joking around about it for almost a year now, but the point is that there’s really no way of knowing how a baby is going to react to any given situation. All you can really do is keep trying.

2. We’re all doing our best. It doesn’t matter in the least if our mothers or our best friends agree with how we’re raising our little ones. All that matters at the end of each day is that we’re doing our best. In reality, as long as we’re doing what we feel is best for our families and not what everyone else thinks is right or wrong, we’re doing okay. Nothing in life is ever black or white and parenting is a perfect example of this. There’s a lot of gray. Just because someone else is doing something doesn’t mean that we should to. Just because something works for one baby, doesn’t mean that it’ll work for another. When it’s all said and done, there’s no such thing as a perfect mom. We all make mistakes and, hopefully, we all learn from them.

3. We can never know the whole story. There’s almost always more than meets the eye. I mean, think about it – none of us can ever know what someone else is going through. There are always multiple potential scenarios to consider. The bottle-feeding mom? The full-time working mom? The homeschooling mom? We have no way of knowing why they’ve made the decisions that they’ve made. Maybe, the bottle-feeding mom needs to be on medication that isn’t safe for the baby. The full-time mom could very well be on her own to take care of her family. For that matter, it’s quite possible that the homeschooling mom has a little one who floundered within a classroom. The point is that we don’t know and we probably never will.

Have you ever caught yourself judging another mom or felt judged yourself? Leave a comment and share your experience.

Written by: Cristi Wuenschel