Hey remember that time you were not a perfect parent? Or that time you were not even a parent?
No? Not ringing a bell?
Turns out we can’t all be awesome like you and watch our kids 100% of the time. The fact that you don’t stop watching your kid for even a second is amazing. It’s incredible that your kids are so perfectly behaved and never cause any problems or get into any trouble. Your paradise life must be great.
And not only do you get to have perfect kids who always obey and never cause trouble but that also means you get to judge the rest of us for apparently sucking at this parenting gig. Every time a news article talks about a tragic event involving a child you get to mount your high horse and stomp all over the parents.
You get to tell them that they don’t deserve their kids. That they obviously were not being a good parent and that their child must be all sorts of wild.
Guess what! You have either gotten really lucky so far in your parenting journey, or have no kids yet. Because accidents happen. Kids let go of hands and are gone in a split second, kids slip out of harnesses (which you judged us for), and kids get snatched away in a split second by alligators.
Do you know how fast kids can run into traffic? Speeding bullet fast. That’s how fast.
Do you know how short kids are and how easy it is to misplace them in a crowd? Because they are short and crowds are tall.
Maybe your kids are not curious and maybe your kids brains have developed all the proper safety parts. But for the rest of the kid population out there you need to realize that kids are curious and kids have under developed brains that don’t have all the safety nets in place. Kids don’t understand that there is a drop off after those bushes, kids don’t understand that there is a man eating beast lurking, and kids don’t understand how fast a car can hit them.
And in saying that don’t come back at me and say the parents should be right there. Because again kids slip away fast. Parents are there wrestling their child from the jaws of an alligator. Parents go pee for like 5 seconds and their kid slips out of the house, or climbs up something. These are not parents who are off smoking up and drinking their life away. These are parents trying to do their best at raising these little humans.
Stop judging. Stop throwing horrible words around at parents who are grieving and realizing that their baby, their child, that piece of their heart will never hug them again, will never kiss them, will never yell “mom, mom, mom” over and over again. Parents who will have to relive those terrible moments every second of every day.
Just stop.
Just say sorry! End. Stop. Nothing more.