Sucky Mom Jessica Stilwell Reaches New Level Of Suck By Comparing Herself To Amanda Todd
On October 10th, Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old teenager committed suicide after being stalked and cyber bullied. The young girl made a very brave and heartbreaking video entitled “My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm” on Sept. 7th and was found dead in her home town of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, just over a month later. The entire world has been grieving over the Amanda Todd story. Our hearts go out to her family and for the thousands and thousands of kids who are subjected to bullying every day. As parents, we all need to step up our efforts in raising our children to be compassionate, empathetic, and mature enough to realize that bullying hurts.
On October 9th, I read an article about striking mom Jessica Stilwell who went on a housekeeping strike to teach her 12 -year-old twins and 10-year-old daughter that they need to help out more around the house. I entitled my article A Mom Went On Strike And Proved She Is A Sucky Mom For Raising Slobs and I quoted a Huffington Post article about Stilwell. The rest of the article was all about me and how I raise my own children, how I am not their maid and how I have taught them from a very early age that because we all get to live in this great big world, we all owe it to each other to keep it clean. In my house, we all help out. My husband and I do the majority of the housework, but our kids are expected to help, and they always have been. I used the term “sucky” mom in my headline as a sort of cheeky joke. Anyone familiar with Mommyish or my writing knows I write with a healthy dose of humor infused into the majority of my articles. I call myself a Frumpy Mom. As a woman and a mom I am amused by how we label ourselves, label each other, the whole hot mom/bad mom/cool mom/helicopter mom/free range mom, but at the end of the day, I’m all about Koa Beck and her call for labeless moms. I don’t think Jessica Stilwell sucks as a parent. I don’t know her. I think a parent who doesn’t teach her kids they are expected to help out around the house is providing them a disservice and it’s a sucky parenting choice. I make my own sucky parenting choices on occasion, we all do. Just because we all suck on occasion doesn’t mean we don’t love our kids and that we aren’t, at the end of the day, pretty good parents.
But I will say one thing that does suck. And it sucks hard. Jessica Stilwell wrote a post on her blog about the negative press she has received about her striking mom experiment.
In light of the tragic recent headlines of Amanda Todd; the Vancouver area teen that committed suicide after her countless desperate pleas for help after being bullied, I NEED to say something here. I have learned a lot about social media this week…but THIS is the important news”¦bullying, cyber bullying, anti bullying, bullying awareness, kids cutting and teen suicide when there appears to be no way out. These are real issues facing our young people today. Not just for Amanda Todd, but for all the young people facing this in real life each day.
So for all the adults that have had ever so nasty things to say on my blog or elsewhere online about my parenting”¦I encourage you to ask yourself what you are teaching your own children by posting terrible things about me and my family without even knowing me or reading something so readily available to answer your questions? Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but what about teaching our children to communicate respectfully with each other without mean or hurtful words?
No. No no no one thousand eleventh gazillion times no. An adult blogger who writes a post about going on strike and not picking up after her kids and has the post go viral and who then has people offering criticism, opinions, and thoughts on those articles, everything from me discussing how I teach my kids to pick up to comments that call the Stilwell girls “spoiled” is in NO WAY the same.You can’t compare the flack you get over an article to a young girl who was stalked, online and offline, harassed, bullied, sexually victimized and physically beaten until she felt she had no choice but to end her own life. That is a suck move, Stilwell. Even worse, it’s a shitty move. Amanda Todd doesn’t get to wake up today and live her life. She doesn’t get to blog about her daily experiences. And much worse, she will never grow older and have her own children who she can make her own sucky parenting choices on, like you and I get to do on a daily basis.
A young girl is dead, and it’s terrible and heartbreaking and ungodly sad.
Sticks and stones do break bones”¦and words really do hurt, no matter how prepared and strong you think you are. Rest gently Amanda Todd.
For each negative comment on my blog and online I have had a 1000x in positives!!! I wish I could respond to each and every one of you and it is my goal to. But for now, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. For those of you that have gone to bat for me”¦you made me tear up. Sniff sniff.More is caught than is taught people”¦. perhaps taking the time to look inward and at your own actions and influence on your own children is more important than taking the time to insult me and bully me and others online.
My heart breaks for Amanda Todd and her family and friends. I ache and pray for each and every young person that faces bullying and the feeling of un-acceptance every day. Make your words count. Make your actions count even more. Make a difference.
It’s great you are asking for people to be kinder on the internet. It’s great that you are expressing sadness over Amanda Todd. But you aren’t Amanda Todd. And that young girl is dead. By lumping receiving criticism over your parenting choices to a girl who killed herself you are Mommyjacking at its worst. So write about how you feel the criticism you have received is unfair. Blog about your frustrations with how the media has perceived you and your family. But don’t compare your circumstances to a little 15-year-old girl who once became so distraught over the harassment she experienced that she actually drank bleach to end her own life. It’s not fair to the people who knew Amanda Todd, and it’s not fair to the thousands of kids who find themselves terrified and suicidal over bullying each and every day.
(photo: youtube)