Open Thread: What’s The Worst Parenting Advice You’ve Ever Gotten?

Do you know the only thing that you need if you’re going to be trapped on a desert island? Besides a boat, because that’s cheater talk?

An infant.

As soon as someone catches wind that there’s a fresh baby about, they rush to the location of said baby in order to instruct that baby’s idiot parents on what the proper way to take care of the baby is. Bam. Rescued.

Most unsolicited advice is fairly harmless, albeit annoying as hell. Some of it’s actually kind of helpful, but some of it is just bad. Hilariously, pathetically bad. I think at some point everyone has been told to rub some kind of alcohol on a teething baby’s gums, right? I mean, once their molars start coming in they can probably hold a shot glass but sure, do it the hard way.

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t gotten some seriously bad parenting advice at some point, whether it was relatively harmless or potentially disastrous?

The crappiest advice I ever got was that my daughter needed a pacifier. That doesn’t sound too bad, except that she wouldn’t take one if her life depended on it. This really frustrated the advice-giver (who happened to be staying with us at the time) so she ended up hijacking one of the pacifiers we’d been gifted, coating it in sugar, and attempting to tempt (read: force) my 6 week old kid to take it. Fortunately I saw this going down and managed to judo chop it out of her hand before asking her to kindly GTFO.

A pregnant woman is like an unsolicited advice magnet, and it only seems to get worse once you have an actual for reals baby in your arms, with everyone weighing in on how you’re doing it wrong. So I want to know what the worst parenting advice that you’ve ever gotten is.

Bring me your stupid, your patronizing, your horrifyingly dangerous wisdom nuggets. Fly, my pretties!

(Image: Rido /Shutterstock)