Purposeful Parent Tip:  Embrace your intuition and inner voice in addition to the virtual parenting tools.

Today’s parent has more information available to them than ever before. No matter what the issue or challenge they are experiencing, there’s an app or a Google search result that will deliver up an answer with a click of a mouse. But have we exchanged our own intuition and gut feelings for virtual experts and quick fixes?

Every day I see some new website that deals with a particular aspect of parenting from conception to giving birth to parenthood. I don’t know how new parents deal with it quite frankly. Which website is best? Which expert is the one to follow? Which parenting community is the right one to join? What playgroup is the best? It’s overwhelming. But with all of this information at our fingertips, has it really made being a parent any easier?
Are we all now experts in this role?

I say no. You may disagree and say that being able to find out how to calm your crying baby with some cool tip posted by a mom online is a miracle. I might agree – especially if I were sitting in the adjacent room to the crying baby! However, what if your smartphone was out of battery and you could not connect to this growing i-village community at 3:00 a.m. with an un-soothable infant in your arms? What would you do? Where would you go? Do you even know?

I suspect when my mother was raising six children, there was no one to call in the middle of the night if one of us were sick. I’m not certain my dad would’ve known what to do. It’s likely she did what her mother did or what the doctor ordered. Or…now stay with me for a moment. Or, she followed her gut or intuition (though she probably didn’t think of it that way).

Today, we’d fire up the laptop, type in “How to Soothe a Crying Baby” in the Google search box and voila! In seconds, we’d have access to hundreds of tips and tricks designed to help a frazzled parent through their particular parenting crisis.

Instant solution. Instant gratification. I doubt there was any of that when my mom was raising us. There was nothing ‘instant’ about anything my mom did. No TV dinners. No instant mashed potatoes. Nothing. Whatever she accomplished, she did it through hard work, diligence, and perseverance. Oh, and a massive dose of patience that she did not pass along to this daughter!

We live in a different world now. If we can’t get what we want when we want it, we become frustrated and agitated. All of our “instants” have turned us into impatient, hurried, stressed-out parents. We no longer know how to wait for anything. And we no longer trust our own instincts and inner voices to raise our children. If we didn’t get an answer to a problem from our i-village community or from the k-billion people we ask, then it can’t be right. We rely on other people’s opinions and Google search criteria to provide the answers to parenting instead of what we know to be true in our hearts.

I’m not knocking the Internet and all of the wonderful parenting communities that have likely helped millions. What I am suggesting is that we begin to exercise a bit of
moderation. That we begin to first check in with our own intuition as mothers to determine how to parent our child. Because that’s the answer that will always be right and guess what? It won’t matter if there’s no wi-fi available.

You have your own Google search built right in and the only way it won’t work is if you stop using it.