Double Happiness aka Twinsmom blogged about some stoopid parenting workshop recently. Twinsmom has her regular column in a Chinese paper and therefore, I often look up to her views. She does have this very sharp mind and every sharper tongue. Too bad I don’t read Mandarin. So, in order to please blind bats like me, she blogs in English too. Though her spelling is sometime hilarious (it’s true, M), I am one of the many smart people who do not need to see an actual and complete sentence to understand the meaning.
Both of us are moderating a parenting and breastfeeding forum at MyMomsBest (MMB). MMB is the greatest because we are a group of bersopan-santun (good mannered) women who work very hard to provide the very best for our kids. But the two of us sometimes got bored with our stay-at-home routine and ventured into other forums just for kicks.
One day, while lurking, Twinsmom discovered that some lady/forumer at MJohnson had implied and called me a hypocrite followed by a bunch of others who echo. That got me claws out. This lady (actually, I am trying to be a lady and not using a more fitting word for her, like words starting with a letter ‘b’ or ‘w’) said I am a hypocrite because I used the words ‘crap and sh*t’ (yeah, with an asterik) on my forum while I sounded so polite on radio. Yeah, I was on Mix.FM with Shazmin and Richard for a mere 20 minutes (inclusive of commercials, jeez, more like 60 seconds). I wrote to the person-in-charge of M J and told them if they do not remove that posting from their forum, I am going to cry to the NGOs, Ministry of Health, Consumer Association of Penang and get my forumers who are lawyers to sue them. I will make a big hoo-haa that the formula milk company is trying to intimidate a poor individual like me, tarnish my image and trying to thwart MyMomsBest from promoting breastfeeding.
That got them a little worried. Now, they have put a big disclaimer on their forum. They said that all the things on their site are not to be trusted because these are made by half-tank sh _ _s who blindly follow what the internet says. I screamed at the company that I am very hurt because they, a big corporation, allowed their members to dictate their views. I pleaded that they are messing around with some fragile babies’ health because their members, regular women, are giving advices to other mothers regarding the health of their babies. For e.g. giving pearl powder and some traditional herbs for newborns to cure frights or giving cranberry juice for a newborn to cure UTI etc etc. (I hope more of our local doctors will be ‘louder’ and more vocal in educating our society about the danger of gambling with babies’ health by practicising traditional medicine.)
That matter has long been buried but now that Twinsmom showed me this advert, I do wonder if we are getting to be smarter parents in the 21st century or are we going back in time to the dark ages? With more and more information available, are we really benefitting or are we leaving our natural parenting instinct to the net and profit minded marketeers? Are we experiencing paralysis by analysis? It is not uncommon for laymen like us to start suspecting and doubting our doctors as we think we are smart by just reading up some websites.
With adverts like this going around, teaching parents how to be parents, I do wonder…. Aren’t these signs that we are getting dumb, dumber and dumbest?