We Do Have Trouble At Bathtime, What With the Kid Walking on Water

I recently got an email subscription to a parenting website, and I have to say that after one month, I'm pretty well disgusted with the whole thing. It's not the site itself - I like the content they provide. Instead it's that they make the mistake every web site in the world seems to make. They allow comments from random yahoos, and random yahoos tend to be total morons. (Yes, we allow comments here at DLOG, but let's face it, we cater to a better class of people. Well, that and I can delete comments, which is why there's never spam in the comments section.)

So the article I'm reading as about basic things you can do to help your two year old work on their numbers. The gist of the one paragraph is that many two year olds may count up to ten, but they are probably just reciting as opposed to actually understanding one to ten. So, there it is - the average two year old doesn't fully understand the counting beyond "one" and "more than one".

Then the comments start in. I've actually used this site before, and stopped going because the comments section has an effect on my anger issues the way a lit match has an effect on a gas tank. Unlike most sites, where it's just people voicing idiot opinions (thus making them ignorable), on this site people use the comments section to brag. They're not trying to be helpful or relevant, they just want to spout off about how their precious snowflake is better than other kids, thus adding to the already ridiculous competitive behavior among many parents.

But don't take my word for it. In relation to the paragraph I was talking about before, we get the following comment:

My daughter will be 3 in November and she's quite intelligent. She understands the difference between 1 and 20 and can count to twenty. I can put toys in front of her and she will count the amount of toys and I can tell her she can have 2 and she will push all but the two that she wants away.

She also knows her alphabet, all of her colors including chartreuse, aquamarine, vermilion and quite a few shapes including octagon, parallelogram and trapezoid. She speaks VERY well.

I admit, the context was parents disagreeing with the notion that their kids don't understand the numbers, as suggested in the articles. What bothers me is that the point of the article is to help people figure out how their kids figure things out. They want people to help their children by recognizing what's going on with their children. I may be way off here, but whether or not little Sally can identify sweater colors from a Lands End catalog is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand and not adding anything to the conversation.

I skimmed through five pages of this tripe. Sure, some people were just trying to get advice, or pointing out the inappropriateness of the others, but a lot of people are just using this as a soapbox to brag on their kids. Look, unless your kid took seven steps upon her birth and then declared herself chief of the world, let's try to keep these comments relevant, okay?

And if the birth did go down like that, you know the rule: pics or it didn't happen.