Originally Posted by cheerfuldom:
My theory is that SOOOO many young parents these days have no experience with children, at all. Never held a baby until they had a baby of their own. Its a generational thing where there are more and more people growing up in small families or as a singleton combined with the loss of community, where they are not around other kids and families and babysitting as teens and that sort of thing that would be very common in generations past. As adults, they are surrounded by peer age groups who also know nothing so they resort to books, blogs, and parenting magazines for info. That is how you get the scripted questions, unfair expectations for care and for their own child's milestones. Combine that with the selfish nature and materialistic nature and these parents also want long hours, cheap rates, nanny care, academics/sports/baby yoga/etc plus any other trendy thing like organic homemade baby food that they see pop up on the blogs and in other people's opinions. Total it all up and it makes a super intense mom. They want to feel like they are giving their child everything by paying someone else to do all the work.
All that to say, you are not experiencing anything that the rest of us don't experience. I refuse to work with these type of moms but I am fortunate that I don't have to take more than four or five so I can be selective of the families I work for. I generally work for teachers. This has been a slow and steady transition as I find that those that work with children, have the fairest expectations of me. I dont work for super intense, first time, get-all-my-info-from-a-trendy-parenting-blog mom. They are NEVER happy, rarely ever last long and generally their children are extremely typical and ordinary. Meaning that they do not have the gifted special snowflake that they think they do.
I wonder if this is a regional thing, because when I find out someone is a teacher I usually find a reason to reject them. I used to be a teacher and my first clients were all TEACHERS. I just got fed up of people making good money and good benefits complaining to me. I also got tired of them wanting all their days free. I also got tired of knowing someone was home on say Good Friday and them coming at 6pm. I feel they're the moms that are like that. I.e. My child just turned 18 months why isn't he/she...? They know the milestones and what colleges are looking for. They know how must children act, but think their children are above it. I once had a parent term after she said some Ivy looks for something and I turned around and said "Well, good luck. From what I can see your child isn't college material. If you're so concerned with X, why didn't you practice it with them last Tuesday when you had the day off?".