August 25, 2012 at 9:51 pm , by Nick Shell

21 months.

I am convinced that the best way to get someone to stop nagging you with their wrong opinion in regards to unsolicited parenting advice is just to simply smile and respond with, “You may be right.”

If they still go on rambling in an attempt to convert you, just said it again; this time raising your eyebrows and smiling even bigger.

You can even throw in peripheral phrases like “I think I might have read a blog about that recently” or “I’ll have to check that out.”

We live in a time when “I don’t agree with you” translates to some people as “I hate you.”

So if a person is already passionate about a polarizing parenting topic that I either A) already have a strong opinion on or B) am indifferent about, I’d rather just move on as quickly as possible to the next conversation topic, as opposed to becoming the next victim of a parenting extremist‘s solicitation speech.

Sometimes it’s just too much hassle to admit with someone that you disagree with them.

I don’t mean to sound like a person without passion and conviction. Because I am very passionate about the things that matter to me; likewise, I am extremely indifferent about the things I don’t care about or care to change.

“You may be right” is clever because it is also undeniably true.

No matter how firmly set I am in my opinions and stances on things like the kind of food I feed my kid or how I choose to discipline him, I could easily be wrong.

I am aware of that at all time. Whether the experts and scientific research support my view or not, still, I may be wrong.

Therefore, the other person with a different perspective as mine may very easily be right.

How arrogant of me to assume that I’m right most of the time about stuff. Or even half the time.

I might as well just assume, at best, I’m only right 49% of the time.

Granted, I want to be right, but I overanalyze stuff a lot.

Like when I half-jokingly wrote a post about hand-cuffing my son on the way to time-out.

It just seems weird to me that in the eyes of parents like me who are “non-spankers” it’s okay to discipline your child by physically restraining them by exiling them to time-out, as opposed to physically striking them.

Yet somehow the idea of taking physical restraint a step further and putting handcuffs on your kid is absurd.

I see double standards there. I see norms based on tradition. And I question that. I question myself.

So, I may be wrong about a lot of my parenting perspectives. The other people may be right.

And when I give them confirmation of that, it helps skip the annoying conversation topic I don’t want to be involved in, like a chapter on a DVD.

I’m such an impatient Millennial parent.