Comments on: Choicemakers

By: Kathy Warnock

Kathy Warnock — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:38:11 +0000

“Betty Crocker and Me” was a wonderful idea and a great blog. It was not a failure. You just decided it needed to come back over here.

I’m a great agonizer. And then I will agonize over the choices I made that didn’t work out — sometimes with attendant guilt. But as my husband and I discussed such choices last week, he said, “Kathy, we always thought we were doing the right thing at the time. We did the best we could at the moment. Now we have to let it go.” In recent years I’ve tried to stop the “I should have” thinking. Hindsight is 20-20, as they say.

And — oh yes — we agonized over the paint colors. We ended up with shades of white in brown tones with color spots throughout the house. Sometimes you just have to work through the agony because no one else can help you. Same with fabric choices . . .

By: Ann

Ann — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:31:50 +0000

I admit I do agonize over some decisions, like where to send my kids to pre-school – I know this sounds totally neurotic. but, last year I just send my son to the closest nursery school and it was not a great experience – and it is a big investment of our time and money. I know we all have great expectations of pre-school, that it should be a happy experience, because school just gets more serious as it goes on, and we want our kids to have a positive feeling about school.

I don’t belive in hellicopter parently, but it is a differnt world and kindness is not valued. I know a lot of parents who would 100% prefer their kids to be a bully than to be bullied.

I think this is a super important topic though – I talk about it with my husband a lot – the importance of turning in a ‘rough draft’ and not being paralized by a sense of doing somehting ‘perfectly’. The picture is so funny because of course we DID agonize over our paint colors – and WE (unlike this couple) decided to paint almost our whole house YELLOW.

By: Dr. Julie-Ann

Dr. Julie-Ann — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:02:51 +0000

Melissa, I don’t know why but your comment made me think about parenting and teaching. I remember when I used to teach a human development course to future teachers, we’d talk about the need to let children experience mistakes and failures so that they could learn to develop self-confidence. If children don’t learn how they can recover from mistakes/failure, they can’t develop self-confidence.

I’ll admit that I fear for children of “helicopter parents.” These children aren’t learning how to be autonomous and to trust their instincts.

By: Melissa

Melissa — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:45:51 +0000

This post hits at the heart of what some fellow moms and I talk about often. Trying to trust our own instincts and not being afraid of failure is a step in the right direction for most of us. Thanks for the insight!