How do these people have enough neurons to speak?

[g-man]

There are a select few people my wife listens to in prepping for the baby. The 'advice' given by friends we note are significantly sub-par adults (much less parents) just gets a smile and nod. She's already got a copy of the "What To Expect The First Year", and luckily for SWMBO, my mom has been doing early childhood development since before I was born, AND doesn't tend to offer unsolicited advice. SWMBO's mom on the other hand has a tendency to pipe right up with advice all the time.

However, my M-I-L's advice is usually just ill-advised and not actively stupid... Some of the stuff my wife's friends post on facebook is of the 'WTF!?!' variety. She had a 'friend' from junior high find her a couple of weeks ago who got unfriended in less than a month after repeated vaccine-bashing and then a post stating 'Most veterans are mentally ill"...

[Rustyv]

The running joke between my wife and I after multiple birthing classes at the local hospital is:
- anything you do to your child, including nothing, will kill them
- if your child survives, it is in spite of you, not because of you
- if you're not a medical professional, your child has no chance and you will kill them
- we don't have the enough medical professionals to care for your kid during the 48hours your insurance will pay for you to be here, so we're going to room the kidlet with you during that time, and watch
- what ever you may think is right, we're going to brow beat you into thinking you're a horrible person for not doing it our way.
(In our case, during an overnight stay to get through a bad stomach bug, they waited until after I left to get dinner and check on the dogs, while my wife was still severely dehydrated and in a tremendous amount of pain to discuss all the ways we weren't correctly planning for the birth of our child. The wife didn't inform me of this while we were there, otherwise I might have thrown the nurse out the door and asked for someone who was more interested in providing care than preaching)

I love kids, and I can't wait to hold my daughter in my arms for the first time. I can't stand the holier than thou attitude that surrounds the baby delivery industry.

[Aesop]

You may have run into total twits. No matter how flat the pancake, there arealways two sides though.

Normal response would be:
By all means, stay home then.
Be sure and tell your lawyer and the hospital's risk management staff you release all medical personnel from all liability in case things go awry, and will happily sign those waivers in advance.

That will only leave "the baby delivery industry" with a few thousand utter morons a month to deal with, which may have had some slight bit to do with why you got the treatment they delivered, why Ob/Gyns are leaving practice in hordes, dumping more moms-to-be onto fewer practitioners, and why their fee for services includes 60% of the total to pay for their malpractice premiums.

In a little less than 2 decades in the ER, I can count the intelligent parents I've met on my fingers, and I'm probably being over-generous in that estimate.

I have no doubt there are good, conscientious, and intelligent folks out there, just as somewhere there are happy smiling children who don't scream and puke on everything.
But at this point, it's more an article of a deeply held belief than any practical anecdotal evidence. So if you fall ionto that category, spare yourself having to deal with practitioners overburdened and amply supplied with the lower rungs of the gene pool on an every-three-minutes basis.

I wish we could treat the good parents' kids and leave the morons out on the street, but that isn't the way the system is set up.
And with HopyDopeyCare, they can all come running to the doctor and adding to the wait times for everyone, while continuing to be too stupid to give Tylenol for a fever despite printed instructions on their discharge papers, the medicine bottle, the box, and a reprint of the PDR inside the box, and being told to do so by the triage nurse, the treating nurse, the PA, and the doctor. Obviously, if it were important enough to lsten to , we'd have hired the Pope to come to their house in person and hold their hands while telling them, after arriving by Goodyear Blimp trailing a streamer with the same instructions.

[Rustyv]

Please don't mistake my anger with the nursing staff that night with a general hatered for all medical professionals. I am positive that I don't know everything I need to know to be a super awesome parent, but I think I can figure things out eventually. I am paying these folks a handsome sum of money for their medical expertise. If my wife ends up needing a c-section, there's nobody else around I'd trust more than her OB. She's as straight a shooter as I've ever met and generally doesn't bullshit us over things that rightfully belong in the "parental decision" catagory. At the same time, if something crosses over into the medical arena she's up front with the reasons and risks.

I have no doubt that on a per-minute basis, docs and nurses spend more time dealing with complete and utter morons than I ever did doing PC repair in the shadow of 2 retirement communities, a community college, a university, and a booming dotBomb downtown back in the late 90s. (And I had some doozies letmetellya)

My particular anger that night was purposefully waiting for me to leave before wheeling their particular pulpit into the room and threatening a rain of fire and brimstone if we don't purchase a particular brand of some device or baby gadget. Without fail, we get pimped products and services that we feel like we either don't need, want, or can afford at this time. I have no doubt that some of them are beneficial to some degree, but I really don't need or want a $45 swaddling blanket with Sooper SIDS Prevention Powers (claim has not been evaluated by the FDA).

[Denis]

Feed the baby until she stops asking for more.

This. I don't know when or why it became unfashionable to feed babies untiil they are satiated, but if I could find the moron behind it, I'd put him or her on an enforced starvation diet and see how they liked that.

Muppets!

[dfwmtx]

I really hate these anti-vaxers, with their love of woo over science, because "science=Big Pharma" in their eyes, and "Big Pharma is baaaaaaaddd!"

[Greg]

Completely aside from the absolutely purely too-shitty-a-human-being-to-be-a-parent types, among the good, intelligent, responsible, well meaning people there is, going back at least one generation, sometimes 2 or even 3, extremely widespread induced parental retardation out there.

The Dr. Spock types are burning in one of the hotter areas down below, I am certain. It's going to take quite a while and a great deal of effort, for more modern and more scientifically backed information to flush out the misinformation that several of our generations have stuffed in their heads.

I feel genuinely bad for well-meaning health professionals. What they have to deal with is so much worse than it needs to be because so many of the people they deal with do and believe incredibly stupid things, because that's what they've been fed.

[Greg]

The running joke between my wife and I after multiple birthing classes at the local hospital is:
- anything you do to your child, including nothing, will kill them
- if your child survives, it is in spite of you, not because of you
- if you're not a medical professional, your child has no chance and you will kill them
- we don't have the enough medical professionals to care for your kid during the 48hours your insurance will pay for you to be here, so we're going to room the kidlet with you during that time, and watch
- what ever you may think is right, we're going to brow beat you into thinking you're a horrible person for not doing it our way.
(In our case, during an overnight stay to get through a bad stomach bug, they waited until after I left to get dinner and check on the dogs, while my wife was still severely dehydrated and in a tremendous amount of pain to discuss all the ways we weren't correctly planning for the birth of our child. The wife didn't inform me of this while we were there, otherwise I might have thrown the nurse out the door and asked for someone who was more interested in providing care than preaching)

I love kids, and I can't wait to hold my daughter in my arms for the first time. I can't stand the holier than thou attitude that surrounds the baby delivery industry.

You can find a different hospital. People who go into that line of work only stay in that line of work if they really care, but some tend to be a little more fried from the stress of being abused than others. We use a small private local hospital that is *not* overrun with illegals and neer-do-wells, and we always have positive experiences there. So much so that the wife has already told me, if we win the lottery we're making a major donation.

Also, it is a weird custom around here (but it makes a certain amount of sense) for the more conscientious expectant parents to interview a potential range of pediatric practices. Some really are just a better fit than others, the size of the practice, style/personality of the doctors, etc really can make a difference in how happy you'll be. My PCP, whose practice is also pediatric... well he's got an outstanding reputation as a doctor, but he's a little odd. It puts some people off. His first career was electrical engineering, he went into medicine as a career change. And you can kind of tell. I think he's great, but as I said it puts some people off. Find doctors where there's no mutual rubbing the wrong way, it'll be better for everyone.

[rightisright]

I really hate these anti-vaxers, with their love of woo over science, because "science=Big Pharma" in their eyes, and "Big Pharma is baaaaaaaddd!"

Every time I hear "Big Pharma" or "Big Oil" my eyes glaze over and I immediately tune out.

[Aglifter]

Eh, there are some pretty nasty pharmaceutical companies...