Monday, August 15, 2011

Judgement

I got an anonymous comment recently on my Everything On My Mind post. Someone really didn't like that it made me sad when institutionalized children are put into government schools all day every day. She thought I was being judgmental.

I would like to clarify that to judge someone is to make an assumption about the motives behind what they do. To judge does not mean to look down upon.

Neither of these is how I feel about parents whose children are in public schools. I do not make any negative assumptions about why they public school, nor do I look down on them.

I feel very sad for children who are brought up in orphanages and then their adoptive families feel the need to place them in public schools for 8 hours Monday through Friday. I am sad for those children. That is not the same thing as saying I think ill of the parents. I do not.

I tend to think that most parents who choose government education do so because it's what they know.

The commenter who did not want to be known stated that all parents do what they think is best for their children. I think that is a really big assumption to make. In my experience, many parents don't think about educational options or what they think is the very best for their child. They just do what they know.

And I do not look down on them for that.

For my first three children, I never considered any other option other than disposable diapers. Cloth diapers never even occurred to me. I didn't know why parents would choose that and it didn't sound at all desirable. When I was pregnant with Lydia, I started looking into options. I really started researching it. Suddenly, I didn't just do what I knew. In the end, I chose cloth diapering for the financial savings.

With Julia and with this baby, I know all the options and I have chosen disposables again. lol Do you look down on me for my choice? Are you making assumptions about why I chose disposables instead of cloth? Yea, I doubt it.

3 comments:

Mendi... said...

I find this to be true in so many areas of life! SO MANY mistakes that Kyle and I made because we simply DID NOT KNOW... We are choosing to look at life differently now... Being open... Training our children differently... All-in-all, it brings so much freedom!

Tereza Crump said...

I think a lot of times we parents just DON'T think about it. We just go with what everyone else is doing. We don't stop to ask "why am I doing this? why is this the best option for me? is there any other options?"

I think in some ways our society is a lot more brainless in the sense that we don't stop to think at all, we just do stuff for whatever reason.

Sherrie said...

Very well stated...I think most the time we don't even think about why we think the way we think....Thinking in itself has become a rare thing...instead we just do...do what we have always done without thinking...