Enough with the Judgements

“All women can breastfeed.”

“Nutrition and exercise work just as well as antidepressants.”

“Your children will eat their vegetables if you refuse to let them leave the table until they do.”

“Those cigarettes will kill you one day.”

Is there something about winter that makes us more prone to telling other people what to do? Judgements are all over the Internet lately. I haven’t been blogging very much lately (too swamped with editorial work), but I feel I have to say something about this today.  Now. This minute. In brief:

Have some faith in your fellow human beings. If breastfeeding would work for your neighbor, she would be doing it. Trust me. Your depressed relative has probably tried nutrition and exercise and, in fact, probably uses them as adjuncts to antidepressants. If children could handle vegetables (or whatever it is you want them to eat), they would. Children want to please their parents more than anything. They would eat vegetables to make you happy if they humanly could. And your relative who can’t quit smoking just may have figured out that cigarettes are the lesser of evils. Here’s a conundrum for the judges out there: what if the cigarette smoker is smoking to stay off antidepressants? Or smoking to stay off harder drugs?

It seems like the worst judgements are saved for parents and people who use substances such as prescription drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. And frankly, these are the very people who most need you to get off their backs.

You may not know everything you think you know.

So please, enough with the judging.