Since becoming an expecting mother and even more since my baby was born I notice many parents speak about their experience raising their children in an externalizing/universalizing/“unsolicited advice-ifying”sort of way. The “just wait until…” sentence stem is one cardinal example (where a parent expresses an exhortation toward a less experienced parent to expect some experience they have had) but the posture I’m gesturing seems diffuse throughout a lot of parenting culture I am exposed to.
Two and a half months into being a Mom I have yet to myself tell a less experienced or expecting parent to “just wait…” but a clowny humility in me jokes at myself - “just wait until you start saying “just wait”…”
I think part of what my little joke to myself is guessing at is that this posture is not just some sort of relational sloppiness that our culture is too permissive of - I give it the benefit of the doubt that it is an attempt (if sometimes misguided or unattuned) to meet some need a lot of parents have for… something?
I hold together the strong emotional boundary I have held not to take on other parents’ “just wait…” frames/narratives and a curiosity of how this posture is in service of something worthwhile (even if I don’t know what that is or if I harbor an intuition that whatever the something is could be better served another way).
Do you have a guess? Why do you think parents say “just wait” or in other ways turn their experiences into unsolicited and/or generalized advice?