"you're a competent parent and you'll know unhealthy behaviour when you see it"
Except so many people are incompetent parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?), the list goes on, and on, and on, and on.
Many kids will survive despite the awful way they were brought up, though often with psychological scars, and are likely to engage in the abuse they themselves were subject to, or turn to self-destructive behavior.
Not that the parents of all psychologically scarred, abusive, or self-destructive people are 100% to blame, but they tend to play a significant role.
So, yeah, I don't think the advice of "do whatever you think is best" to parents is necessarily the wisest approach, despite a lot of parents thinking they're smarter than the experts and that they don't need to listen to advice.
> Except so many people are incompetent parents...
>... who refuse to vaccinate their kids,
>> The percentage of children who have received no vaccines has increased, reaching 1.3% for children born in 2015, compared with 0.3% among those 19–35 months when surveyed in 2001 (6). Some children might be unvaccinated because of choices made by parents, whereas for others, lack of access to health care or health insurance might be factors.
I'll leave this to you to parse out which parts of these are evidence of bad parenting; but it's pretty clear to me that the GP's statement is largely correct.
Except so many people are incompetent parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids, abuse them emotionally, physically, and/or sexually, feed them all sorts of junk food (US obesity epidemic, anyone?), the list goes on, and on, and on, and on.
Many kids will survive despite the awful way they were brought up, though often with psychological scars, and are likely to engage in the abuse they themselves were subject to, or turn to self-destructive behavior.
Not that the parents of all psychologically scarred, abusive, or self-destructive people are 100% to blame, but they tend to play a significant role.
So, yeah, I don't think the advice of "do whatever you think is best" to parents is necessarily the wisest approach, despite a lot of parents thinking they're smarter than the experts and that they don't need to listen to advice.