Worlds of wisdom on parenting? Image: Sarah Gilbert
No. It's not a new app from Apple catering to golfing enthusiasts based in Korea.
IAGOLP stands for Imaginary Authoritative Guidelines On Laudable Parenting.
You see IAGOLP everywhere these days. Whole sections of mass-market bookstores are dedicated to them. They're a regular fixture in newspapers, magazines and on those plasticky hosted morning television shows. And sure, you can find them all over the Internet these days in the form of sites and blogs.
Apparently, the act of parenting has been such a colossal mass failure over the past 40,000 years or so that we need a constant stream of authoritative experts (many with impressive tertiary qualifications, and many whose children have already in fact grown up and left home) to help rectify this sad situation.
I'll be referring to IAGOLP in many of the posts I add to this blog.
To me they're like a set of standards that are fuzzed enough to apply to everyone (and therefore, nobody in particular), and make parents feel like they're doing something noble and dedicated by being willing to buy a book on the subject. There are of course the occasional highly relevant tips and tricks, but IAGOLP can also be brilliant for stoking the guilt you already feel about certain aspects of your parenting, and turning you into a paranoid parenting android.
It can, of course, be a very positive and proactive thing to read around and listen to advice. But not, I think, at the automatic expense of drawing on your own common sense and just applying eyes, ears, heart and grey matter to the context only you and your family can ever really hope to understand.
Besides that, I don't think I've ever seen anything in a self-help book or on a talk show that came remotely close to the accuracy and relevance of advice or anecdotes from everyday friends and acquaintances. People who weren't trying to sell it to me, basically.
What do you think? Am I giving the voluminous parenting 'self-help' industry (and our collective infatuation with it) an unfair rap?
I mean, book sales don't lie, do they?
=D
