Least helpful advice

I was thinking about advice, and how subjective it can be. As everyone's circumstances are different, can any but the most general advice be relevant? Drink more water. Be kind to one another. Wear your seatbelt. It's hard to take exception to those. Otherwise, maybe it's best to avoid it.

Oh, don't get me wrong -- I have enjoyed many years of giving advice, both welcome and otherwise. It may be a professional hazard -- at our best, reference librarians are problem-solvers, and at our worst we are irritating know-it-alls. As far as getting advice, I always figured I could ignore it if it didn't seem helpful. It was when I became pregnant that I realized that not only is bad advice not helpful, it can actually be destructive.

Two pieces of advice I found particularly troublesome came from two separate conversations I had with a friend and with her husband. The first conversation, with my friend, took place about four years ago. I was pondering, as I often did, whether parenthood was for me, and I asked her advice as the mother of a two-year-old. She said that she thought my ambivalence and indecision meant that parenthood was not for me. Having a child was so difficult, she said, that she didn't think anyone could enjoy it unless they had been totally committed from the start. She had desperately wanted a child, she said, and now she was struggling. If I was on the fence, I wouldn't have the fortitude to cope.

The second conversation, with my friend's husband, took place years later -- less than a month before Isaac's birth. We were discussing how I was feeling nervous about childbirth, and I mentioned a French study in which a majority of new fathers said that they would have liked to be the one giving birth. I thought this was sweet, but my friend's husband laughed and told me not to believe it. He said that he had watched my friend give birth to both their children, and he would never do it. He said he was grateful that he hadn't had to go through such incredible agony, and he recommended painkillers.

I guess I can't blame them -- I asked for advice and they gave me their honest opinions. But their perspectives were so personal that their advice didn't end up applying to me at all. Their advice wasn't bad, but it was misplaced, and unfortunately I didn't realize it until much later. For years I was troubled by my friend's advice -- did my indecisiveness mean I would be unhappy as a parent? For weeks I was rattled by her husband's advice -- were those other new fathers lying when they said they wanted to give birth?

Actually, many people recommended painkillers, but as I had my hopes set on natural childbirth I tried to discount this advice. (I especially tried to ignore the people who said flippant things like I have one word for you: epidural.) I heard lots of positive advice to counter the naysayers, so I wonder why my friend's husband's comments were so persistent.

But my friend's advice about parenthood was more potentially dangerous. What if I had concluded she was right, that my years of indecision about parenthood equaled insufficient commitment? This has turned out to be completely false for me. Parenthood is one of the most personal decisions there is, yet for years I asked everyone I knew for their input on the issue. This got me no closer to making up my mind. In the end, we had to stop asking for advice to be able to make our own wonderfully subjective decision.