[crystal_revenge]

As the father of a teenager, I would also add: take parenting "wisdom" from new parents with the same grain of salt you would career advice from someone who just landed their first job.

I personally found the complexities of parenting and, even more importantly, family life, don't really start to emerge until after the first few years.

Talk to divorced parents of older children about the "Surreal Magnificence" of parenting and you'll likely get a hearty chuckle out of them.

[deanCommie]

To put a counter-point on your counter-point:

* Divorced parents aren't representative experiences for most parents. (The oft-used statistics that >50% of marriages end in divorce miss that those with one divorce often end up with N divorces. Aka most PEOPLE, and most COUPLES, do NOT end up divorced)

* The job of a parent is to raise an adult. There are certainly those that become enamored with the idea of parenting a baby/toddler/child and are unprepared for the complicated job ahead. But there are also those that seem to think their job ends as soon as the child is legally an adult. Or those that are all too happy to throw away their decade plus of investment because their teenager going through absolutely normal hormonal chaos are suddenly disrespectful to them.

* In essence, I'm trying to say that divorce parents of older children are just as much full of shit as the new parents in terms of giving someone advice.

[elijaht]

Some brief googling suggests that 41% of first marriages end in divorce (ex. https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/). Obviously not >50%, but certainly in the neighborhood

[deanCommie]

I'd be curious how much of this changes once you account for a few basic fundamental things like:

* Being over 25

* Having a college degree.

The people who worry about marriage because of these stats are typically in this category. I bet just by accounting for these 2 points, the numbers would plummet to the 20s if not teens.

[vanderZwan]

So I agree that naivety is a thing, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss the advice. It's just that it's not wise to rely on one person's advice.

I have a two year old (well, she'll be two next week, close enough). Among my nearby friends are five couples who have have children that are one or two years older than mine. Their input has been extremely helpful in the last two years, because it's been mostly in the form of "these are the mistakes we first made and what we eventually figured out". It also helps that they are five very different couples so my partner and I can compare their experiences and figure out what applies to our situation and what doesn't.

Also, by comparison, I have friends with much older children too, and their input can essentially be reduced to "I'm sorry the first two years are a sleep-deprived haze of which my memories are limited to the photos and videos we took, so we have no advice for you."

[throwaway2037]

The best parenting advice that I hear does not humble-brag about their own (this is undercurrent of most bad advice), rather acknowledges that each child is different, weird, and special in their own way.