I’d like to say I try really hard to not judge other parents and how they decide to raise their kids. I personally hate when people look down at the way my wife and I have decided to do things, especially because we’ve done a lot of looking around and research to come up with many of our methods. But, at the end of the day, I do admit that I feel like we’re doing it the right way and that some people with vastly different methods are just wrong. I guess that’s human nature, or at least mine.

The last year of parenthood has made me immensely more sensitive to the subject of children, their habitats and how the kids can be negatively effected. I think there’s a lot of problems right now with how society looks at parenting and children, but that’s a much bigger issue. That’s what makes watching Bravo’s Pregnant In Heels so difficult for me to watch. The series follows a woman named Rosie Pope who sells her baby and pregnancy expertise to rich folks in New York City. I don’t find anything particularly offensive about the job itself, but it’s the type of people generally featured on the show that get to me.

My wife and I watched most of the first season while she was pregnant and found ourselves chuckling at some of the people hiring Pope to work her magic, but now that I’ve got a kid and have thought about the whole idea of parenting far more than I ever did before, I find it difficult to watch. The one episode of the new season I saw split focus between one mom whose oldest daughter was a real terror and another mother who wanted to raise her kid in the Tiger Mom style (essentially, do what I say and shut up). The first mom treated her kid like her friend for years and found herself dealing with the negative aspect of that when her second child was born, with a third on the way, she needed help. Pope basically played Super Nanny and fixed things, so no real problem there though I did think it was strange that you could change a child’s entire outlook in like one week.

The potential Tiger Mom was more worrisome. She was born in China and raised that way herself, so she figured it would be best for her child because it worked for her. This is a general parenting argument that drives me insane because it assumes that children are these complete blank slates that you can fill in as you see fit. I fully believe that we are who we are based on circumstances of both our nature and how we’re nurtured and therefore feel that this can not be the case. Just because you reacted one way to a style of parenting, does not mean your child are. Maybe your child isn’t as emotionally flexible as you were. Maybe, as a woman said on the show, stuffing things down your kid will break them instead of making them stronger. This mom was super controlling, though her husband was more of a free spirit. I think their relationship might actually be as awful as it was portrayed on screen, but it definitely hit buttons for me when she kept saying she was in charge. No one should be in charge of a relationship.

When watching this show I often think, “If this person wanted to hire me, I’d tell them to kick rocks,” but what Pope winds up doing (speaking generally from the episodes I’ve seen) is actually get in there and attempt to change opinions. The first mom thought she’d never get her oldest to sleep in her own bed, but coming at it from a different way fixed the problem. The second mom didn’t seem to ever evaluate her choice to be a Tiger Mom, she just assumed it would work but talked to Pope and a few other people wound up helping her actually look at the potential problems behind that parenting style.

So, at the end of the day, I think Pope — who is very enjoyable to watch, I must add — takes on these difficult clients because she thinks she can help sway them towards a way of thinking that I happen to be more in line with, but also because it makes for good television. I don’t know if I’ll continue watching on a regular basis or even catch up on one of Bravo’s ubiquitous marathons, but the series has shown me that through communication, people can change some of their opinions which is a nice thing to see on television. I really hope Pope can talk some sense into the mom I saw on a preview who doesn’t want to get her kid vaccinated because she doesn’t know anyone with Polio. Sigh.