A woman has gone viral on TikTok after posting a video about all the things she wished she knew about parenting before having children of her own.
Speaking to the camera, Stacey Green told her followers: “You have to do things with them, like all the time. Like fill the day with things to do. For them.
“Before my Saturday would have been maybe hanging out with my friends Mary and Jane, and watching TV. Or going to a cottage. Now my days are spent in a field going ‘one, two, three gooo’ as we go up and down a hill on a tractor.”
She continued: “Like I knew it, but I didn’t understand the tedium of it all. Anyway, just a little PSA for you if you’re on the fence and you don’t want to do things, or be told what things you should do, this may not be for you.”
At the end of the video, she turned to one of her young children and said: “Ohh, that is a big rock” with a grimace on her face.
The video seems to have resonated with a lot of other parents, as many people have since shared and commented on Green’s video.
“It’s exhausting having to acknowledge every little thing they say,” one person wrote.
Another added: “You forgot to say that they don’t appreciate any of it and will 100 per cent be bored all the time.”
Given how widely shared the video was, Green issued a follow-up in which she addressed the many people who took the opportunity to criticise her for her views.
“Everybody is going to have an opinion about how you’re raising your kids – everybody. And you know what? They can think whatever they want because the only opinion that matters is yours,” she said, before going on to explain how she often receives judgemental comments on TikTok regarding her parenting style.
“People saying, ‘I can’t believe she would do it like this or that’s not how I do it’. Okay. Don’t do it like that, who said you had to.
“But that’s the beautiful part about this. Those are your babies, this is your family. Everybody else can shove it.”
