Is It Ever OK For Childless Adults To Give Parenting Advice?

April Spiller has plenty of experience with kids. She’s been a teacher for the past 11 years, has nieces and nephews, and has multiple friends with kids.

“As a childless adult who has been around and helped raise over 2,000 other people’s kids, if I am giving you advice, it’s because I have either been there or have seen others going through it,” Spiller told HuffPost.

But she’s learned the hard way that her advice is rarely taken seriously because she’s not a parent herself. So now, she keeps her thoughts to herself.

Her experience raises an interesting question: is it ever OK for childless adults to give parenting advice? Even if you don’t have kids yourself, it’s natural to have opinions about choices your siblings or friends may make when raising theirs. But having opinions and being able to relate are different experiences.

To dig deeper into this debate, we talked to parents, childless adults and an ethicist for their opinions.

Valentina Rebeschini is a photographer living in London with a 14-year-old daughter. She’s been on the receiving end of plenty of parenting advice, and she’s done listening to people who don’t have kids themselves.

Simply put, she finds that people without kids rarely know what it’s actually like to parent them.

“The moment I mention I have a teenager [to someone who doesn’t have kids], I get the classic ‘oh good luck,’ without them actually knowing the situation. It’s judgment without knowing what’s going on underneath,” Rebeschini told HuffPost.

It’s a situation she’s seen play out throughout her kids’ childhoods. “When my daughter was younger, people who didn’t have children would say things like, ‘I wouldn’t give a child an iPad,’ or ‘I wouldn’t let them watch TV,’ and then found themselves doing exactly that once they had their own. Now, with a teenager, it’s the same thing. People imagine what ‘teenager’ means without knowing the developmental history, the day-to-day reality or whether there’s any neurodivergence involved,” she shared.

Even when it’s coming from a place of lived experience, giving advice to someone with kids can backfire if you don’t have one yourself. “If I had it all to do over again, I would not give my friends with kids parenting advice. This isn’t the only reason this friendship ended, but it definitely contributed,” said Darrin Smith, a 37-year-old childless web developer.

Smith shared that a few years ago, one of his friends had a baby and insisted on using gender-neutral pronouns. “Posts would say things like ‘my child’ or ‘my baby.’ Her reasoning was not wanting to force gender norms on her kid,” Smith said.

As a gay Black man and her friend, Smith felt entitled to offer his opinion, which was that by withholding basic gendered language, she might be creating a problem before one existed. Ultimately, the friendship unravelled.

“It didn’t matter how logical or well-intentioned my perspective was. Giving unsolicited parenting advice is almost always received as a direct attack on their values as a mother,” Smith said. “If I could do it all over again, I’d just keep my thoughts to myself.”

Not every experience of a childless adult doling out parenting advice is a bad one. “Some of the best advice I have received as a new dad was from a friend who doesn’t have kids,” dad Asim Zahid told HuffPost.

Zahid said that as far as he’s concerned, the value of advice is not dependent on whether somebody has kids; it’s the way the advice is given. As long as the advice isn’t accompanied by judgment, he’s all for it. “Advice becomes unhelpful when it’s perceived as criticism,” he said.

Vanessa Gordon, a mother of two, feels similarly. Recently, she said, a friend of hers who does not have children pointed out that she interacted with her kids as if they were her friends, not her children. “He also told me that he has noticed how my children can be very manipulative and how easily I give in to them, especially as I am juggling work and time with them at the same time,” Gordon said.

She easily could have been offended by his advice, which she hadn’t even asked for. But Gordon told HuffPost that she actually appreciated it.

“His perspective was helpful because he was observing the situation from the outside. Parents can become so immersed in the daily realities of raising children that certain patterns are missed. A person does not necessarily need to be a parent to recognise patterns and issues involving boundaries, communication, respect or behaviour,” she said.

Conor Keenan, a dad of two kids, told HuffPost that some of the best parenting advice he’s ever received came from his sister, who doesn’t have kids but used to be a special needs teacher, and from his friend Cat, who doesn’t have kids but is a court-appointed child advocate.

“I think people without children have every right to care about what kind of adults we’re collectively raising. That doesn’t mean every piece of advice is good advice. But I’d rather hear someone out and decide for myself than dismiss their opinion simply because they don’t have kids,” he said.

According to Byron Hyde, an ethicist and philosopher of science and public policy at Bangor University in the UK, there’s a whole field of philosophical study devoted to what makes someone a good source of knowledge called epistemology.

“Many people assume that personal experience is a good source of knowledge and tend to look down on ‘book learning’ or other sources that are perceived to be ‘too academic’ or ‘intellectual,’” Hyde explained.

But he emphasised that the reality is that personal experience is considered the weakest type of evidence. This means that just because someone is a parent doesn’t mean their advice is automatically going to be good.

With this in mind, Hyde told HuffPost that the value of parenting advice depends on the evidence for where it’s coming from. “For example, if you’re friends with a child psychiatrist, why would you ignore their free advice, for which they normally charge as a professional, just because they don’t have children themselves?” Hyde asked.

But even childless adults who don’t work in career fields having to do with children may be worth listening to. “Don’t forget that everyone was a child once,” Hyde said.

There’s a time and place for giving advice – especially when it comes to something as personal as parenting. Hyde recommends that childless adults only offer parenting advice when it either comes from specialised training or knowledge gained through personal experience, such as something that they went through as a kid.

Otherwise, it’s best to keep quiet – even if you have opinions you’d really like to share.

Even if you do have advice that stems from trained knowledge or personal experience, Hyde recommends only sharing it when you’re asked. Unsolicited advice is rarely well-received.