If nobody asked for the advice, who is it helping when people voice it anyway?

People dishing out unsolicited advice and opinions is something that gets me riled up. There are a large number of people in this world who believe that it is their duty to make sure everybody else is doing things the "right" way, and so when they see something that they dislike or don't understand, they feel the need to tell the perpetrator what they are doing "wrong" and how to fix it.

This annoys me to no end!

The thing is, everybody is different. People value different parts of life over others, they want different things, they think differently and function differently. This is what makes life interesting and fascinating!

Plenty of people ask for advice on a daily basis, and that is great because there are equally plenty of people who will answer this plea with their own experiences and lessons they have learnt etc. I think that giving advice when it is requested is fantastic, if done in a sensitive and understanding way, for example, remember that the person asking for advice has probably had a different experience than you and so may not feel the same way.

The problem comes, however, when somebody is quite happily going about their business, doing their thing, when somebody decides to tell them that if they did things differently it'd be better.

For example, this is one that I hear A LOT. People giving their opinions on how long women should breastfeed for, to a woman who is still breastfeeding her 2 and a half year old. That woman may have been powering through with breastfeeding and wants to carry on for as long as she can, she may have found it incredibly difficult or super easy, but she also may have no other option. Or she may just believe that breastmilk is doing a fine job so why stop now? The point is, what works for one person might not work for another, but that doesn't mean that it is wrong or weird. It is a choice. People should respect that.

I feel that these people maybe see it as an opportunity to talk about something that they never really had the chance to voice before, which I understand, and in a way it probably helps the person who is giving the unsolicited advice, but it could make the receiver question their own intuition, which I think is a shame.

As a people, we really need to work on being more understanding. Looking at a situation from both sides and deciding that actually, yeah that might not be what I would do but hey, it's working for them - good on them!

Have you ever had someone give their opinion or advice when you didn't ask for it? How did you handle the situation?

#advice #opinions #unsolicitedadvice #understanding #breastfeeding