There’s SO much parenting advice out there and some of it feels completely backwards to me. Like, who decided these were rules? What’s the one piece of advice you hear constantly that you just… don’t buy? 
The ‘never let them see you cry’ thing. I disagree with it completely. My parents did this and I grew up thinking adults don’t have feelings, or at least that they shouldn’t show them. It took me actual years of therapy to unlearn that. Kids need to see that emotions are normal, not something to hide in the bathroom until you pull yourself together. Showing your kid that you are sad sometimes, or frustrated, doesn’t make you weak. It shows them what being a real person looks like. My daughter saw me tear up at a movie once and instead of panicking, she just patted my hand. That’s the good stuff.
Oh don’t even get me started. The advice that makes me want to throw my phone across the room is sleep when the baby sleeps. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS. Sure, I’ll also do the laundry when the baby does laundry and eat dinner when the baby eats dinner. The baby sleeps for 22 minutes in a position that only works if I’m holding them at a 47 degree angle. When exactly am I supposed to be sleeping?! And then the same people who say this will also tell you ‘enjoy every moment’ which, okay, enjoy every moment of what exactly? The 3am screaming? The mystery rash? I’m TRYING Karen. I really am. 
The kids need to figure it out themselves advice bugs me when it’s applied to everything. There’s a version of letting kids problem-solve that’s genuinely good for them. But there’s another version that’s just adults not wanting to do the work of teaching. If a kid is struggling with something and the adult just walks away going ‘they’ll figure it out,’ sometimes they do. Sometimes they just feel abandoned and conclude they are bad at that thing forever. The difference matters and nobody talks about it enough.
Oh the classic boys will be boys… Timeless advice. Very helpful. Super clear action steps. Nothing says quality parenting guidance like a five-word sentence that simultaneously excuses bad behavior and tells boys their feelings don’t matter. Two for one deal, really efficient. 
I also love just wait till they are teenagers.. as a response to literally any parenting challenge. My kid won’t eat vegetables? Just wait till they are teenagers. My kid bit someone at daycare? Just wait till they are teenagers. The implication being that teenagers are so much worse that nothing before that point actually counts as a real problem. Truly inspiring stuff.
I want to push back a little on what GlassTech said actually. Because I think there’s real value in letting kids sit with discomfort before jumping in. The problem isn’t the advice itself, it’s how it gets applied without any nuance. A parent who never lets their kid struggle will raise someone who falls apart the moment life gets hard. That’s real. But yeah, a parent who uses figure it out yourself as an exit strategy isn’t actually doing anything useful either. So maybe the disagreement isn’t with the advice but with people applying it like a blanket rule to every situation. Which, honestly, is the problem with most parenting advice. It works sometimes and people turn it into a philosophy.
The ‘you need to be consistent 100% of the time or you’ll confuse them’ advice stressed me out for years. I used to feel like a failure every time I bent a rule once. Like if I let my son have a biscuit before dinner one time, I’d somehow broken the entire system and he’d never eat vegetables again. But kids aren’t computers. They don’t glitch because you made an exception on a hard day. What matters is the general pattern, not perfect consistency every single moment. I’m a lot more relaxed now and weirdly… my kid is better behaved? Not sure if those things are connected but something shifted when I stopped treating parenting like I was following a strict instruction manual.
@WovenLap said it perfectly about enjoy every moment and I keep coming back to that one. I think the reason it bothers so many parents is that it puts the guilt on you for not feeling joy during the parts that are genuinely hard. And there are genuinely hard parts. The advice sounds like it comes from a good place, nostalgia, missing those early years, but it lands like a criticism. Like you are doing it wrong if you are not treasuring the 4am feed. What I wish someone had told me instead was: ‘some moments are wonderful, some are awful, and both are real and both count.’ That would have felt a lot more useful than being told to enjoy all of it equally. 
Here’s something I keep wondering about though. A lot of the advice we are disagreeing with, is it bad advice, or is it advice that worked in a completely different context and we’ve just kept repeating it? Like children should be seen and not heard is obviously wrong now. But at some point someone said it and it reflected what they genuinely believed was right. So what does that mean for the advice we are confidently giving today? Which of our current parenting beliefs are going to look completely backwards in 30 years? That’s the question that keeps me up at night more than any specific piece of advice. 
The don’t negotiate with your kids one gets me. I get where it comes from. You don’t want a situation where a five year old runs the house and every request becomes a three hour argument. That’s real and exhausting. But there’s a difference between negotiating and explaining. When I explain to my kid why something is happening, they comply way more often than when I just issue a command. It’s not about giving them power over decisions, it’s about treating them like a small person who can understand things. Works on adults too, weirdly enough.
Okay so real story. My mother in law, lovely woman, told me I was spoiling my baby by picking him up too much. You are teaching him that crying gets him what he wants… She said this with full confidence, like she was passing down ancient wisdom. I nodded, said thank you, picked my baby up anyway, and then went home and read approximately 40 articles about infant attachment. The science is pretty clear that you cannot spoil a baby. Responding to a baby’s cries is how they learn the world is safe. My son is five now, very secure, very loved, and has never once manipulated me through strategic infant crying. The ancient wisdom was wrong. The baby was fine. 
@RigidDatum just asked the question I was going to ask. Because yeah, the cry it out debate alone shows how much parenting advice flips depending on who you ask and what decade you are in. One generation swore by it, the next called it damaging, now there’s more nuance again. So maybe the real issue isn’t any specific piece of advice but the confidence with which it all gets delivered. People say this stuff like it’s fact when it’s really just 'this worked for me in my situation at that time.‘A little more this is what helped us’ and a lot less ‘this is what you should do’ would go a long way in parenting conversations generally.