When my children were young I spent more time trying to be “perfect” than I should have.  My house was always clean, my children always well-dressed and I taught them table manners.  I signed them up for all the right sport teams and summer camps and denied their video games and Facebook until the appropriate age.  I was the class mother, the soccer mom and the school volunteer.  And now looking back on it, I spent way too much time doing all that stuff and not enough time just appreciating the moments of their childhood.  My children at 21 and 24 are now wonderful adults and it has nothing to do with how clean my house was or that I was the class mom.

I look around me these days at young parents and I think it must be even harder to be a parent.  There is pressure everywhere to be perfect and there’s 3.9 million mommy bloggers out there to tell you how to do it.  Parents have to worry about the food their children eat, the detergent they wash their clothes with, the bullying on the internet and the list goes on and on. And with all that running around to be the perfect parent they are doing what I did… missing all the precious moments that in retrospect  go by way to quickly and really mean so little.

The mommy blogger has been around for several years now, but did you know the army of chatty, tech-savvy mothers was this large — and monied?

14% of all American mothers with at least one child in their household blog about parenting or turn to blogs for advice, according to a recent study by Scarborough Research. About 3.9 million moms in the United States identify as bloggers, but just 500 of them are considered to be influential among other mothers.

The average mommy blogger is 37 years old and 89% of mommy bloggers have kids between the ages of 2 and 11. They’re also socially conscious and are 85% more likely to have supported a politician based on an environmental issue, 88% more likely to buy eco-friendly products and 38% more likely to volunteer than the average mom.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/05/08/mommy-blogger-infographic/

I’m not saying a clean house or that keeping your children safe from cyber-bullies isn’t important , I just saying that from my perspective now, I wish I had spent more time watching my kids getting dirty then cleaning them up.

For mother’s everywhere, here are some of my favorite excerpts from some great mothers.

The Best Part of Parenting by Lisa Belkin

From Bossy Pants by Tiny Fey