Is It Ever OK For Childless Adults To Give Parenting Advice? Let's Just Say People Have *Thoughts*

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

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.

“It’s judgment without knowing what’s going on.”

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........

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