My son recently celebrated his fifth birthday. Which means I celebrated five years of having kept another human being alive successfully! Some days I still can’t believe it. I mean, I can do lots of things – I can whip up a mean black bean soup, I can rotate my own tires and I can, do the Vulcan salute with both hands. But parenting? I didn’t know I had it in me. Some days I even think I’m doing a passable job, though those moments are usually fleeting, lasting only until I read some article “based on scientific evidence” or a particularly opinionated post on a friend’s Facebook feed that proves I’m doing everything wrong.
While no one will hesitate to warn you of the challenges you’ll face raising kids, they will conveniently omit the fact that one of the biggest difficulties doesn’t involve the kids at all: it involves the judgment from the rest of the world as you stumble through this thing called parenting. This recent commercial by Similac really hit home with me for this very reason. While I’ve never witnessed this type of rumble outwardly on the playground, it’s an all-too-common internal dialogue that many parents experience in the vicious cycle of judge-and-be-judged, as if there’s some kind of Parental Olympics and we’re all vying for the gold. Imagine if we all just supported one another instead? Wow…we might even set a good example for the little ones we care about most at the end of the day.
~ Trish Salge, Sr. Art Director and Evan’s Mom, The S3 Agency
Note from the Editor: I especially like that Similac doesn’t have any branding at all until the very end, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the message. The branding then serves as a punctuation mark, bringing the point home and relating this important POV directly to the brand. Really, really smart (and honorable). ~ DB
