This next bit just need to be said:

Celebrity Quack Moms Are a Terrible Influence on Everyday Parents

On April 15, the actress Alicia Silverstone released a book called The Kind Mama: A Simple Guide to Supercharged Fertility, a Radiant Pregnancy, a Sweeter Birth, and a Healthier, More Beautiful Beginning. It’s chock-full of attachment parenting lessons and dangerous misinformation. The Daily Beast compiled some of the book’s more outrageous claims. These include the notion that postpartum depression is caused by eating processed sugars, that allowing your baby to sleep in its own crib is neglectful, that the diaper industry is “fueled by corporate-backed pseudoscience,” and most troubling, that some children are “never the same” after they get vaccines.

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But as any critical reader of celebrity coverage knows, stars are not just like us. They are better-looking and have more money, time, and support. Which is why it’s so aggravating that they are promoting attachment parenting techniques that are inaccessible to most working parents. When Silverstone tells other mothers that they are borderline monsters if they don’t let their kids sleep in a family bed, not only is she not considering the latest scientific evidence on co-sleeping, she’s also telling working parents who desperately need a good night sleep that they’re not doing right by their children.

Same goes for elimination communication, otherwise known as potty training your kid before he can even sit up on his own. Both Silverstone and Bialik push EC in their books, and because they have the money and the help to watch their kid 24/7, that method of potty training worked for them. If you try telling your local day care that your 6-month-old goes diaper-free, they will probably laugh so hard tears form in their eyes before they chuck you out the door.

Most of these things are just silly, not dangerous. But even the dangerous ones—like the anti-vaccine thing—are a product of the blithe privilege of the wealthy celebrity mom. As Lindy West puts it in Jezebel, “Spreading hysterical misinformation about vaccines (even if you’re just criticizing vax schedules and not shilling a direct vaccine-to-autism connection) might not seem like a big deal to families that can afford high-quality out-of-pocket medical care, but it is a very big, life-and-death deal to the low-income and immunocompromised.”