It’s a Monday morning in September 2022, and my three-month-old son and I are sitting on mats at a yoga studio in south-east London, with low autumn sunlight streaming in through the windows. To either side of us were other mothers and their similarly aged children, most of them happily wriggling around as we waited for our first baby massage class to begin. , and breastfeeding.
“How’s everyone doing?” The instructor goes around the room one by one, asking mothers to share about their week and what their children have been doing.
The mother on my right, a lovely woman in my antenatal group, told the group that her son (a few weeks older than me) had started rotating from front to back. Now, to an outsider, this may sound like a pretty innocuous detail. But what about new parents? That’s important at a time when we want to know the signs that our children are healthy and reaching developmental milestones. a lot.
“Wow, that’s early!” everyone exclaims. Mother looks proudly at her son. That can’t be denied. It’s such a sweet moment to see a woman completely exhausted and doing an incredible job. She deserves every pleasure.
“I look down at my son and wonder when he’s going to roll over.”
I look down at my son and wonder when he will roll over. I was new to this parenting job and had no idea when these things would happen, but later I picked up my phone and Googled “When does the average baby learn to roll over?” did. The NHS website states: “Some babies start rolling over as early as 3 to 4 months, but most babies start rolling over by 7 months.” I keep this nugget of information in the back of my mind and go about my day.
As the weeks go by, each baby in my and my son’s orbit seems to be learning to roll over, like little crazy dominoes. Everyone follows suit. Each one is, except ours.
A calmer, more confident version of me would have been able to approach this fact rationally. First of all, what are developmental milestones? It’s a very loose schedule for when parents can expect their children to learn new skills. Are all babies different just like all adults are different?
But unfortunately for me, a combination of extreme sleep deprivation and anxiety about my new role means that his lack of interest in rolling is a reflection of my own substandard motherhood. I’m thinking. So I quickly get sucked into this problem, which has a huge negative impact on my mental health (and boring those around me).
“I couldn’t stop panicking about my baby’s development.”
This habit of panicking about my baby’s development didn’t stop when I rolled over. In fact, during that first year, it flared up in every other area. How long it took them to sleep through the night, how fast their baby food progressed, the time of their first clap, their first word, their first step.
I watched other babies do these things first on set and wondered what their parents did that I didn’t. What was I missing? Were they cooking better food? Was it because they were exclusively breastfeeding? Was I not able to do that? If there was ever a stick to beat myself with, I found it.
I am not alone in this self-flagellation. According to clinical psychologist and author Emma Hepburn, I’m not the first mother to use her child’s developmental rate as a measure of her worth as a parent. I certainly won’t be the last.
“We all do it,” she told me. “Your brain is wired to compare yourself to others.” As highly social animals, we have a desire to know where we fit in a hierarchy and to elevate ourselves a notch higher. There is a built-in desire to try to raise the level.
“Your brain is wired to compare yourself to others.”
But once you have children, Dr. Hepburn says, there are many things that actively encourage you to compare yourself to the kids around you, and the programming can go into overdrive.
“First of all, getting these books at developmental milestones creates additional anxiety about having a child (…) That, combined with hormonal changes and sleep deprivation, makes you feel negative. you’re much more likely to,” she says. As opposed to a positive comparison.
A further problem, Dr. Hepburn says, is that in modern parenting, “solutions” are too often offered (or sold) to various behaviors exhibited by infants and young children. At the same time, because we see each other’s lives on social media, it’s harder than ever to focus on our own children without being tempted to measure up against someone else’s age. It has become.
There are many reasons why the childcare industry has flourished in the internet age. Such as the rise of Instagram and TikTok accounts promoting ideals about infant sleep and feeding in order to sell expensive products.
According to Dr. Hepburn, this can lead to pressure to do things “right” and change our expectations of ourselves and others as we parent. What if our child isn’t at the “right” point age-wise for a certain milestone? We feel like we’re doing something wrong.
The problem is, it’s very likely not you. “Baby development is highly variable, and just because you do something later doesn’t mean it’s going to be worse in the future,” Dr. Hepburn reassured me.
“It certainly doesn’t mean you’re a shitty mom, and most likely it just doesn’t connect to what you’re doing and not doing.” , your child will be unique as a human being. Most children will get where they need to be at some point, she says, unless they have severe developmental delays that require professional attention.
If this is difficult for you to accept, Dr. Hepburn recommends consulting a professional. “A specialist can often erase any concerns you may have.” But it’s also worth considering your own beliefs that are causing these feelings and what you’re telling yourself about them. And if that means asking for help building your self-esteem as a parent, then do it.
“The magnitude of this fallacy became clear when my second son was born this year.”
When you’re feeling lost in your new big role as a parent, it’s normal to compare yourself to your child’s peers, especially when you feel so responsible for your child’s development. But when my second son was born this year, the magnitude of this fallacy became clear to me and I realized he was a completely different baby.
This time we basically forgot to encourage him to roll over at all, and yet our second son rolled over faster than the average baby. He couldn’t sleep through the night as quickly as his brother. In fact, up until now he’s been doing everything his own way, which isn’t all that surprising when you think about it. He’s a completely new person.
That doesn’t mean what we do as parents doesn’t affect our children. Of course it is. We help shape, shape, and guide them every day in ways big and small. But I think that wisdom comes from knowing that children have a wide range of what is considered “normal” in a developmental sense. And as parents, our key task is to keep our children safe (physically and emotionally) in love, and to truly accept them for who they are and all that they are not.
“I wish I could turn back the clock a few years.”
I wish I could turn back the clock a few years and tell anxious first-time moms that their baby is going to grow into the most wonderful, charming, and certainly capable toddler. His lack of rolling over (which he actually didn’t do until his 1st birthday) made no difference at all to his physical performance. But that didn’t stop him from crawling or achieving other milestones. He just wasn’t very interested in it.
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I wish I could have told her that this meant nothing about her being a mother (she wouldn’t have listened). She was doing well, because she was. And share with her the most important thing I learned in the first few years of this parenting game.
Want to know if you are a great mother? If you’re worried, you are.
Dr. Emma Hepburn’s book, The Emotional Toolkit: 45 Ways to Feel Better, is available for purchase now
