The age of the super baby

Childbirth is not the dawn of a new life. It is the dawn of a competition that begins the moment your baby arrives.

Birth weight? When did your infant start eating semi-solids? When did it start crawling? Walking? Talking? The underlying concern is always how your baby will measure up to someone else’s, and the hope is always that your glorious infant will win. Winning is important. Winning means you’re a good mother, and we all need to be told we’re good mothers largely because we’re surrounded by people telling us we could be better so they can sell us a lot of junk we don’t need. Cue Baby Einstein. And baby gym. And toys that no longer whistle and clang, but “stimulate a baby’s aural capacities and improve hand-eye coordination”. What’s going on? Our parents never played us LSD-trippy DVDs of pink goop floating around to Mozart, and I think we all made it safely to parenthood on our caveman own.

It isn’t fair that now you aren’t allowed to be chubby for a while after giving birth. You have to fit back into your old clothes as soon as you can. You have to look good, carry on throwing dinner parties and going to weddings and also be breastfeeding, pureeing steamed apples and taking your baby to play-dates. If that wasn’t enough, now your baby has to look at flashcards, listen to Beethoven and go to pre-preschool where they do exactly what they do at home, only with a fancy name. Baby gym is the same as climbing onto the sofa and trying to jump onto the chair.

Baby swimming is the same as splashing in a wading pool and baby chef is pretty much every mealtime where the cheese is being studiously squished into Cheerios and eaten. But we’re told that mother-and-baby classes are de rigueur and so of course we must go! Never mind that babies don’t even know how to play with other children until they’re about three (it’s all parallel play before that!) If you don’t go your baby might lose the race, and you’ll be the bad mommy with the dumb kid. Oh, the horror.

My daughter started walking without any support after her first birthday. A lot of children are whizzing about before they turn one. Turns out, children do things when they’re ready and lo and behold, one day — not long after said birthday — she did. She never drank formula because she hated it, she isn’t potty-trained yet and she sometimes eats only custard for lunch. I don’t obsess as long as she is healthy and happy. Toddlers are supposed to be capricious, curious and a bit strange. They’re the teenagers of babyhood. And they learn doing everything. They don’t need special activities geared to enhance their motor skills; they’re doing that when they’re lumbering along with a jharoo trying to ‘clean’ bookcases or listening to you sing along to the radio. And I wish I ate custard for lunch too sometimes.

We desperately need to reclaim parenting from all this nonsense. We must reserve the right to be as wackadoo or particular as we want. I don’t want my daughter to be like everyone else’s child anyway.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2010.