‘It's easy to get sucked into competitive parenting, but no one wins the baby race’
It’s a Monday morning in September 2022, and my three month old son and I are sitting on a mat as low autumnal sunlight cracks through the windows in a south-east London yoga studio. To our left and right are other mums and their similar-aged progeny, most of whom are wriggling happily or feeding as we await the beginning of our first baby massage class.
‘How’s everyone doing?’ asks the instructor, before going around the room one by one, asking each mother to share something about their week and what their child has been up to.
The mother to my right, a lovely woman from my antenatal group, tells the group that her son — a few weeks older than mine — has started to roll from front to back. Now, to an outsider this might sound like a fairly innocuous detail. To a new parent, though? In a time in which you’re hungry for any indication that your child is healthy and hitting developmental milestones, it matters. A lot.
‘Wow that’s so early!’ everyone exclaims. The mum looks on at her son proudly. There is no denying it; watching the woman, who is absolutely exhausted and doing a tremendous job, is a very sweet moment. She deserves every ounce of her joy.
I look down at my own son and wonder when he will roll over. New to this whole child-rearing gig and absolutely clueless about when any of these things might be expected to happen, I later grab my phone and tap ‘when does the average baby learn to roll’ into Google. ‘Some babies can start rolling as early as three to four months, with most rolling by seven months,’ says the NHS website. I store this nugget of information away in the back of my mind and get on with my day.
A few weeks pass and each of the babies in mine and my son’s orbit seemingly learns to roll over – like a set of little squidgy dominoes, all following suit. Each that is, except for ours.
A calmer more confident version of myself would have been able to approach this fact with rationality. What are developmental milestones anyway, but a very loose timeline for when parents can expect children to pick up new skills? Surely every single baby is different, just as every single adult is?
Unfortunately for me, though, extreme sleep deprivation combined with feelings of insecurity in my new role means I see his lack of interest in rolling as a reflection of my own substandard mothering. And so I quickly become obsessed with this issue, much to the detriment of my mental health (and the tedium of those around me).
This habit of panicking about my baby’s development didn’t stop at rolling. Indeed, it flared up around all sorts of other areas during that first year: how long it took him to sleep through the night, how fast his progress went with weaning, time to first clap, first word, first steps.
As I watched other babies become the first in their set to do any of these things, I wondered what their parents had done that I hadn’t. What was I missing? Were they cooking better food? Was it because they were exclusively breastfeeding — something that I couldn’t do? If there was any stick at all to beat myself with, I found it.
I’m not alone in this self-flagellation. According to Emma Hepburn, a clinical psychologist and author, I am far from the first mother to use their child’s developmental speed as a measure of their worth as a parent. I certainly won’t be the last.
‘We all do it,’ she tells me. ‘Your brain is designed to compare yourself with others.’ As deeply social animals, the drive to know where you rank in the hierarchy – and scheming to lift yourself up a notch – is hardwired in.
But then when you've got children, Dr Hepburn says, there's so much that is actively prompting you to draw comparisons with those around you, with the potential of sending your programming into overdrive.
‘First of all, you get these books with developmental milestones,’ she says, ‘and then there's additional anxiety of having children [...] tie that in with hormonal changes and sleep deprivation and you're much more likely to make negative comparisons as opposed to positive ones’.
A further issue, Dr Hepburn says, is that in modern parenting we are so often offered (or sold) ‘solutions’ to the various behaviours that babies and young children exhibit. At the same time, we look at each other’s lives on social media, so it is harder than ever to focus on your own children without the temptation to try to measure them against others their age.
There’s loads of reasons why the parenting industry has flourished in the internet age, from the rise of Instagram and TikTok accounts promoting ideals around infant sleep and feeding, with the aim of selling you expensive products.
This contributes, according to Dr Hepburn, to a pressure to do things ‘right’, which shifts what we expect of ourselves and others raising children. If our child isn’t at the ‘right’ point for age for a certain milestone? We feel like we’re doing something wrong.
Thing is, it’s very likely not you. ‘There's such a wide variation in how babies develop and just because they do something later doesn't mean they're going to be worse off down the line,’ Dr Hepburn reassures me.
‘It certainly doesn't mean you're a rubbish mother and the biggest likelihood is that it's not tied into anything you're doing or not doing.’ Your child, she says, will be who they are as a person: unique. Unless there's any serious developmental delays, which would need to be looked at by a professional, most children will get where they need to be at some stage, she says.
If you find it hard to accept this, Dr Hepburn recommends speaking to a professional ‘because they can often shut any worries down’. But it’s also worth looking at the assumptions you're making that are driving these feelings, and what you are telling yourself about them. And if that means seeking help to build your own self-esteem as a parent, then do it.
In moments when we feel lost in our new big roles as parents – and especially within a context where we feel so much responsibility for our children’s development – benchmarking yourself and your kid against your peers is normal. But the magnitude of this fallacy was revealed to me when I had my second son this year – and realised what a totally different baby he is.
Our second son has rolled earlier than the average baby, despite the fact that this time round we have basically forgotten to encourage him to do so at all. He has not slept through the night as early as his brother. In fact, so far he has done everything in his own way, which isn’t really that surprising when you think about it. He’s a whole new person.
That’s not to say that what we do as parents doesn’t make an impact on our children; of course it does. We help to shape, mould and guide them in big ways and small every single day. But the wisdom, I think, comes from knowing that the scope of what is deemed ‘normal’ in a developmental sense is wide for children. And our key task as parents is to keep them (physically and emotionally) safe and secure in our love, and to truly accept them for everything they are – and aren’t.
I wish I could wind the clock back a couple of years and tell that anxious first-time mum that her baby would grow and develop into the most wonderful, engaging and yes, physically capable toddler. That his lack of rolling (which didn’t really happen until his first birthday) made absolutely no difference to his physical abilities. It didn’t stop him crawling or hitting any other milestones. He just wasn’t that interested in it.
I wish I could tell her that none of this meant anything about the mother she was (not that she'd have listened). That she was doing great, because she was. And share with her the most important thing I’ve learned over my first few years in this parenting game.
Want to know if you're a great mum? If you're worrying about it, you are.
Dr Emma Hepburn’s book, A Toolkit for Your Emotions: 45 ways to feel better is available to buy now
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