A guest essay by Zoe Thorne.
I recently met up with a friend who has a toddler the same age as my youngest. At one point, it was time for her kid’s nap (though sadly not for mine, since those days are long gone; thank you, ‘low sleep needs’) and my jaw dropped as she pushed two chairs together, her kid climbed up and… just went to sleep? As a mum of two kids who only ever tolerated contact naps, I couldn’t believe my eyes and told her how lucky she was. She rightly pointed out that luck was only a small part of it; it had taken a lot of time and effort to get to that point, which she had put in because it was important to her to have regular naps but not be tied to home.
And then she mentioned how antsy her kid gets in the car, and how she was jealous at how well mine travel. I explained with a laugh that they don’t get any choice in the matter. My family are on the other side of the country—perhaps not a distance that would get much sympathy from American readers but one that makes most of my fellow Brits raise their eyebrows when I mention it. My husband’s family are spread across France, Germany and Switzerland, and small children require more accessories and equipment than is physically possible to bring on a plane. So from the beginning, it was a non-negotiable that our kids would need to be able to cope with frequent long car journeys. We try to keep screen time low as it has the same effect on my kids as feeding a Gremlin after midnight, so instead they have learned to look at books, draw, listen to their Yoto players or simply stare out of the window. Also snacks. SO MANY SNACKS.
I realised, of course, that this amounted to the same thing as my friend and her toddler’s miraculous ability to fall asleep anywhere, on cue. It didn’t just come out of nowhere. As a parent, there are so many different battles, from sleep to food to travel to play to toileting. What I’ve learned—and what I tell friends who are about to become parents for the first time—is that you get to pick one thing that is important to you and your family, and you fight for that one. Maybe two, if you’re lucky and have a LOT of energy. But that’s it. Everything else is just winging it with the cards you’ve been dealt. You physically can’t do any more than that, and it’ll probably kill you if you try.
We all make different choices, for personal or cultural reasons. My kids have cousins in Paris who have, since they were tiny, sat nicely at the dinner table and eaten whatever was put in front of them. With a knife and fork, no less! I would look over at my kids picking at their Plate Of Beige™ while constantly wriggling and knocking the table legs, and sigh. But then I remembered that table manners weren’t where we had decided to focus our energy. It’s unfair to compare the results of someone else’s top priority with something we had only been half-hearted with.
The more I look at my friends’ children, the more I see it. There are kids who don’t scream like they’re being tortured when you wash their hair, because they’ve been taken swimming since they were tiny and got used to water in their face. There are kids that happily occupy themselves with toy blocks for hours while their parents, shock horror, have a nice sit-down instead of being ordered to role play as Merrylegs the silver unicorn who is visiting their tea shop. There are, so I have heard, kids who wake up later than 5.30 a.m., though I’ve yet to see evidence of this, and suspect the parents who claim it are just making it up to make me feel bad. It’s one thing to try not to compare your children when it comes to aspects of life that aren’t your main focus; it’s another thing entirely to feel jealous of the probably fictional perfect miracle child that one mum at your baby group boasts about.
Of course, not everything is a choice. You famously don’t get to pick the child you end up with. Unless you do some kind of shady, futuristic genetic manipulation shenanigans, with a menu where you can choose things like “no colic”, “non-tangling hair” and “beams angelically at the camera for all photos”, I suppose. Or if you go to an orphanage and decide to adopt a talking mouse. But otherwise, you still have genetics and the randomness of the universe to deal with, and your best-laid plans can still go awry.
We had thought that food was going to be our non-negotiable. We envisaged ourselves being those smug parents who can take their kids to restaurants without even bothering to research the menu online first, who would wave away the kids menu and say, “Oh no, they’ll just have some of whatever we have.” We truly believed that if we just kept cooking the things we’d always cooked, they would automatically grow up eating spicy curries, strong cheeses and asparagus risotto, because they wouldn’t know any better.
Yes, yes, I know, I realise now.
Maybe under other circumstances, we could have put more effort in, made mealtimes our priority and broadened their tastes to something beyond buttered pasta and cucumber sticks. But my eldest turned out to be autistic and likely having ARFID, and so plans changed as supporting her needs was more important than our convenience. There are the battles you choose to fight, and those that aren’t worth the price of winning. And so we carefully check menus for options with plain carbs and ask for the sauce to be separate and remember that cucumber sticks are still a vegetable.
On the flip side, you also sometimes get bonuses you never asked for. I had never been particularly bothered about breastfeeding, especially since I come from a family where nobody did, but to my surprise, once I got the latch sorted in the first couple of weeks, both my two fed well, and happily switched between breast and bottle with no issue. In fact, I was almost offended at how unfazed they each were when I finally finished and weaned them off the breast. “I made that!” I wanted to yell indignantly. “I literally used up my own energy, blood and calcium supplies to produce that, and you couldn’t give a damn.” But of course, I am aware how lucky I was to get that unasked-for victory, when many other mothers want to breastfeed but can’t, or feel trapped breastfeeding their bottle-refusing baby.
I’m a part-time stand-up comedian who often performs at daytime gigs for parents and babies, and I have a routine about being excited to finally get an easy baby after my first, since we’re always told you get one easy baby and one tricky baby, although you don’t know which way round it will be. And then my second child was born and I realised to my horror, that it was the first one who was technically the easy baby. But in reality, I don’t believe there is such a thing as an easy baby. There will be certain things with any child that are more challenging for your family’s lifestyle, and some that go the way you hoped. Sometimes it’s because it’s a conscious decision you made, and you deserve credit for the effort you put into making it happen. Sometimes it’s just luck, and you therefore shouldn’t be smug about it. Either way, though it can feel impossible to avoid, no good will come of comparing your kid to others, because you have no idea which battle their parents chose to fight, or realised they didn’t want to win.
Also, bring snacks. Always snacks.
Zoe Thorne is a comedian, writer of textbooks, composer and mum of two from the UK. She gets overly excited by German compound nouns, Taskmaster and finding a perfectly ripe avocado. She has already yelled more times today than she’d like, but she’s really good at doing voices when reading stories. You can find her on Instagram and Bluesky.
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