A Compendium Of Unwanted Parental Advice
Six Of My Favorite Thinkers Weigh In
When I conceived of the prompt for this newsletter —“what’s the shittiest thing someone ever said to you as a parent?” — I struggled to choose one representative sample from my own life. Because truly, there is a WIDE assortment of shitty things people have said to me in my twelve years as a parent. But the most viscerally painful moments mostly happened in the unspeakably fragile days of early motherhood.
When my first baby was 24 hours old, a well-meaning nurse casually mentioned my “history of anxiety,” and threw me into a spiral of anxiety/dread/disorientation/identity crisis that wouldn’t begin to relent until I picked up my first bottle of Zoloft nearly five weeks later. With my second baby, someone noted her small size at a fried seafood joint and said, “It’s good for a girl to be petite!”
And with my third, a male pediatrician wrote down the title of a book.
As a third-time mother, I was as emotionally prepared as I’d ever been for my last newborn. I started taking Zoloft when I was 37 weeks pregnant to avoid the hell of the postpartum hormonal crash. I made my therapy appointments. I started pumping a few days in so my husband would be able to be the primary night parent (my tendency towards depression skyrockets with sleeplessness. Brett can happily(ish) function on criminally low amounts of sleep).
And yet. We can never fully prepare for a new life. It’s impossible to remain unshaken. So, when baby #3 refused to sleep flat on his back or in anything that didn’t resemble someone’s arms, I panicked. I knew that without sleep, the thick fog of my postpartum depression could come creeping through the cracks of the various shields I’d erected. I knew that Brett couldn’t do ALL the night stuff. We had two very active children. We needed to not be broken husks.
So I showed up to the 2 week baby appointment, at which the male pediatrician immediately cautioned me against nipple confusion upon seeing my baby with a pacifier. I’m proud of myself for saying “I’m not worried!”
And then I told him we needed to figure out a workaround for the flat on back situation. Because it wasn’t working. This, you see, is when the male pediatrician whipped out a notepad and wrote the name of a book down. “People have found this book helpful! Don’t worry - he’ll get used to it. Keep at it mama.”
I don't cherish every moment
I quietly accepted the piece of paper, feeling both shamed and silenced. And then I left. And cried and cried and cried. I’d give anything to go back in time and tell him that his notepad was not helpful, that his lack of empathy was actively harmful, and that his inability to discuss holistic options left me feeling stranded, alone, and desperate. Ultimately, my postpartum doula helped me do some risk analysis and we come up with a sleep option that I was comfortable with. We were ok.
Because American motherhood has been constructed as a role in which the good excel and the bad fail, there are so many avenues for both well-meaning and straightforwardly antagonistic comments to penetrate our vulnerable maternal cores. But there’s something comforting in knowing that we’re not being battered by these comments alone or in a vacuum. There’s community to be found in sharing stories and reflecting on what we might’ve said had we had our wits about us. There’s validation to be felt in ranting, swapping curses, and knowing in our bones that we were strong all along.
This is why I brought in six brilliant friends to share their own shitty advice horror stories. My favorite part? Every single one of these parents came out wiser and and carrying fewer fucks on the other side. #parentgoals
, author of Fat Talk andA week after my newborn baby’s first open heart surgery, we were struggling to help her get back to breastfeeding, so I was pumping around the clock in the PICU. They sent in their “best” lactation consultant who was determined to get us back to breastfeeding. She mapped out a pumping schedule which had me trying to feed the baby directly for 20 minutes, then switching to her feeding tube, and strapping myself into the breast pump to pump for 30 minutes… and her plan was we would repeat this cycle every 3 hours, 24 hours a day. I said to her, “but when will I sleep?” And she looked me dead in the eye and said, “Mama, how much sleep do you want to get?”
I realize that’s a particularly egregious example of “breast is best” but it lived rent free in my head as I tried to do exactly what she said for the next 3 months until I gave up on breastfeeding in a sobbing mess of despair and it took me another 3 years or so of therapy to work through it and forgive myself for “failing” my baby.
My understanding of how profoundly difficult the whole project of pregnancy and motherhood would be, how out of my depth -- and beyond the reach of online forums, pregnancy newsletters, baby books, and doctor's words -- I truly was when I lost my first wanted pregnancy at six weeks. I was sad in a way that makes words seem useless. The depth of those dark emotions consumed me. When I wasn't working, I spent what felt like weeks lying in bed or on the floor sobbing. My tears were limitless. Two weeks later, I got an email from What to Expect, informing me that my fetus was the size of a bean! Or a raspberry! I never felt so empty, so alone. And I never managed to figure out how to cancel or unsubscribe from those fucking emails.
I had preeclampsia with my first child and almost died during delivery. Because of this, I had to meet with a high-risk OB two weeks after I’d given birth for a checkup. I was still not recovered from a traumatic birthing experience and still struggling to breastfeed; the doctor asked me if I was planning on having a second child. At that point, I couldn’t even think further in the future than the baby’s next nap time and said I wasn’t sure. “You should be sure to lose all the baby weight before you get pregnant again,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll be setting a new baseline weight for yourself.” I was horrified and furious but too stunned to say anything. The fact that I had almost died and this doctor was concerned about me losing weight before having a baby I didn’t even know I’d ever have felt so inappropriate on so many levels. I never saw that doctor again but that moment has stayed with me 10 years on. For the record, I did have another baby and I didn’t lose all the weight. I’m the heaviest—and hottest—that I’ve ever been in my life.
After growing up in the midwest, I didn't expect to raise my own children in New York City, but my work brought me here, and here we have remained. We love our Brooklyn neighborhood — you eat the best chewy bagels and bump into friends on every block — but the catch is that my kids aren't able to run barefoot through woods or ride their bikes around a cul de sac. Like all parents, I sometimes wonder if we're making the right choice in this way, and it didn't help when a relative came to visit, looked around our apartment, and mused, "Too bad your kids can't live in the country with fresh air." For a moment, my heart broke, but then I remembered that there are SO MANY WAYS to raise a happy child. Did you ever see the documentary Babies? It follows four babies in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan and the U.S., who had very different lives— one rode a glass elevator to their Tokyo high-rise apartment, and another bathed in a bucket while a goat drank from the water. But guess what? They were all thriving! Whenever I catch myself worrying nowadays — about whether I'm doing this or that "right" — I ask myself one question: "Do my children feel loved?" And if the answer is yes, I smile and breathe easy.
I was working on the 47th floor of a big bank, balancing my corporate career with late-night writing, newly married and pregnant. After giving my notice, my boss called me in, saying he was sad to see me go but happy for my next chapter. Then he warned me about the dangers of having a baby naturally, sharing how his mother had lost one that way, urging me to reconsider. It was a surreal moment, standing on the edge of a new life with such an uninvited warning.
Almost as soon as people found out I was having a boy baby, I started to hear comments about "moms and their boys." At our very first pediatrician appointment, when my son was maybe three days old, the nurse asked me "Is he a mama's boy?" The truth started to feel like a terrible secret I needed to hide: he was NOT a "mama's boy." In fact, to my horror, he seemed to be equally, if not more, attached to his dad. In the early days, pacing and bouncing around the house was the only motion that could soothe him, and it happened to be a motion I could not create from my full-time seated/rolling position in my wheelchair. The narrative I'd absorbed was that babies, and apparently boys especially, were quantifiably, scientifically, universally more attached to their mothers. What did it mean that my baby boy was more content in the arms of his dad? My conclusion: I must not be a real mom. Isn't that wholly unhelpful? Infuriatingly ridiculous? My kid is 4 now. He's not a "mama's boy" or a "daddy's boy." He's a shockingly distinct human growing at flurried rates with sturdy/shifting, unique bonds with two very real parents who love him.
This is exactly how I felt. “His inability to discuss holistic options left me feeling stranded, alone, and desperate.” My kid would never nap when he was just with me. I was losing my mind. The only advice I EVER got, from the Waldorfians to the sleep experts, was to 1) figure it out fast because the problem could turn into a “real ball of snakes”; 2) make a plan and follow it!; 3) go to another part of the house where the baby and I wouldn’t feel each other’s anxiety and I wouldn't hear the baby crying (besides being useless advice, it’d only work if you had a big friggin house); and 4) relax because it would settle out by and by. I’m still angry. It was a hard problem. Nobody knew what to do—but with freaked-out new moms, I think there’s this awful, irresistible power trip to Know More, to nod wisely, gaze at the horizon, opine, and despise the mom a little bit because you’re so glad you’re not the postpartum loser, or the helpless partner, this time.
Wait but dying to know which FUCKING BOOK he thought was going to solve everything???