I have vivid memories of maternity leave with my first child. My son is about three months old and like babies he is a little bundle of needs and reactions. He’s cute and well-liked, and while he has strangely impressive control over his head and neck, he doesn’t quite do it. Do a lot of. As far as I can tell, he seems happy with it. Yet for some reason, I schedule time in my day for him to lie on a blanket in our apartment next to an array of toys and books. Could he pick any of them? Does he know what they are? No. I’m definitely not predicting. (Actually, I was predicting.)
I wish I knew TikTok user Delaney Rae (@hercuriosities) shared some of the best parenting advice she’s ever received:
“Don’t try to make a happy baby happier.”
Delaney is talking about older kids – toddler age and older kids, when they can actually Play play – but frankly I think it would work for kids of all ages, including contented little speckled newborns.
“If you really sit down and think about this, we interrupt children’s play all the time,” she explained. “[My daughter has] In and out of…the kennel, talking to himself for about 20 minutes. I could just go over and close the door and play peek-a-boo because I think it would be fun for her, but I need to let her do it. She is learning to play independently. I think that’s one of the reasons she’s such a good indie player… because I don’t interrupt her. It’s a bit like Montessori parenting where if they’re good, once they’re locked in you pretend they don’t exist. She was cold and I was outside making banana bread.
“Don’t try to make a happy baby happier,” she reiterated at last. “Just let them play.”
As a new mom, I can’t stress enough how much I need this. I often feel very guilty because I don’t doing Enough. But, really, aside from the aforementioned projection (he’s not boring: I am) and guilt, what I’m doing is either underestimating my son’s ability to entertain himself orfrom a non-baby perspective, overestimating the level of excitement he would need as a little creature who had only recently discovered that he had toes.
But it seems I’m not alone…
“Sometimes my baby is limited to about 30 minutes of independent play time and I fight the guilt of neglecting her,” one comment read.
“The other day, my five-month-old spent a good ten minutes just scratching at the netting of his playpen. I was like, ‘Am I going to interrupt or…?’ “But it seems very important to him,” another laughed.
“There have been many times when I wanted to do something with her, but she was just entertaining herself, so I had to remind myself that I could wait until she told me something else,” admitted a third.
So moms, listen to the words of a veteran of raising two babies and toddlers: Let them do their thing.
Join me next week for the rest of the best advice I’ve ever received: Never wake a sleeping baby unless your doctor instructs you otherwise.
