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I learned that in ten years of parenting, I’ve gotten a lot more capable of staying calm with a crying baby (although I absolutely still hit my limit sometimes). Our third child is almost 7 months old and I have been surprised to discover that I don’t feel guilty every time he is unhappy the way I did with my first two babies. I think after getting through the toddler and preschooler years, I have better boundaries and finally believe in my bones that it is okay that sometimes things happen that my kids don’t like—whether that is a diaper change or getting their face wiped, or having to set the table or clean their room.

Just say some version of thank you or no thank you and keep doing what you’re doing. People usually realize they’ve been judgmental at that point.

Might not be a four day weekend for you (or me!) but it sure is for my kids!! I’m happy our childcare workers have a day off, but these fairly inconsequential holidays always screw with us when it comes to childcare! Maybe that’s what Emily meant 🙂 hope you’re able to find some rest and relaxation, even if it’s just winning a fight with your partner to be the one folding laundry 😉

This is lovely! On this same note, if you’re dealing with not-totally-toxic family (which I recognize is a totally different territory)… I saw something on TikTok that I found useful. It said that millennials like to use the word “boundary” and it’s for some reason a trigger word for the older generations. This person said if we can get across our “family rules” and “guidelines” without specifically using the word boundary, it can be a game changer. Again, there’s a lot of toxic family out there that you may not be willing to work with in that regard, but responding to this comment because it feels in the same vein if you’re feeling agreeable and light!

Im really just trying to respond to the person asking about car seats on airplanes for bigger kids. Apologies if there’s a better place to do that- I cannot find it! The CARES harness is FAA approved and sooo much easier than lugging a car seat on to the plane. To me it’s a good middle ground between a huge car seat and just using the lap belt. Happy traveling everyone!

Hi all! I’m Kayleigh, I’m a education support professional working in K-8 in the Boston area. I live on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I’ve always been interested in evidence-based infant care, I come from a family of scientists/doctors and my husband is also a PhD in Organic Chemistry. We are both 35 and wll be embarking on trying to conceive our first child this summer. We never planned on starting “so late” but the pandemic and two international moves scuppered our best laid plan… I am so glad that resources like ParentData exist! Nice to meet you all!

My son would only poop on our (carpeted) floor for months, until I bought a huge thing of puppy pads and lined his spots with them. I gave him the go ahead to poop on the floor, as long as he was standing on the pads. From that moment on he never pooped on the floor again. Taking the pressure off him and stress of cleaning of the carpet off me was like a magic key!

My best potty training tip (not for the parents in the questions but for others reading this) is to start when your child is very young and finish prior to 2 years old. The current advice to wait until 3+ (and then do it in a long weekend?!) is nonsense and leads to the kinds of problems the letter writers have. Children have never historically been kept in diapers so long and it is an affront to the their dignity and independence to do so.

We had a wild ride with potty training and ended up taking our 3 year old to occupational therapy. He was really anxious about using the toilet – the loud noises, the flush, and the hole in the toilet freaked him out, and he would just completely panic about using the toilet.

His OT devised a game where we would throw toys in the toilet to go “swimming” and then pull them out for a bath (and then a round of disinfectant!). We slowly worked up to dropping the toys in while sitting on the toilet, and that was basically the end of it. It sounds ridiculous, but it really helped him get some positive associations with the bathroom, and get him over the anxiety.

We had a pediatrician that was very concerned with speech development (3 out of the 4 kids we knew in that practice were referred to speech therapy at 18 months!). As a former preschool teacher, and a full time SAHM, I felt like my daughter and I were so in tune, she didn’t really need “speech”- she communicated very well with me, just not in actual words. Anyway, we got free speech intervention through the state, and for a few months (right after I had her baby brother, so the timing was great!) we had a speech therapist come to our house for an hour a week to play with her. Totally free. Though I don’t know if she really needed it, it was good peace of mind knowing we were doing our best to provide her scaffolding to keep up with her peers. Ask your doctor if there is this type of government funded therapy available to you (and look for another doctor that isn’t so worrisome for the future).
Good luck!

Oh, 15-month-old mama. I wish I could give you a big hug. Trust your gut here. My son didn’t have any words around that age. We started speech therapy around 14 months at our pediatrician’s recommendation (on Zoom due to COVID!), and I felt good we were doing something but deep in my gut I knew it was a waste of everyone’s time. At two years, he started daycare with good receptive language but no intelligible words. We had seen the audiologist and hearing tests were normal, but as soon as he started daycare, he got ear infection after ear infection. At 26 months, he got tubes surgery. Three weeks later, he said “dada” for the first time! Within months, he was speaking full sentences. (In the interim, we switched to a pediatrician who said he doesn’t worry much about language until the age of 2-3.) My advice is to 1) trust your gut, and know that 2) development can be beautifully asynchronous. The brain is a magical organ that can heal itself after major trauma, and in my son’s case crammed 2+ years of linguistic development into a few months. Let your little one surprise you, and just monitor your gut. If there’s action that will help you sleep better at night in the meantime, feel free to ask for resources, but skipping it is also okay.

I am in the midst of IVF. I just finished my second egg retrieval and have had one failed embryo transfer. Sometimes, holidays like Christmas, Mothers Day, etc are hard. When you hop on social media you are bombarded with pictures of women with their kids. Why isn’t that me? Why don’t I have that yet? Then comes the thought of “how selfish am I to think that way? Not eveything is about me.” But, I just want to be a mom. Infertility and IVF leave you with a lot of complex emotions that can be hard to sort out at times.

So I’m in Target the other day buying diapers and sh*t and I see a Mothers Day card display. “Oh, I’ll buy a card for my mom,” I think. Then I walk past the display and don’t stop to pick one out because honestly, I’m pissed at my mom for being MIA while I’ve become a mom of three boys in the last four years. I cannot figure out how to have this conversation with her productively. I went to the baby aisles and got the diapers and then went back to get a card because I decided that was the grown-up move. Took me a solid five minutes when I got home to figure out how to write something genuine. Landed on “you’re a strong badass woman” or something like that. Wished I could have written “I’m so glad I get to share motherhood with you now” or “you have been so amazing as I’ve navigated this impossibly challenging season of life”. What I want to say to her: “I get that you have your own life, but you’re my f*cking mom. These are the only grandkids you’re gonna get. I am feeling abandoned.”

Mother’s Day is often my birthday or close to it, and as a young adult my mother often relieved me of the responsibility of attending Mother’s Day celebrations (no one wants a hungover 25 year old grumbling through brunch!).
Now that I am a mom myself, she’s understood if I’ve gone if of town by myself or just wanted to chill with my kids. She’s the best, and this year all five of her kids, her four sons-in-law and all 9 grandkids are bringing brunch to her house. It’s also my birthday, but after being giving so much leeway to celebrate when I was young, I’m happy to concentrate on Mothers Day for the day!

I love that, “mommy gets to be a whole person, too” <3
At our house, we say “everyone needs a break sometimes”. So very true. My 4yo now uses that phrase to explain to his little sister why mama/dada is unavailable. He also uses it himself when he feels like he needs some quiet time!