Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Giri answers a question about how to talk with other parents about having an easier-than-expected experience raising a baby.
Frank:
My wife and I welcomed our first child this past summer, and honestly, it’s been a pretty smooth ride so far.
Not ridiculously easy by any means, but easier than we expected.
Since October, he’s been sleeping through the night, wakes up happy, crushes a bottle, and gets right to playing. We transitioned off breast milk about three months ago with no issues. Teething has been minimal, usually just a quick cry or two that “The Wheels on the Bus” can handle.He loves baths, is having a great time crawling, enjoys daycare, and still gets excited to see us at the end of the day.
We have a lot of friends with kids around the same age, and this is where the question comes from. How do you talk about the good stuff without coming off like a jerk who’s bragging about how easy their kid is? I mentioned the sleeping thing once, and a friend said, “I hate people like you,” which felt… fair.
We know this is not because we’ve figured out parenting, and we’re fully expecting things to get harder at some point. Just trying to figure out how to share what’s going well without sounding like we’re rubbing it in their face.
I'm only a few months ahead of you on this path, and I don't think much elder wisdom was accumulated in that extra time, but this is less a parenting question and more a social-graces question, so I feel equipped to answer. I remember having my very first version of this conversation. About three months in, I put my daughter in the baby carrier and went to get groceries. A guy about a decade older than me saw her and said "Congratulations," and I said, "Thanks," and then, more to pad out the conversational rhythm than to actually express an idea, I added, "We're finally starting to get a hang of it." And he said, "No you're not, but good luck." He said it in this sort of knowing curmudgeonly tone which I now recognize as one of the main registers that grizzled parents like to use with rookie parents. Something like: Don't get too high on this; you too are going to join me in the pain cave some day.
I'm discovering that when hanging out with my friends with kids, I prefer to talk about everything besides our kids, but that's a whole separate sidebar. You're bound to have these conversations, and comparisons are inevitably made, between one little creature and another. The key thing to remember is that the backdrop to almost all these conversations is fatigue. In my innocent childless days, I thought I would handle this aspect of parenting without much fuss, because I'd often sacrificed sleep for things I cared about, like fun or work or school, and done fine. What I didn't account for was the dual nature of fatigue. There's physical fatigue, from the disrupted sleep and overstretched days, but also the psychological fatigue of being "on" and attentive to the wellbeing of a fragile creature you love more than anything as she wanders a world that is capable of putting fire and broken glass and banana peels in her path. One of my main daily feelings now is that I need three more hours in every day to do all the things that need doing, even though my minute-by-minute parenting experience is joyous, much closer to the one you describe than the ones that your friends are presumably going through.
So be mindful of that emotional backdrop when engaging in conversations with underslept parents who are constantly wondering if they're doing something wrong—particularly in our age of optimization, of apps and reels and manuals that try to convince you that you could be doing better. Many days, these parents just want to feel like someone is suffering alongside them in the trenches. They don't want to feel uniquely cursed. Nor do they want to feel that you are uniquely blessed. They want to feel that the challenges they are passing through are just the median unavoidable obstacles of the life they have chosen. If things are going well for you, don't feel that you should invent some difficulties of your own just to match your peers. But it might be sensible to adopt a policy like this: Don't volunteer any jealousy-inducing details unless asked. This is not to say that you shouldn't discuss things you're enjoying about your child, like the faces he makes while pooping, or the songs he likes to hear, or the made-up games you like to play. But I wouldn't proactively raise the topics that relate to your high quality of life, like sleep or weaning. There's plenty of neutral-ish territory to discuss instead.
If you are directly asked about those sources of potential resentment, then, of course, be honest, but not over the moon. And you can couch your reply in reality, which is that even a good situation is precarious and liable to change in a few weeks' time. (I remember when we used to call it a sleep "regression" and not just an entirely new era of our lives.) Mostly, I would also ask lots of questions. Show curiosity about how your friend is wrangling their own creature, because they're all different, and because it's interesting to hear how people navigate uncertainty. It's possible that by letting them vent, and letting them think out loud, you can reframe the challenges in their own minds. In the same way that therapy or writing—recognizing your emotions, holding them at arm's length and turning them around in your palm—sometimes leaches those emotions of their urgency, your conversation might even be helpful. Hey, maybe you can even get these sad lumps to laugh.
