Does moving my newborn to her own room mean I hate kids?

An unhinged question from a follower leads me to ask 'why do we assume the worst' when other moms make different decisions than us

On my Instagram, one of my favorite times each week is when I ask an open ended question about what is on the minds of my followers. I’m not a “real influencer,” but just a regular working mom who likes to connect with other working moms and discuss the things that are top of mind for all of us.

But Instagram’s question box feature has been broken for my account for over two weeks now. I can see questions, but I can’t reply to them. This led me to seek out another tool for this week’s Q&A, and I landed on trying out NGL which is a platform that allows anonymous question submittals.

I knew I was playing with fire by allowing anonymous questions, but I was interested to hear what people really wanted to know.

Then I came to this question, and I nearly spit out my early morning coffee when I read it.

My favorite part is that the question opens with “genuinely asking” as if the asker knew that their question would be read as satire without this preamble. I also love how the asker is so sure that I “incredibly dislike” my children as a result of one choice I made when they were newborns.

The question was prompted by admission that I move my newborns to their own rooms around 4-6 weeks. HOW OUTRAGEOUS, they say.

I’m going to dive into the reasons why I make the choices that I make (which by the way I am not forcing on anyone else), but first lets talk about the implication that a mother who makes a decision in the best interest of her or her family can be represented as incredibly disliking her children.

Am I allowed to prioritize my needs?

One of the fundamental tenets of motherhood is sacrifice. We all know it. We feel constant reminders of the sacrifice that we make. And honestly, most moms I know make that sacrifice readily and without hesitation.

But somewhere along the way we have let that sacrifice slip into martyrdom. We are proud of the sacrifices we make, and we compare the size of our sacrifices to other moms.

The comparison game leads us right into the trap of the Fixed Pie Fallacy. Originally coined by Milton Friedman (an economist), the Fixed Pie Fallacy states that the total amount of something is fixed, so if one person were to get more (win) then by default the other person would have to get less (lose).

When we view the world in only two dimensions, then any other parent who makes a different choice than us is less than, and we are more than them.

If another mom doesn’t sacrifice the same things that we do, we make massive, sweeping inferences about them and their fitness as a mother.

But that is so F’d up. All decisions are context dependent, and we never understand the full context of any other person or situation.

A mother who decides differently than you is a mother who has evaluated her priorities, the needs of her family (which by the way also includes her needs), and her unique circumstances, and she has made the best decision with the information, time, and resources that she has. We have no right to judge her decisions.

Who decided there was a “right way” to parent?

Motherhood is a “choose your own adventure” game. We get to decide if we gentle parent, have strict bedtimes, force them to eat their broccoli, or ban screens in our house.

One of the reasons I think being a parent is so hard today for millennials is because we have access to the internet where you can find a million conflicting examples of “the right way to parent.” And we end up stacking ourselves and our kids against actual experts and people who represent themselves as experts who claim to have finally found the exact right formula for parenting.

Our parents didn’t have this pressure to parent “the right way.” They saw what their in-real-life community sanctioned, and they decided how to parent from 10s of others, whereas we have millions of others telling us how to parent our kids.

Guess what? There is no '“right way” to parent.

When we assume the worst about another parent

I share a lot about the choices I make as a parent, and as a mother of 3 kids, I do have some real world experience and have tried many different tactics and landed on the ones that work best for me and my kids.

Last week I shared about my experience with sleep-training and received the largest single-day drop in followers on my account. Did I say that I let my kids cry it out all night long in their rooms? Absolutely not. Honestly, I didn’t even get into the tactics of sleep training. I only spoke of the fact that teaching my kids to sleep in their own beds all night long has been one of the single best decisions in my parenting journey.

People filled in the missing information with their own narrative. They were so repulsed by this assumption of information that they decided to part ways with me forever on the internet. (this is fine, I wish them all the best!).

Just because I taught my kids to sleep in their own rooms all night long does not mean that you need to do it too. I did it for me and my family, not anyone else.

Why talk about it on the internet?

If these topics are so polarizing, should I even continue talking about them on the internet? It’s a question that I ask myself when I have waded into the mommy war waters.

Here’s the thing tho: If I don’t talk about them, if no one talks about them, then moms out there who end up making different choices for their kids will be even more alone. Moms who desperately need sleep (maybe they are performing your dad’s brain surgery in the morning) will think there is no parenting strategy that will enable them to sleep for the first five years of their kids life. They will feel like the pie of parenting decisions is fixed, and they are the loser if they don’t make all the right decisions.

The martyrdom of motherhood is LOUD on the internet especially in the trad-wife era we live in today. And I spiraled in the martyrdom for years before I realized that the power to choose something different for my family is completely mine. And who cares what someone on the internet thinks about my newborn’s sleeping arrangements?

What started it all

Let’s go back to the comment that started it all.

Do I incredibly dislike my kids because I put my newborns in their own rooms at 4-6 weeks?

To answer this I need to know if you remember what it’s like to sleep in a room with a newborn? Maybe it’s just mine, but newborns are LOUD AF. The sneezes, grunts, farts, and little sleeping pips will pull me out of a dead sleep. And then I am sitting there looking at this perfectly asleep child who truly does not need my intervention right now.

I also suffer often from a postpartum anxiety associated with “is the baby breathing” panic. I will sit there and watch the baby breathe for hours “just to make sure” that they didn’t stop breathing. This is not healthy for me and it provides no benefit for the baby either. We have technology that can do this for us!

So yes, I make the decision to move my babies into their own rooms earlier than most. And that works for us.

I don’t move her into her own room because I dislike my baby. But it’s because I love her enough to prioritize my own sleep so that I can show up for her when she needs me. I know that staying up all night and missing out on sleep for weeks at a time is truly not serving her best interests.

But it’s not about the newborn!

The final takeaway here has nothing to do with my newborn. Perhaps we should consider how we interact with other moms who make different choices than us.

Could we exist in a world where we celebrate another mom who made a different choice and at a minimum be excited that something is working for them and maybe even learn a thing or two from their situation?

Could we cheer on other mothers who made different decisions without imposing judgement that they must be “worse” on the parenting spectrum than “us”?

It does not feel like an outrageous idea to cheer on people who are living life in entirely different circumstances who parent differently than we do.

Perhaps we could try to make mothers feel unequivocally supported by other mothers, because we already have enough common enemies without fighting amongst ourselves.

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