The wonderful thing about having a baby is that you are incredibly vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and as a result incredibly susceptible to advertising. Even those moments when you have a minute to “relax” and spend some quality time with your phone, you’re reading parenting forums, looking up symptoms, bookmarking baby-led weaning recipes and watching videos of experts telling you the 12 ways you are doing irreparable damage to your baby by being on your phone right now.
Luckily for you mama, the very same device that creates endless anxieties also gives you access to the products that will solve them! Truly, we are living in the golden age.
Anxiety: I am worried my baby’s bum will feel cold when their nappy gets changed
Fix: a wipe warmer
One thing no one warns you about when you become a mother is how much of your brain will be constantly preoccupied by temperature. Is the baby’s head too cold? Is her bath too hot? Does she feel warm to you? Is her bottle too cool? What’s the TOG rating for this damn sleepsack? It’s every mother’s nightmare that your child will ever experience a single moment of discomfort and hold it against you for the rest of their lives. Who hasn’t felt their baby flinch as you applied a cool wet wipe to their nethers during a midnight nappy change and thought, “I am a monster. Time to walk into the forest and howl at the moon”?
Good thing there’s a product that allows you to circumnavigate trauma of the cold bum cheeks. With this nifty device you can get that adorable little asshole spick and span while sparing it from the dangers of ever knowing a suboptimal temperature. Will you immediately follow this warm wipe with a cold scoop of Sudocrem? Could you have saved yourself $69.99 by just sticking a wipe under your tit before using it? I dunno mama, it’s late, try to get back to sleep.
Anxiety: I am worried my baby is too bald
Fix: a silk pillowcase
Is your precious newborn developing a bald spot? How is he meant to pose in his baby milestone photoshoot without a perfect head of hair? What if someone sees your baby’s bald spot and thinks, “That baby has a bald spot.” Why, this could really affect his career prospects and social life, even though he is merely days old. But, because you are a good mother, you can help him now by spending a stupid amount of money on a mulberry silk bassinet sheet. Yes, mulberry silk, laboriously made by cultivating and killing millions of silkworms. Once it was a fabric reserved for royalty, now it can be shat on by any middle-class baby, if his mother is anxious enough.
Anxiety: I am worried my baby’s hearing is damaged by white noise
Fix: earmuffs for newborns
So you’ve dropped a couple of grand on the cutting-edge robot cot that rocks your baby to sleep while playing white noise. But now you’re worried: is it too cutting-edge? There hasn’t been time for longitudinal studies on what white noise might do to your baby’s fragile ears. After spending six hours Googling studies, reading studies, realising you don’t have a science degree and can’t interpret the studies, there’s only one thing you can do. You must buy infant earmuffs to protect her ears from white noise, in case the white noise is somehow damaging her eardrums or disrupting the neural pathways that need to develop for her brain to understand sound.
While you’re at it, remember to put away some money for occupational therapy costs in case she ends up having an auditory processing disorder because of how much white noise you’ve already played her. Also, while she’s wearing the earmuffs, you have to stay awake and watch her like a hawk because the earmuffs are not a part of the Red Nose safe sleep recommendations. So you can’t ever sleep again, sorry.
Anxiety: I am worried my baby won’t develop senses
Fix: sensory play
Worried your precious baby will not develop the ability to touch things? Sometime in the last decade, parenting experts came together to invent something called “sensory play”. Sure, stimulating your senses could be achieved by doing something called Being a Person in the World, but for some reason this now involves a messy abomination known as sensory play. Influencers show off their tubs of shaving cream, food colouring, water, pebbles and assorted slimes, arranged into perfect little scenes like a high school science diorama. When we were kids, our sensory encounters were limited to metal slippery dips in the playground and stepping on bindis in the summertime. Now, parents must spend hours hand-dyeing grains of rice and conjuring up taste-safe sands, just for a toddler to poke at it for a hot five minutes before they get bored and traipse everything into the house, leaving you with your own sensorial play of cleaning goo stains out of your carpet and stepping on a chickpea in the middle of the night. You got this mama!
Anxiety: I’m worried my baby is doing too much sitting in the bath
Fix: a neck floatie
So your baby seems to like the bath, but could your baby be having a better time in the bath? Are you just letting them sit in there, with their bum on the base of the bath? Why not suspend your baby from the surface of the bath instead, with a flotational neck doughnut. Simply pop your baby’s head in the doughnut, fill the bath up all the way to the top, and have them bob around in there, serene as a leaf in a pond in a Japanese garden. Now how did anyone bathe their babies before we could order a flotational neck pillow directly to our door?
Alex Lee and Humyara Mahbub are the hosts of the podcast Baby Shoes
