It was once said that it took a village to raise a child, but I’m not so sure. In my experience, it takes a Google server farm. An entire Google server farm, humming away monolithically in the middle of Idaho or wherever, processing an endless stream of increasingly fraught searches such as “How to wrap a newborn” and “How much baby diarrhoea is too much baby diarrhoea?” and “Seriously, I’ll do anything, just tell me how to make him sleep.”
And that’s regrettable, because the internet is no place to raise a baby. I’ve spent hours learning this lately, catapulted by search engines to the dank recesses of parenting forums that exist solely to imply I’m guilty of child abuse because I don’t know the best sort of blanket to put in a pram yet.
As I am quickly discovering, hell is other parents.
Not all parents, obviously. Just the professionally judgmental ones, of which there seem to be many hundred thousand. They’re the ones who lurk on the internet, convinced of their own infallibility, desperate to prove to the world that they suffer more and work harder and know better than every other parent combined.
They sit there, these parents, crouching in the comments. They wait for someone to recommend one method of swaddling, just so that they can deliberately wade in and point out that – actually – that method is bad for your baby’s hips, and your baby will definitely end up in a wheelchair, and it’ll be all your fault, and you may as well just kick your baby in the mouth now and be done with it if that’s how much you hate children, you arsehole.
They wait for someone to bring up co-sleeping, so that they can either decry it as a deadly invitation for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or scream that you don’t love your kid if you make it sleep in a cot. Own a sling? You’ll dislocate your baby’s head. Don’t own a sling? Your baby will grow up a sociopath.
Use a dummy? Requested an epidural? Took too little parental leave? Or too much? It doesn’t matter, you’re a monster either way. And woe betide anyone evil enough to think about feeding their baby formula milk. You know what they do to people who don’t breastfeed in jail, huh? It ain’t pretty.
Judgmental parents aren’t purely confined to the internet – one bellend made it all the way to our real-life maternity ward, where he kept loudly requesting priority access to the midwives because his partner had given birth “without any pain relief, which is more than I can say about some of the other women here” – but it’s where you’ll find most of them, steaming in and wagging their fingers at any minuscule perceived parental flaw, while their own kids fall down the stairs and set themselves on fire unattended in the background.
Look, being a dad is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My eyes constantly sting with tiredness. My bones creak. I’ve stopped caring that my hands are flecked with poo. Dinner is now anything warm, eaten one-handed and standing up. My days are sodden in a never-ending mixture of love and concern for this tiny boy who probably doesn’t even recognise me yet. I think I cried at the last episode of Broadchurch. It’s really no way to live.
Plus I already feel terrible about everything – about working too hard, about not being able to breastfeed, about leaving my wife with too much responsibility – so the last thing I need is a deliberate barrage of guilt-trips from strangers whenever I venture online. That’s the last thing any of us need.
