My one-year-old daughter is currently on antibiotics for what appears to be the most wicked of festive colds. The most obvious source of her illness is her elder sister and the never-ending bugs coming back from nursery. Another source though could be the numerous strangers who lent into her pram unprompted last week and got right in her face.
Without coming across as a Scrooge fighting against those being kind, I have a serious problem with people I’ve never met reaching out and touching my daughter. To be honest, I have a problem with them even breathing in her direction.
Imagine doing the same to a random adult you had never met before and getting that close to them. Also, did we learn nothing from Covid? Kind stranger, I have no idea where the hands you are touching my baby with have been or if you’ve got a wicked festive cold that will end in antibiotics for my child.
People being lovely to our children is genuinely the nicest thing ever – especially as being kind, let alone being kind to someone you don’t know, seems to have completely disappeared from society. However, it can be very jarring to turn around and find a stranger leaning into the pram trying to make your startled baby smile for them.
I am particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, as our youngest daughter has a rare genetic disorder called GRIN2B and she seems to suffer illness exponentially worse than other children. We are therefore very careful when it comes to keeping her safe and well.
At present her disability is not that visible to people and so we have received the most maddening (and if they knew, offensive) advice and interactions with strangers telling us about our baby.
The other day my daughter Holly and I were in the supermarket rapidly picking up some dinner before sprinting over to nursery to pick up daughter number one. While I conducted my usual blank stare at the shelf in front of me having no idea what to grab, a woman came over, leant right into Holly’s pram and stood there stroking her arm.
When I turned around she promptly decided to tell me what she knew to be true about my daughter after seconds of discovering her. Apparently this stranger knows for a fact that Holly “pays attention to everything” and “is watching you, you know”. It was said without a smile and while she held onto my daughter’s hand, the implication being that I should have been paying attention to my baby rather than looking at the supermarket shelf.
The obvious retort would have been something like “and pray, how do you assume I buy my groceries without taking my eyes off my child for a single second? Shall I grow a second head?” In reality I just went “uh, yeah, I know” and kept staring at her until she eventually shuffled off.
Now, if she had known that Holly is in fact extremely silent and still a lot of the time she is in the pram (a lot of children with GRIN2B are non-verbal), would she have still provided this very unwanted advice? I don’t know.
I told my wife about this encounter and she informed me of a recent incident where she had been rushing back from a hospital appointment with Holly and had sprinted across the station with the pram to just catch the train home.
As she got inside and the doors closed behind her, she got her phone out to quickly text me to say she’d made the train. No sooner had she got her phone out of her pocket than a random passenger walked up to her and said “your baby is trying to communicate with you, but you’re on your phone” and proceeded to try and talk to our daughter in her pram in an attempt to make my wife feel awful.
My wife was unsurprisingly completely taken aback and eventually the stranger felt like she had heroically engaged with our daughter enough that she went and sat back down in silence.
My gorgeous baby has a rare, genetic condition - no one knows what to say to us
Read MoreThankfully there were some nice people on the carriage who later came up to my wife and told her to ignore what had just happened. Again, would that woman have behaved like that if she knew what my wife was juggling with? I don’t know. Maybe she is someone who likes to go around chastising any parent who dares to get their phone out, maybe she likes being unpleasant to people she’s never met and doesn’t know anything about them.
Every parent has stories of strangers giving them unsolicited advice about their children. Friends have stories of complete strangers asking them if they’re managing to breastfeed and random people coming up to them and announcing they’re making life hard for themselves with certain parenting techniques. I have never heard of anyone ever appreciating the unsolicited advice or it in any way being helpful.
People being kind to each other and saying nice things about your children is honestly one of the greatest things possible, but there are boundaries that most parents would prefer were not crossed.
So strangers, rather than giving out the unsolicited advice, perhaps try offering a bit of sympathy to those doing the impossible juggle of raising children. If you’ve done it yourself already, even more reason to drop the advice and say something nice. Or if you can’t do that, maybe don’t say anything at all.
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