“She’s such a good baby!” “My girl is a good eater.” “He’s easy.”
“He’s in the middle of his Terrible Twos.” “Terrible Twos? Wait ‘til you get to Threenager and F-You Fours.”
“He doesn’t listen.” “She’s a fussy baby.” “He’s a monster!”
Those are all things I’ve either said about my two-year-old son and baby daughter, or heard other people say about their little ones.
The more times that go by and the more I actually think about what those words & phrases actually mean–and what I’m trying to communicate with them–the more I don’t like that way of speaking. I’m not saying those are terrible things to say or that I’ll never say them again or that they don’t come from a valid place. They aren’t and I will and they do.
But I had this exchange the other day, and it made me think: I said to a friend, about my 10-month-old daughter, “She’s a good baby, but she’s a bad sleeper.” She replied, “I haven’t been around babies much, so I honestly don’t know what it means to be a ‘good’ baby or a ‘bad’ sleeper.”
Such a simple statement, but it stopped me in my tracks. What DOES it mean to be a “good” baby? What about a “bad” sleeper? Or, in the case of my son, what does it mean to say he’s “difficult” or a “maniac”?
All those words either explicitly or inherently assign value to something my kids are doing or not doing or how they’re acting–and that’s not how I want to think about my kids. Truly, it’s not how I think about my kids. I use those words because they’re quick and simple, but my daughter, like all babies, is much more complex than “good” at some things and “bad” at others.
My kids aren’t good. They’re not bad. They’re not difficult. They’re not easy. They’re certainly not terrible.
They’re simply Miles and Linnea, my perfect and not-perfect kiddos.
Linnea isn’t a “good” baby because she always drinks her whole bottle and hardly ever cries (*humble brag*), any more than Miles was a “bad” baby because he cried pretty frequently and refused to latch on. Linnea isn’t a “bad” sleeper because she still wakes up at 4 a.m. every night to eat. Miles is two and he’s stubborn and opinionated and energetic, but that doesn’t make him “terrible.”
They are who they are and they’re forming their personalities. Maybe they can’t really hear or understand it now when I say they’re “good” or “bad” or “difficult,” but I can hear it. I wouldn’t feel good if someone talked about me like that for arbitrary reasons–or because I was exhibiting behavior that’s totally appropriate for my age. And the last thing I want to do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy (or a mom-fulfilling prophecy) where my kids hear me call them “terrible” and decide they ARE terrible.
One of my hard-and-fast mom values is that I want to help my kids feel good about themselves, their honest selves, whoever those selves may be. Cheesy, yes, but true. So I’ll start by trying to catch myself before I assign value to their actions.
How’s Miles, you ask? Well, he’s two. I’m not going to say anything. You do the math.