Are you worried that your child isn’t keeping up with the Jones’s? Here’s Molly from the Mother’s Always Right blog with a reassuring post to kick off our Parenting Month.

I stumbled into motherhood completely unprepared. It wasn’t the sleep deprivation or the breastfeeding or the colic that got me. Each of those challenges was a breeze. No, what really took me by surprise and pushed me to my limit was the monster that is Competitive Parenting. 

As a pregnant woman I was blissfully unaware of the comparisons my baby would have to endure. I had no idea I was to enter a race as soon as I’d given birth. And it hit me for six.

There was no escaping it. In the early days it was the race to get my daughter to sleep through the night. Well, we failed that one miserably. Then it progressed to the race to roll over. Yep, we failed that one too. It moved onto sitting unaided and bum shuffling – and guess what? That’s right, last again.

Now we’re at the crawling stage and I’ve simply given up. I’ve handed in my race card and walked away.

Looking back, I can see I was as guilty as any new mum of trumpeting each new developmental stage from the rooftops. I updated my Facebook status every time my baby did anything new. I was proud and excited. It was as if my daughter’s newly acquired rolling-over skills confirmed I was succeeding (or “winning”) at motherhood.

But then I wised up.

In a panic that my seven month old was not yet confidently sitting unaided I did some research. I found out there is no hard and fast rule. While one baby might roll over at fourteen weeks, another might skip it altogether. While one baby might be crawling by six months another may just bum shuffle. Some babies are walking by ten months and others wait until they near their second birthday. But the age at which a baby learns a new skill is not an indication of their future intelligence.

So I closed my eyes and ears to everyone else’s baby and started appreciating the little things my daughter had mastered perfectly, like simultaneously sucking her toes and shaking a rattle.

Since I’ve resigned my place in the Baby Race I’ve become far more relaxed and am thoroughly enjoying this new-found freedom. My baby’s ten months old and making no attempt to crawl yet. But I’m not worried. I know she’ll get there in the end. And when she does, it will probably come completely out of the blue, just like every other developmental phase she’s been through so far.

I wish I had taken this attitude from the beginning. Instead of outwardly smiling and secretly cursing babies who were sleeping through the night by six weeks, I should have just shrugged my shoulders. Instead of panicking that my daughter needed “sleep training” I should have just trusted that she would sleep through eventually.

And I should have taken the same view to the whole sitting unaided stage. There was really no need to hover behind her at baby groups and launch a covert mission to prop her up without any of the other mums noticing. I didn’t need to lie “oh yeah, she can sit really well, she’s been doing it for months.” Because, in her own time, she has mastered that little trick too.

In fact, I think my daughter’s lateness at acquiring new skills is actually a sign that she’s pretty switched on. I mean, why bother sitting up on your own if you have a perfectly comfortable bouncy chair to lounge in? And why crawl when a quick shout will get someone to fetch whatever it is you need?

This is how I know my daughter will be fine. She’s just like me, you see: Talented in the art of manipulation and communication, but really rather lazy when it comes to getting off her bum.

Tell us how you feel about the ‘baby race’ and we’ll send one person who comments a BornFree Cup of their choice.

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