As the baby turns one, I’ve been looking back at the past year – which seems somehow to have been both the longest and shortest of my life – and reflecting on what I’ve learned. I embarked upon parenthood thinking I was at least a little bit prepared in terms of what it involved, only for it to be made swiftly apparent that I am utterly clueless. In fact, one of the sharpest, most humbling lessons so far has been the dawning understanding that no one actually really knows what they are doing most of the time.
I suspect that before a baby arrives we all have some ideas about the sort of parents we are going to be, only to guiltily dispense with those “principles” one by one as the child grows. This has never been more apparent to me than when thinking about screen time. How I laugh now at the sweet summer child who obnoxiously recommended the CBeebies Prom to my fellow National Childbirth Trust (NCT) mums, keen to stress that of course I turned his bouncer to face away from the screen. I’m surprised the poor baby didn’t get a crick in his neck from craning to see what was going on.
