What a Baby Cheetah Taught Me About My Own Crawling Toddler

We were standing in front of the big cat enclosure at the Bronx Zoo last Tuesday. I was wearing my aggressively stained Lululemon leggings, holding a lukewarm cup of drip coffee that tasted faintly of pennies, while Leo—who's four going on feral—was actively trying to lick the glass. There was this guy standing next to us. He had on cargo shorts and Oakleys resting on the back of his neck, and he was loudly explaining to his own toddler that a baby cheetah is "born running."

I almost choked on my terrible coffee.

Like, he was practically doing a TED Talk for a two-year-old about how these animals just burst into the world doing sixty miles an hour, fully capable of taking down an antelope. And it made me so irrationally angry because it's the exact same toxic myth we buy into about human parenting. We look at nature, or we look at other moms on Instagram, and we assume everything is supposed to be automatic. Graceful. Innate. We assume these magnificent animals are born majestic, and therefore we're supposed to just instinctively know how to raise our own kids without losing our minds.

But no. Hell no.

I'm pretty sure I read in some National Geographic article—or maybe it was an Instagram reel at 3 AM while I was nursing Maya, who even knows anymore—that cheetah cubs are actually born completely blind. They weigh like, maybe 400 grams? That's less than a pound. They're absolutely helpless, squishy little screaming potatoes who can't do a damn thing for themselves for weeks.

Just like us.

Anyway, the point is, standing there watching this exhausted mother cheetah try to keep her three cubs from biting each other's tails, I realized that raising a human baby and raising a wild predator are basically the exact same chaotic, sleep-deprived job.

That weird fuzzy mohawk thing they've

So there's this really crazy biological thing that happens with these cubs. For the first few months of their lives, they grow this thick, silvery-grey strip of hair right down their backs. It's called a mantle, and it makes them look like they've a severe, permanent bad hair day. Or like a grumpy old man.

Apparently, this is an evolutionary trick to make them look like honey badgers from above, because honey badgers are absolute psychopaths that eagles and lions won't mess with. But my pediatrician, Dr. Miller—who I bother with entirely too many portal messages—told me once that temperature regulation is one of the hardest things for any new mammal to figure out. And that’s the other thing the mantle does. It acts like a built-in thermoregulator for the cub, keeping the sun off their skin and trapping heat when the savanna drops to freezing at night.

Oh god, temperature regulation.

My husband Dave is completely incapable of dressing our children appropriately for the weather. It's a genuine marital issue. It will be 75 degrees in April, and I'll catch him putting Maya in a fleece snowsuit because "her toes felt a little chilly, Sarah." I used to fight him on it until I just threw away all the synthetic polyester crap we got from my mother-in-law and replaced it all with organic cotton.

Honestly, the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao is the only reason my kids haven't spontaneously combusted from Dave's over-layering. I bought like six of these when Maya was tiny. It’s sleeveless, which means it actually breathes, and it has this 5% elastane stretch that makes it so much easier to wrestle over a screaming baby's head. It acts just like that cheetah mantle—it creates this perfect microclimate against the skin so they don't get heat rash, but they don't freeze when the AC kicks on. Also, the crotch snaps don't require an engineering degree to close at 2 AM, which is honestly all I care about.

Lions don't have mantles, by the way, which just proves cheetahs are vastly superior cats.

Wrestling is basically a full time job

So the cargo-shorts guy at the zoo thought these cats are born knowing how to hunt. Which is just hilarious to me. They have ZERO innate hunting skills. None.

Everything they learn, they learn by acting like absolute maniacs. They stalk each other. They tackle their siblings. They chew on their mother’s ears until she looks like she's dissociating. It takes them months to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other without tripping over their own paws.

Dr. Miller is always saying that "play is the work of the child." Which sounds like something you'd read on a wooden plaque at a wildly expensive preschool, but it's true. When Leo was about four months old, I was panicking because he wasn't rolling over yet. I was convinced I had broken him. I bought all these fancy flashcards and black-and-white contrast boards, and you know what actually worked? Throwing him on the floor under a play gym and letting him just... thrash around.

If you're going to buy one thing for a new baby, make it the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys. I'm obsessed with this thing. I literally kept it set up in the middle of our living room for eight months because it looks like actual furniture and not a plastic explosion. It has these little wooden rings and fabric animals hanging from it, and Leo would just lay there trying to punch the elephant for hours. That's how he learned depth perception. That's how he figured out his hands were attached to his body. Not from me doing guided exercises with him, but from him just wrestling with his environment like a little wild animal.

Now, I'll say I also got the Gentle Baby Building Block Set later on. They're... fine? I mean, they're blocks. They do exactly what blocks are supposed to do. They're squishy rubber, which is genuinely really great because Maya threw the blue one at my temple last week and I didn't get a concussion. They squeak, they've numbers on them, you can put them in the bath. They're perfectly good blocks. But the wooden gym? That was my holy grail.

If you want to check out things that really look decent in your house while your kid learns how to use their limbs, you can explore Kianao’s organic baby clothes and blankets.

Nobody is honestly born knowing how to do this

The other thing about cheetahs that blew my mind is that they don't roar. They literally physically can't. They lack this specific bone in their throat, so instead, they chirp. Like birds. And they purr.

When Maya was around six months old, she stopped making cute cooing sounds and started doing this guttural, high-pitched screech that sounded exactly like a pterodactyl in distress. I thought she was possessed.

Dave kept Googling "baby making weird screeching sounds" and panicking, but it turned out she was just teething horribly. Her little mouth hurt, her gums were swollen, and she was just trying to communicate that the world was entirely unfair. It’s so jarring when your kid finds their voice, and it’s not the cute, Instagram-perfect giggle you expected. It's a weird, messy, wet chirp of frustration.

Don't even talk to me about amber teething necklaces, those things are a terrifying choking hazard and a complete scam.

What seriously saved our sanity was the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy. Dave seriously ordered this one, and I'll forever give him credit for it. When Maya was deep in the trenches of cutting her first molars, this little silicone panda was the ONLY thing that stopped the screaming. It's made of food-grade silicone, so I didn't have to worry about toxic crap, and it has all these different textures on the paws and the bamboo stick part that she could really gnaw on. I used to throw it in the fridge for twenty minutes while I made my afternoon coffee, and handing that cold panda to her was like handing a peace treaty to a tiny dictator.

A mother cheetah raises her cubs entirely alone for up to two years. She moves her den every three to six days to keep predators away from her babies. She is exhausted. She is vigilant. She is surviving on pure caffeine-free adrenaline.

I look at my own life—the messy living room, the squishy blocks under the couch, the stained onesies, the cold coffee—and I realize we're all just trying to keep our cubs alive.

We're not born knowing how to do this. We don't burst into motherhood doing sixty miles an hour. We learn by stumbling, by over-layering our kids, by panicking over weird throat noises, and by relying on good play gyms to do the heavy lifting while we sit on the couch for five minutes.

And you know what? That's exactly how nature intended it.

If you need some gear that genuinely helps instead of just adding to the clutter, go look at Kianao's play gym collection before your kid starts wrestling the family dog.

Stuff you're probably wondering about wild animals and human toddlers

Do baby cheetahs honestly roar?
No, they literally can't! It’s the wildest thing. I went down a huge YouTube rabbit hole about this. Because they don't have a floating hyoid bone, they just chirp, purr, and meow. They sound like aggressive little house cats. It makes me feel a lot better about the weird, bird-like screeching noises Leo used to make when he was hungry.

Why do cheetah cubs have that weird grey hair?
It's called a mantle! It’s basically nature's way of giving them a disguise so they look like a honey badger (which nothing wants to mess with), but it also helps them control their temperature in the wild. It’s exactly why I obsess over breathable organic cotton for my kids, because human babies are notoriously terrible at controlling their own body heat.

Is tummy time really the same as cub wrestling?
Honestly, yes. Dr. Miller told me that all that uncoordinated thrashing around on the floor is critical work. When a cub tackles its sibling, or when your baby violently shakes a wooden elephant on their play gym, they're building the exact same gross motor skills and spatial awareness. They aren't born coordinated; they've to fail at moving a thousand times before they get it right.

Are cheetahs born fast?
Not even a little bit. That guy at the zoo was so wrong. They're born totally blind and weighing under a pound. They're completely helpless little blobs. They don't start really running until they're much older, and they've to practice endlessly to get up to those crazy 60mph speeds. So if your kid isn't walking yet, stop stressing. Nobody starts off sprinting.

How do you keep a human baby from freezing or sweating to death?
You ignore my husband Dave's advice, first of all. You dress them in breathable, natural layers. Synthetic fabrics trap sweat and cause heat rash. A good organic cotton sleeveless bodysuit acts like a second skin—or a cheetah’s mantle—letting air flow while still giving them a base layer of warmth. It takes the guesswork out of the whole "are they too cold/too hot" panic spiral.