A London Dad's Nepo Baby Definition: Toddlers and Privilege

We're twenty-two minutes into the great Tupperware standoff of a rainy Tuesday morning.

Maya is sitting on the rug, red-faced, grunting, and aggressively trying to pry the blue plastic lid off her container of blueberries. It's taking her forever, and she looks like she might spontaneously combust from the effort. Chloe, her identical twin sister, has taken a completely different route. She simply walked over, shoved her sealed container into my knee, crossed her chubby little arms, and stared at me expectantly until I opened it. She is currently eating her blueberries while watching her sister struggle.

It hit me right then, staring at Chloe's smug, blueberry-stained face. If you're looking for a working baby definition of unearned privilege, it's having a thirty-four-year-old man act as your personal sous-chef while you contribute absolutely nothing to the transaction.

The biggest myth about the whole nepo baby discourse is that it strictly applies to the offspring of 90s supermodels who inexplicably land Vogue covers at age sixteen, or actors who just happen to share a surname with a Hollywood director. People love to point fingers at celebrities. But the real, insidious version of this—the everyday nepotism that actually ruins society—starts right here on a yogurt-stained playmat in zone 3 London, when we just can't bear to watch our offspring struggle with a shape sorter.

What my GP said about unearned toddler capital

During the twins' last checkup, while I was wrestling them into a headlock just to use their baby d vitamin drops, our pediatrician, Dr. Evans, sighed and gave me a look of deep pity. She said we're all so obsessed with clearing obstacles out of our kids' paths that they never learn how to step over a twig.

She tossed around these two words: 'access' and 'execution.' Apparently, child psychology suggests that providing access is fine—buying the toys, taking them to the park, registering them for the overpriced sensory class where they just hit each other with wet spaghetti. But when we step in and do the execution for them, we're basically committing developmental sabotage. If you buy the puzzle, that's access, but if you turn the piece because watching them jam a square peg into a round hole causes you physical pain, you're robbing them of the failure they actually need to become a functioning human.

Which brings me to the absolute torture of the preschool art project.

The playgroup perfectionists

I need to talk about the mothers at the local playgroup who bring back these perfectly symmetrical, glitter-glue masterpieces at the end of the session. We all know a two-year-old didn't make that paper plate dinosaur. A thirty-four-year-old project manager named Susan made that dinosaur. Susan is running a nepotism machine in the church hall.

When you take the safety scissors out of your kid's hand because their paper snowflake looks like a mangled tissue, you're subtly communicating that their actual, genuine effort is absolute rubbish. You're handing them unearned artistic capital. You're doing the execution. You're building a tiny, glitter-covered nepo baby who thinks success just magically appears without any blisters on their thumb.

Meanwhile, Maya's art project usually looks like a muddy puddle that was struck by lightning, and I'm fiercely proud of it. It's hideous, but she grafted for it.

Frankly, if your toddler's finger painting belongs in the Louvre, you probably need to examine your own life choices.

The agony of sitting on your hands

If we want to stop raising entitled tiny dictators, we've to endure the physical torment of watching them fail.

Here's a completely incomplete list of things I've had to force myself to stop doing for my children:

• Opening yogurt tubes just because they can't figure out the little perforated tear tab
• Stacking their blocks back up the second they knock them down
• Putting on their left shoe when they've already spent five minutes putting the right shoe on the wrong foot
• Intervening when they get stuck halfway up the sofa cushions

You basically have to sit on your hands while they scream at a wooden train track, fighting the urge to fix it for them while simultaneously leaving the actual problem-solving up to their chubby, uncoordinated fingers, just praying the neighbors don't call social services about the noise.

Blocks that don't dent the floorboards

The trick to all of this is what Dr. Evans called 'safe failure,' which I translate to 'letting them mess up in a way that doesn't end in a trip to A&E.'

This is where our Gentle Baby Building Block Set comes in, and I'll actually sing the praises of these things because they've saved my skirting boards. When I used to buy heavy wooden blocks, the execution phase was terrifying. Maya would build a towering, structurally unsound monument to her own ambition, it would tip over, and a solid wooden cube would take a chunk out of the plaster or bounce off Chloe's forehead.

These Kianao blocks are made of soft rubber. They're squishy. When the girls build a lopsided tower and it inevitably collapses onto their feet, there's no drama. They don't get hurt. They just get mildly annoyed, maybe cry for about four seconds, realize their toes are still attached, and try again. It's the perfect arena for failure. I don't have to hover around them like a nervous referee. I can just drink my cold coffee and let gravity teach them a lesson.

If you're trying to figure out how to let your kid play without hovering over them with a first aid kit, check out Kianao's educational toys that honestly let them do the heavy lifting safely.

The teething reality check

Of course, there are some biological struggles where 'execution' is a grey area. Teething, for instance. You can't execute teething for them. I can't chew on a table leg on Chloe's behalf, as much as I might want to at 3am when she's screaming the house down.

For a while, I was doing everything short of performing an exorcism to make her comfortable, but eventually, you just have to give them tools and back away. We use the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy. I'll be honest here—it's not magic. It's a piece of silicone shaped like a panda. It hasn't revolutionized my life, it doesn't make the night-wakings stop, and it certainly doesn't make the drool disappear from the shoulder of all my black t-shirts.

But it's alright, mainly because it gives her agency. Instead of relying on me to massage her gums with a wet washcloth while she bites my fingers, she can grip the flat little panda herself and gnaw on it to her heart's content. It's her figuring out how to self-soothe. It's her doing the work.

Clothes that let them graft

If you really want your kids to put in the hard yards of crawling, tumbling, failing, and trying again, you can't dress them in ridiculous outfits that turn them into immobile decorative pillows.

I've seen babies at the park trussed up in stiff denim jeans and heavy knit jumpers, completely unable to bend their knees, wailing because they can't reach the sandpit. That's a parent setting their kid up to need rescuing. If they can't move, you've to do everything for them.

We keep the twins in things like the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It's sleeveless, it's stretchy (got a bit of elastane in there), and the organic cotton means I don't have to deal with weird eczema flare-ups when they inevitably sweat through a tantrum about the wrong colored cup. They look like tiny gymnasts, and more importantly, they've the full range of motion required to climb onto the coffee table, realize they're stuck, and figure out how to get back down without me acting as a safety net.

Parenting, it turns out, is mostly just stepping back and letting them do the incredibly hard, incredibly boring work of growing up. It's brutal to watch. But the next time Chloe hands me a sealed Tupperware, I'm sliding it right back across the rug. She can figure out the lid herself.

Ready to let your little ones do their own execution in clothes that seriously let them move? Shop our organic baby clothes collection and embrace the messy art of safe failure.

Questions I ask myself at 3am

How do I stop doing everything for my toddler without them having a complete meltdown?

You don't. The meltdown is the entire point. You just sit there, sipping whatever tepid caffeinated beverage you've left, watching them cry over a wooden puzzle until they accidentally snap the piece into place. It's horrible to watch, I hate every second of it, but it genuinely works.

Is it really that bad to just put their shoes on for them when we're running late?

Look, I'm not a saint. If we've a doctor's appointment in ten minutes, I'm shoving their feet into their boots and carrying them to the car like sacks of potatoes. You have to pick your battles. Just try to let them struggle on the lazy Sunday mornings when you've nowhere to be and infinite time to watch them fail at velcro.

What if they're honestly struggling with something physical like teething?

You still can't do the work for them. You hand them a cold teether, maybe give them a cuddle, and let them sort out the friction on their own gums. You can't fast-forward their biology, no matter how much you wish you could.

How do you teach a two-year-old about privilege?

You don't sit them down for a lecture on socioeconomic disparities, obviously. I just try to point things out out loud. When it's pouring rain in London and we get into the car, I'll just say, 'Aren't we lucky we've a dry car today?' Half the time they're ignoring me and eating lint off the floor mats, but I like to think it seeps in eventually.

Does any of this honestly make them independent?

I really hope so, because the amount of time I've spent watching Maya try to peel a banana is frankly staggering. But yesterday, she really got the peel started all by herself, ate the whole thing, and threw the skin near the general vicinity of the bin. So, maybe it's working.