What The Baby Boom Years Actually Taught Me About Motherhood

Dear Sarah from exactly six months ago,

You're currently hiding in the downstairs half-bath. It's Tuesday, 4:13 PM. You're wearing those black maternity leggings that you definitely shouldn't still be wearing because Leo is four years old, and there's a mysterious crusty stain on your thigh that you're actively choosing not to investigate. Your third iced coffee of the day is sweating onto the faux-marble vanity, vibrating slightly in your hand.

Outside this door, your mother-in-law, Barbara, is casually explaining to Maya—who's seven and currently trying to cut her own bangs with craft scissors—that during the baby boom years, mothers just put a dash of whiskey on a teething baby's gums and left them in a wooden playpen all afternoon while they smoked Virginia Slims and watched soap operas.

You're sweating. You're grinding your teeth so hard your jaw is going to ache for a week. You're furiously scrolling through a color-coded weaning spreadsheet on your phone while listening to Leo scream in the kitchen because you gave him the blue cup instead of the slightly different blue cup. He used to be your sweet little baby boo, and now he's a tiny, dictatorial terrorist who demands organic, hand-mashed peas served at exactly room temperature.

I'm writing this from the future to tell you to put the phone down, take a sip of that watery coffee, and actually listen to Barbara for a second. Not about the whiskey. Oh god, please don't give the toddler whiskey. But about the rest of it.

Please throw away your color-coded spreadsheets

I know you think you're failing if you don't track every single ounce of puree that enters that baby's body. We're the generation of information overload, like, we literally have apps that chime to tell us when our kids should be tired. Dave actually set an alarm on his phone last year for "Leo good sleep window" and I almost divorced him right there in the living room.

But when you look back at how the baby boom generation parented, they just... didn't do this. My doctor, Dr. Aris, who has been doing this since the dawn of time and looks like he survives entirely on black tea and patience, told me last month that the biggest health crisis he sees in mothers right now isn't physical, it's just sheer, unadulterated anxiety. He basically said we're making ourselves sick trying to optimize human beings who just want to eat dirt and play with empty cardboard boxes.

Back in 1946, Dr. Spock wrote this incredibly famous baby book, and the very first line was literally just telling parents to trust their guts because they knew more than they thought they did. I read that quote and honestly wanted to cry into my laundry basket. We have completely lost the plot. Instead of trusting our instincts and just feeding the kids whatever non-choking-hazard food we're eating and letting them sleep when they rub their eyes, we're crowdsourcing our maternal instincts to Instagram influencers who use beige filters on their perfect, quiet children.

Anyway, the point is, stop trying to make baby-led weaning a competitive sport. Give them a mashed banana. Let them make a mess. If they don't eat it, they'll survive. They really will.

The absolute nightmare of synthetic fabrics

Now, while I'm giving Barbara credit for her mental chillness, we do need to talk about where the boomers got it horribly, terribly wrong, which is the physical stuff. The mid-century era was basically a love letter to toxic chemicals and highly flammable polyester.

When Leo was a newborn, his skin was an absolute disaster zone. Like, he looked like a little red lizard. Barbara kept bringing over these adorable, brightly colored outfits from big box stores, and every time I put one on him, he would break out in these furious weeping rashes behind his knees. I was losing my mind trying different organic coconut oils and oat baths.

Dr. Aris finally looked at me, sighed, and muttered something about how cheap synthetic clothes trap heat and are basically soaked in petroleum-based dyes that destroy the skin barrier. I don't really understand the exact biology of it—I barely passed high school science, frankly—but I guess the fibers are just too harsh and hold onto sweat, breeding bacteria like a petri dish.

That was the day I threw out half of Leo's wardrobe and bought like six of the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesies from Kianao. I'm not exaggerating when I say these things saved my sanity. They're just incredibly plain, stretchy, sleeveless little suits, but they're made from 95% organic cotton, which means no weird pesticides or synthetic dyes touching his angry lizard skin.

The best part is they've these envelope shoulders, so when he had a massive blowout—which he did, constantly, usually in public—I could just pull the whole thing down over his body instead of dragging toxic poop over his head. I loved them so much I forced Dave to learn how to do the laundry on cold just so he wouldn't shrink them. They're honestly my favorite thing we bought that first year.

If you're drowning in baby laundry right now, seriously, just explore some organic baby clothes that don't make you want to rip your hair out. Quality over quantity, always.

Let's discuss the plastic spoon situation

The other thing I wish I could tell you six months ago is to stop heating up Leo's food in those cheap plastic bowls we inherited from the baby boom era. You know the ones. The slightly scratched, cloudy plastic ones that have been floating around the back of the cabinet since 1992.

I went down a terrifying 2 AM Google rabbit hole about this. Apparently, standard plastic baby gear degrades over time, especially when you run it through the dishwasher on the sanitize cycle every single night like a crazy person (hello, it's me). The articles were talking about microplastics and phthalates leaching into the food and acting as endocrine disruptors. I'm pretty fuzzy on what an endocrine disruptor actually does, but my understanding is that it basically confuses their tiny developing hormones.

I panicked and threw every single plastic bowl we owned directly into the recycling bin, much to Dave's horror. We switched everything to food-grade silicone and sustainable wood. It's so much easier to clean anyway, because silicone doesn't have those weird hollow spots where mold secretly grows and waits to destroy your life.

Finding the middle ground with your mother-in-law

Look, being caught in the sandwich generation is no joke. You're exhausted from raising small humans, and simultaneously you're managing the feelings and opinions of a boomer parent who thinks your boundaries are a personal insult.

When Barbara visits, she brings gifts. Usually blankets. Huge, synthetic, scratchy blankets that make me itch just looking at them. I finally had to institute a hard boundary about what comes into the nursery, which was an incredibly awkward conversation while Dave cowardly pretended to fix a nonexistent leak under the sink.

I started buying my own blankets so she wouldn't have an excuse. I'm completely obsessed with the Colorful Universe Bamboo Baby Blanket. I don't know what kind of witchcraft bamboo fabric is, but it's naturally antimicrobial—which Dr. Aris says is great for kids who sweat heavily in their sleep, like Leo does. The universe pattern is just so cool, with these little yellow and orange planets. Dave really likes it too, which is rare because Dave's interior design aesthetic is basically "dorm room chic."

I'll say, I also bought the Colorful Flower Bamboo Baby Blanket, and it's... fine. The fabric is exactly the same, super soft, breathes really well, keeps them from waking up soaked in sweat. But the floral pattern is very "grandmother's guest room" to me. Maya loves it and drags it around like a cape, but it's definitely not my aesthetic vibe. Still, it works, and it's a hundred times better than the polyester nightmare blankets Barbara was bringing over.

Sometimes they were right but please ignore the rest

Screen time. Don't even get me started on screen time. Just give them the iPad when you need to take a shower or you'll literally go insane.

The baby boom generation didn't have iPads, so they just shoved us outside until the streetlights came on. We can't really do that anymore because we all live in a state of hyper-vigilant terror, but we can borrow the energy of it. Just letting things go.

So, Sarah from six months ago, sitting in that bathroom. Drink the coffee. Wipe the mystery stain off your leg with a baby wipe. Walk out there, tell Barbara thank you for the historical perspective on infant alcoholism, take the scissors away from Maya, and just breathe. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be present.

If you need to overhaul your nursery to survive the next six months without having a full breakdown over eczema and microplastics, explore Kianao's baby blankets collection and make your life just a tiny bit easier.

Things you're probably Googling at 3 AM

Why does my mom think everything I do with the baby is wrong?

Oh man, the generational clash is so real. Boomers parented in an era where authoritative rules were everything and kids were meant to be seen and not heard. We parent with, like, big feelings and gentle communication and a million safety regulations they never had. They see our anxiety and think we're weak; we see their methods and think they're negligent. Neither is totally true. Just nod, say "that's interesting," and then go do whatever you were going to do anyway.

Is organic cotton seriously doing anything or is it a scam?

I used to think it was a massive scam for wealthy people who buy $14 loaves of bread, but then Leo's skin basically revolted against normal clothes. Because organic cotton isn't grown with heavy pesticides and isn't bleached to death, the fibers are softer and they don't trap heat the same way. Dr. Aris told me it allows the skin barrier to genuinely heal. For us, it was the only thing that stopped the constant eczema flare-ups.

What the hell is baby-led weaning and do I've to do it?

Absolutely not. It's just a modern term for "letting your kid feed themselves chunks of food instead of spoon-feeding them mush." It's supposed to help with fine motor skills and make them less picky, but if watching your baby gag on a piece of broccoli gives you a panic attack, just puree the damn broccoli. The baby boom moms fed us rice cereal at two weeks old and we all went to college. Do whatever keeps you sane.

How do I tell my mother-in-law to stop bringing plastic toys?

I made Dave do it, honestly. But the script we used was basically blaming the doctor. "Oh, the doctor is super strict about endocrine disruptors right now so we're only allowed to have silicone and wood!" It takes the heat off you and places it on a medical authority, which Boomers usually respect. Then just quietly donate the noisy plastic garbage she brings anyway.

Are bamboo blankets really that different from regular cotton?

Yeah, they kind of are. Bamboo is weirdly heavy but cooling at the same time? It drapes over them in this really comforting way but the microscopic gaps in the fiber mean the heat seriously escapes. If you've a sweaty sleeper who wakes up crying because they're hot, swapping to bamboo is usually a game-changer. Plus it doesn't get stiff and scratchy after fifty washes like my regular cotton blankets did.