Searching for baby bowser: Screen time, hair bows, and pure panic

It was 6:14 on a Tuesday morning, a time when civilized society is safely asleep, but my living room looked like the aftermath of a minor coup. Twin A (Mia) was clutching the Nintendo Switch controller to her chest like a sacred artifact, mashing the buttons with sticky, jam-covered thumbs. Twin B (Isla) was lying face down on the rug, screaming into the wool pile because Mario had just fallen into a virtual volcano. I hadn't even had the kettle on yet, and I was already failing at modern fatherhood.

I needed to shut the console down remotely before the neighborhood woke up. I vividly remembered reading an article about a parental control app for the Switch—a brilliant little piece of software designed to lock kids out when their time is up. The app’s mascot, ironically, was the spike-shelled video game villain himself. Desperate, I pulled out my phone, squinted against the harsh blue light, and frantically typed baby bowser into the search bar, hoping for a quick link to download the app.

Google, however, in its infinite, algorithmic wisdom, decided I had made a typo. It assumed I wasn't a desperate dad looking for digital salvation. It assumed I was a parent looking for haberdashery.

The great algorithmic misunderstanding

Instead of software to limit my toddlers' screen time, I was hit with a wall of brightly colored, oversized infant hair accessories. Giant velvet knots. Massive nylon ribbons. Things that looked less like clothing and more like small, decorative pillows strapped to the heads of slightly bewildered newborns. I had stumbled face-first into the world of "baby bows."

Now, I've twin daughters, so the pressure to aggressively gender-code them in their bald, potato-like infancy was immense. People on the street constantly asked if they were boys, mostly because I usually dressed them in whatever gray sleepsuits happened to be clean. The societal expectation seems to be that if your female child doesn't have hair, you must glue a massive pink propeller to her scalp so strangers at the supermarket don't accidentally say "he."

I scrolled through these search results, temporarily forgetting about Mia, who was now trying to bite the joystick off the controller. The bows on my screen were getting larger and more elaborate. I found myself staring at a photograph of a four-month-old wearing a floral arrangement so vast it could have won a prize at the Chelsea Flower Show. It was absurd.

But then, my sleep-deprived brain remembered a conversation I’d had a year earlier with Brenda, our NHS health visitor. Brenda was a terrifyingly competent woman who communicated entirely in disappointed sighs and aggressive leaflet-handing.

Brenda’s terrifying warnings about infant skulls

During a routine check-up when the girls were about three months old, Brenda had spotted a tiny, innocuous-looking hairband in my changing bag (a well-meaning gift from an aunt that I had never actually used). She picked it up as if it were radioactive.

According to Brenda, strapping tight elastic around a baby's head isn't just visually ridiculous; it's practically a medical hazard. She rattled off something about the fontanelles—those terrifying soft spots on a baby’s skull that pulse when they cry, which I spent the first six months of their lives trying not to look directly at. Apparently, tight bands can press into these spots. She also muttered something dark about "traction alopecia," which, as far as my panicked brain understood it, meant that if you pull a baby's wispy hair too tight, it just gives up and falls out completely.

She then handed me a crumpled NHS leaflet that essentially outlined the rules of baby headwear, which I've mentally categorized as follows:

• The car seat death trap: Headbands can slip down over a sleeping baby's nose and mouth. If they're backward-facing in a car seat and you're driving down the M25, you won't see it happen. This single fact kept me awake for three consecutive nights.
• The strangulation risk: Anything around the head can easily become something around the neck.
• The choking hazard: Those little rhinestones and glued-on flowers aren't structural. They're just tiny, shiny choking hazards waiting to be detached by a curious toddler and swallowed whole.

It was at that exact moment in my flashback that I realized I'd rather face a lifetime of people calling my daughters "mate" than ever attach a piece of elastic haberdashery to their skulls.

Dressing them for survival, not Instagram

This whole tangent made me deeply appreciative of clothing that just does its job without requiring an instruction manual or a risk assessment. Honestly, my entire philosophy on dressing twins boils down to: Can I get it on them while they're actively trying to crawl away from me?

Which is why we practically live in the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It's the absolute workhorse of our morning routine. There are no stupid frills, no choking hazards, and definitely no matching headwear required. It’s just remarkably soft organic cotton that somehow survives being washed at temperatures that would melt lesser fabrics. When Isla inevitably covers herself in mashed banana and Calpol, I can just un-snap the bottom and pull the whole thing down over her legs (a trick that took me six months to learn, by the way). It doesn't leave red marks on their skin, and it doesn't make them look like novelty cupcakes.

I can't say the same for everything we've tried. My wife, in a moment of weakness, once bought the Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Bodysuit. The cotton is just as nice, but those little ruffled sleeves are an absolute nightmare if you live in London and have to put a cardigan on your child nine months out of the year. Trying to stuff those fluttery bits into the narrow armholes of a knitted jumper is like trying to pack a wet tent back into its bag. It usually ends with me sweating profusely and Mia looking like a tiny, furious linebacker with inexplicably bulky shoulders. It’s lovely for a hot summer day, but for practical layering, I loathe it entirely.

If you're also tired of clothes that prioritize aesthetics over the grim reality of changing a wriggling toddler, explore the organic baby clothes collection here. It might save your sanity.

Taking parenting advice from a fictional turtle

I finally shook myself out of the hair bow rabbit hole, deleted my initial search, and added the word "Nintendo" to my query. Bingo. The parental controls app appeared.

I've to spend a moment dwelling on the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of this app. Nintendo, a multi-billion dollar corporation, has decided that the best mascot for teaching us about healthy familial boundaries is Bowser. For those who aren't steeped in video game lore, Bowser is a giant, fire-breathing turtle-dragon hybrid whose entire personality revolves around repeatedly kidnapping a woman and trying to murder a plumber.

Yet, in this app, he's depicted as a gentle, attentive father to Bowser Jr., patiently explaining that too much screen time is bad for the eyes and that we must set firm daily limits. This is the guy lecturing me on responsible parenting? The guy who leaves his son in castles filled with lava pits and flying bullets? It's like taking dietary advice from a cannibal.

But the most infuriating part? The app is brilliantly works well. I linked it to the console, set a 15-minute daily limit, and hit "suspend software."

Across the room, the Switch screen went completely black. Mario was gone.

Mia stared at the dead screen for three seconds. The silence in the living room was big, heavy, and terrifying. Then, she took a deep breath, threw her head back, and unleashed a shriek that I’m fairly certain shattered a window three streets over. Isla, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, immediately joined in.

The grim reality of screen time limits

This is the part the NHS guidelines never really cover. Oh, I’ve read the advice. Our pediatrician casually mentioned that children their age really shouldn't have more than an hour of "high-quality" programming a day, preferably co-viewed with an adult. She said this while looking at her clipboard, completely ignoring the fact that Isla was currently trying to dismantle the examination table with her bare hands.

I don't even know what "high-quality programming" means anymore. Is a plumber jumping on a mushroom high quality? It teaches cause and effect, surely. The medical advice always sounds so clean and achievable in a sterile clinic, but at 6:30 AM when you've two screaming toddlers and a migraine building behind your left eye, screen time is just a hostage negotiation tactic.

I desperately needed a distraction. I looked around the room for something, anything, to stop the noise.

My eyes landed on the toy box, and I felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for the days when a simple piece of silicone could solve all my problems. When they were cutting their first teeth, the Panda Teether was essentially the third parent in our relationship. We had three of them on constant rotation—one in the fridge, one in the changing bag, and one constantly being chewed by a furious, drooling baby. It was flat enough that they could grip it without accidentally punching themselves in the face, which happened a lot with heavier toys.

I found myself missing those simpler times. Yes, teething was a nightmare, and the sleep deprivation was so severe I once tried to pay for a coffee with my Oyster card. But at least the problems were physical. A sore gum could be soothed with a cold panda. You can't put a silicone toy in the fridge to cure a toddler's existential rage over being locked out of Mario Kart.

The collision of anxieties

I eventually managed to calm them down by offering them pieces of dry toast and pointing at a pigeon out the window. As we sat on the rug, eating our sad, butterless breakfast, I realized that parenting is basically just ping-ponging between different genres of panic.

Here I was, terrified that a video game was going to rewire their dopamine receptors and ruin their attention spans, while simultaneously terrified that a velvet headband could choke them in a car seat. The internet tells me that everything I do is wrong. If I let them play the game, I'm a negligent father relying on a digital babysitter. If I put a bow on their head, I'm risking traction alopecia.

In the end, you just have to pick your battles. I've decided to let Bowser handle the screen time limits, because frankly, he's more intimidating than I'm. And I've decided to leave their heads completely unadorned, mostly because I can't be bothered to locate a matching pair of hair accessories at six in the morning.

They might look a bit scruffy, and they might occasionally cry over virtual lava pits, but at least their fontanelles are safe. We survive another morning. Now, if I can just figure out how to get the jam out of the joy-con buttons before my wife wakes up, I might actually call today a success.

Before you tumble down your own late-night internet rabbit holes of parenting panic, make sure you've the basics sorted. Check out our collection of organic, no-fuss baby essentials that actually make life slightly easier.

Questions I frantically Googled so you don't have to

Are baby bows honestly dangerous?

Honestly, the medical advice I’ve stumbled across suggests they can be. The big risks are suffocation if the band slips down over their mouth while sleeping or in a car seat, and choking if the little glued-on bits fall off. Plus, my health visitor practically threatened me with the concept of traction alopecia (hair loss from tight bands). If you're going to use them, stick to soft, unadorned fabric and take them off the second you aren't directly staring at your kid.

How much screen time is really okay for a two-year-old?

The official line from our pediatrician was roughly an hour a day of "quality" stuff, whatever that means. The reality in our house is that it heavily depends on how sick everyone is and whether it's raining. The NHS seems to suggest just keeping it balanced and not letting screens replace actual playing. I try to stick to the limits, but I also try not to beat myself up when Peppa Pig ends up babysitting for 40 minutes while I cook dinner.

How do you really enforce the Switch limits without a meltdown?

You don't. Or at least, I haven't figured it out. The Nintendo parental app is brilliant because it just suspends the software when the time is up, but the resulting tantrum is biblical. I find that physically removing the console from their line of sight and immediately offering a highly desirable snack is the only way to break the spell. Redirection is everything.

Can a headband really cause hair loss in babies?

Yeah, apparently traction alopecia is a real thing. Babies have incredibly fine, fragile hair and very sensitive skin. If you strap a tight elastic band to their head every day, the constant pulling can damage the hair follicles. I’m no doctor, but I’ve decided it’s just not worth the risk just to make them look cute for a photo.

What's the best way to clean sticky toddler jam out of a game controller?

I wish I had a highly scientific answer for this. I usually end up using a barely-damp cotton bud (Q-tip) and a lot of swearing. Just don't spray anything directly onto the electronics, unless you want to explain to your toddlers why Mario is permanently broken.