I watched in absolute horror as my old university friend Fiona, wearing a leather jacket that smelled faintly of stale vape smoke and regret, leaned directly into the pram and started rewriting my twenties. We were in a Costa Coffee in Zone 3, and I was just trying to drink a lukewarm flat white while the twins briefly paused their synchronized crying. Fiona ignored me entirely, locked eyes with Twin A, and began speaking.
She told my baby we danced till three on a Tuesday in Soho, a wildly inaccurate bit of revisionist history considering my standard Tuesday in 2015 involved a soggy Tesco meal deal and falling asleep to Grand Designs. I tried to correct her, pointing out that my most wild late-night activity was waiting for the N38 bus in the freezing rain, but she was on a roll.
She moved over to Twin B, doubled down on the delusion, and muttered something about how she told my baby dance till 3 is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice for a modern woman. I don't know why she was speaking in broken audio-trend captions, but standing there with dried oat milk on my jeans, I realized something deep about having children: people don't talk to you anymore. They talk to your baby. And mostly, they just lie to them.
When they talk to the pram instead of you
There's a very specific, deeply passive-aggressive genre of unsolicited advice where a stranger or a relative will bypass the adult entirely and deliver their critique directly to the infant. It usually happens in the produce aisle at Sainsbury's or while you're waiting outside the pharmacy for your third bottle of Calpol this month.
An older woman will materialize out of thin air, peer over the edge of the bassinet, and adopt a high-pitched, sing-song voice. "Ooooh, is Mummy letting you freeze? Mummy forgot your little socks, didn't she? Yes she did."
I'm not Mummy. I'm a heavily bearded man in a damp jumper, but apparently, the sheer gravitational pull of an exposed baby ankle turns perfectly normal pensioners into hostile detectives. I used to try to defend myself. I'd explain that it’s mid-July, it’s twenty-six degrees outside, and if I put socks on these children they'll spontaneously combust. But page 47 of whatever parenting book I half-read at 3am suggested maintaining a calm environment, which I eventually realized just means biting your tongue until it bleeds while Brenda from Putney accuses you of child neglect.
It’s not just the sock police, either. Sometimes people just project their own bizarre baggage onto your poor, unsuspecting children. Later that same week, a woman at the bus stop chimed in with her own unprompted clubbing nostalgia, loudly claiming she told my baby we dance till 3 every weekend when she was my age. I just stared at her, clutching a half-empty bottle of room-temperature formula. Ma'am, this child has a strict bedtime of 6:45 PM, currently has a rash on her chin from chewing her own fist, and cries if the wind blows too aggressively. She is not ready for fabric nightclub wristbands.
The great sleep debate in our living room
Nothing brings out the weirdly aggressive advice quite like baby sleep. When my mother-in-law came to visit during the fourth trimester—a period I remember only as a series of terrifying hallucinations—she had very specific ideas about how the twins should be arranged.
She took one look at our carefully constructed, NHS-approved clear sleep space and scoffed. According to her, babies need to be swaddled in four layers of thick wool, placed face-down on their stomachs, and surrounded by stuffed animals to feel "secure." I felt the blood drain from my face. I had just spent three consecutive nights doom-scrolling safe sleep statistics, convinced that even looking at a blanket too long would endanger them.
Our pediatrician, a wonderfully blunt woman who looks perpetually exhausted, had previously mentioned to me that back-sleeping is non-negotiable and that babies don't actually need a nest of vintage teddy bears to survive the night. I tried to explain this. I tried to casually throw medical authority into the conversation without sounding like a hysterical millennial. My mother-in-law just waved a hand and said, "Well, my boys survived, and I used to put a drop of whiskey on their dummies."
I won't even start on the people who tell you to rub whiskey on a baby's gums, mostly because that's a tragic waste of perfectly good whiskey that the parents desperately need to drink themselves.
You find yourself nodding politely while quietly forming a protective physical barrier around the crib, smiling through the pain of knowing you're going to have to sneak back in later and un-tuck the massive quilt she inevitably drapes over them.
Buying things to survive the madness
Because you spend so much time fending off grabby strangers and well-meaning relatives who want to pinch your baby's cheeks with unwashed hands, you start looking for tactical gear. For us, clothing became a literal defense mechanism.
Twin A has skin that reacts aggressively to everything. If a stranger wearing cheap perfume gets too close, she breaks out in a rash that looks like she’s been dragged through poison ivy. We ended up buying the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao simply because we were desperate for something that wouldn't irritate her neck when my wife's overly tactile aunt came to visit.
I’ll be completely honest: I usually think organic cotton is just a tax they put on anxious middle-class parents, but these actually saved us. The fabric is absurdly soft, it stretches nicely over their massive, wobbly heads without a struggle, and most importantly, it covers enough surface area to act as a physical shield against Fiona’s scratchy leather jacket. It’s a genuinely brilliant piece of clothing that has survived approximately four hundred hot washes after aggressive diaper blowouts, and I refuse to put them in anything else when we leave the house.
On the flip side, people also insist on giving you advice about teething, which usually ends with them shoving toys into your baby's face. We tried the Bear Teething Rattle Wooden Ring because it looked aesthetically pleasing and I was tired of staring at neon plastic monstrosities in our living room. It's fine. The wood is smooth and it doesn't look like an eyesore. But I'll warn you now: the cute little crochet bear head acts like a sponge. Within ten minutes of Twin B chewing on it, the bear is completely saturated in thick, stringy twin drool, turning it into a soggy, heavy mass that I then have to aggressively hand-wash and dry on the radiator. It’s lovely to look at, but functionally, it’s a saliva trap.
The manipulative baby myth
The absolute worst thing strangers say to my baby, though, isn't about socks or sleep or my fictional clubbing history. It's the psychological profiling.
If one twin cries when I put her down, someone will inevitably lean over and say, "Ooooh, she's got you wrapped around her little finger, hasn't she? She’s a manipulative one."
My deeply sleep-deprived brain absorbed a podcast a few months ago where some child psychologist explained the neurobiology of infants, and while I couldn't tell you the exact science, the gist was pretty clear: a four-month-old literally doesn't have the prefrontal cortex required to scheme. They're not tiny, drooling Machiavellis plotting to ruin your evening. They cry because they're cold, or hungry, or because they suddenly realized they're no longer floating in a warm fluid and existence is terrifying.
But older generations love to assign malicious intent to babies. If you pick them up, you're "making a rod for your own back." If you soothe them, you're "spoiling them." It creates this awful dynamic where you, the parent, feel judged for literally just comforting your own child. You end up trying to explain brain development to a bloke in the queue at the post office while your baby screams, which is exactly as dignified as it sounds.
Letting it wash over you
Eventually, the exhaustion breaks you, and you just stop fighting it. You stop correcting the woman who thinks the twins are identical (they're visibly not). You stop explaining why you aren't feeding them rice cereal at three months. You just let people say whatever unhinged thing pops into their head.
So the next time Fiona comes round and leans over the pram to lie about my youth, I won't stop her. If she wants to tell them we used to drink martinis on yachts instead of drinking cheap cider in a damp student flat in Leeds, fine. The babies don't understand English anyway. They're currently more interested in trying to eat their own feet. I just smile, nod, and mentally calculate exactly how many hours it's until bedtime.
FAQs from the trenches of unsolicited advice
What do I honestly say to the stranger who tells my baby they need a hat?
Nothing logical will work, so don't even try explaining the weather. I usually just hit them with a deadpan, "Oh, we're building up their cold tolerance for the winter Olympics," and walk away while they try to process it. Failing that, a simple "My pediatrician said they run hot" shuts down 90% of arguments.
Is it bad if I just ignore my mother-in-law's outdated safety advice?
You have to ignore it. Nod politely, say "that's so interesting, how times have changed," and then immediately go back to putting your baby to sleep on their back in an empty crib. You don't need to win the argument; you just need to keep the baby alive.
Are my babies honestly manipulating me when they cry?
No. Our doctor made it very clear that babies are completely incapable of manipulation until they're much older. They aren't trying to trick you into holding them; they just genuinely think they might die if you put them down. It’s exhausting, but it’s not malicious.
How do I deal with friends who talk to my baby instead of me?
Let them. Your friends who don't have kids have absolutely no idea how to interact with you anymore because you haven't read the news in six months and you smell like sour milk. Let them project their weird TikTok audio trends onto the infant. It gives you three minutes to drink your coffee.
Why do synthetic clothes give my baby a rash?
I'm not a dermatologist, but from our frantic 2am googling, babies have incredibly thin, useless skin that acts like paper. Cheap dyes and polyester trap heat and sweat, creating a perfect storm for eczema. Switching to organic cotton wasn't a lifestyle choice for us; it was a desperate damage-control measure that happened to work.
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