Why a 1980s baby boom cast makes more sense than modern apps

My mum casually mentioned last Tuesday that if I didn't start putting a pulverized rusk into the twins' nighttime milk, they would never sleep past 4 am and I'd be looking at stunted growth by their third birthday. The bloke at the park swings, a man wearing aggressively expensive waterproof trousers, confidently informed me that if they aren't eating raw fermented kefir by week twenty, their gut biome is permanently ruined. And our old NCT instructor, a woman whose eyes barely blinked during a two-hour lecture on the horrors of epidurals, previously insisted that any solid food before six months was a fast track to lifelong emotional trauma.

You nod politely at all of them, shove the pram toward the nearest coffee shop, and wonder how on earth humanity managed to survive the last ten thousand years.

I found myself thinking about all this the other night while trapped under a sleeping two-year-old. I was scrolling through streaming services with my free hand and stumbled across the 1987 Diane Keaton film, Baby Boom. If you haven't seen it since the days of VHS, it holds up surprisingly well. The film follows a high-powered Manhattan executive who suddenly inherits a toddler from a distant relative. Watching the baby boom cast get through the absurd, hyper-competitive yuppie parenting culture of the late 1980s is terrifyingly relatable today.

She deals with preschool interviews that require a child to have a diversified portfolio, judges who look at her like she's insane for working, and the sheer, unadulterated panic of keeping a tiny human alive. At one point, I caught myself calling one of the girls "my little baby boo" in the exact same frantic, pleading tone Keaton uses when she's trying to stop the kid from destroying her apartment. I used to be a respected journalist who interviewed politicians, and now I speak entirely in vowels while negotiating hostage situations over rice cakes.

That time Diane Keaton made more sense than my health visitor

The turning point in the movie is when Keaton's character realizes she can't win the modern parenting race, so she abandons it. She moves to a drafty house in the country, ignores the experts, and starts making her own natural baby food from the apple orchard out back. The company she builds, Country Baby, becomes a massive success because it turns out parents just want things that are simple, safe, and not packed full of synthetic garbage.

It's funny that a fictional plotline from over thirty years ago perfectly predicted the exact crisis we're all having right now. We're drowning in data. We have apps tracking how many milliliters of milk they drank at 2:14 pm, monitors that alert our phones if they roll over slightly too aggressively, and an endless stream of influencers telling us we're poisoning our children if we don't buy their specific brand of alkaline water.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, who practically wrote the manual for the original post-war baby boom generation, famously opened his book with the line: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." I vaguely remember reading that in a dentist's waiting room and thinking it sounded suspiciously like a man who never had to get a screaming toddler into a snowsuit. But as the twins get older, I'm starting to realize he wasn't entirely wrong.

The absolute madness of the modern weaning spreadsheet

Let me tell you about my brief, catastrophic relationship with a baby-led weaning spreadsheet. Someone on a forum convinced me that if I didn't introduce exactly 100 different organic ingredients before their first birthday, I was failing as a father. I actually created an Excel document color-coded by food group. I spent an entire Sunday steaming courgettes and cutting them into geometrically precise batons so they wouldn't be a choking hazard, only to watch Twin A immediately throw her baton at the dog, while Twin B attempted to shove the entire thing into her ear.

I realized I was losing my mind over a vegetable. My health visitor, a spectacularly dry Scottish woman who has clearly seen every permutation of parental hysteria, basically told me to stop overcomplicating it. She reckoned the guidelines change every five minutes anyway, and while she's not a nutritionist, she figured offering them bits of whatever we were eating, minus the salt, was probably going to result in them learning how to chew eventually. We binned the spreadsheet that afternoon.

Conversely, trying to get them to sleep through the night is basically just an exercise in staring into the abyss and hoping the abyss eventually gets tired and closes its eyes.

Swapping out the plastic without losing your mind

While I stopped stressing about the exact shape of the carrots, I did start paying a bit more attention to what we were serving them in. Our GP, who always looks like he desperately needs a week in Mallorca, mentioned offhandedly one day that heating up scratched plastic bowls might not be the best idea. He muttered something about endocrine disruptors and phthalates, and while my understanding of chemistry is limited to knowing that mixing vinegar and baking soda makes a volcano, I decided that microwaving cracked plastic probably wasn't a brilliant life choice.

You don't need to throw out every item in your kitchen and move to an off-grid commune to fix this, though. Just slowly swapping out the battered plastic spoons for food-grade silicone or bamboo when you get a chance is probably enough to reduce whatever weird chemicals we're constantly exposed to without sending you into a financial tailspin.

This collection of baby gear we found actually helped bridge the gap between the chaotic plastic dumping ground our flat had become and the minimalist, natural aesthetic I foolishly thought I could maintain after having kids.

Finding gear that doesn't assault the senses

The aesthetic degradation of your home is a very real part of parenthood. Before the twins, our living room had a distinct, mid-century modern vibe. Six months in, it looked like a primary-colored plastic factory had exploded. Everything flashed, everything beeped, and everything played a highly aggressive midi version of "Old MacDonald" at three in the morning if you accidentally stepped on it.

We eventually bought the Kianao Bear and Llama Wooden Play Gym because I honestly couldn't look at another piece of neon plastic. My pediatrician had suggested putting them under an arch to help them figure out depth perception and reaching, though I'm fairly certain they mostly just use it to ignore me. The wooden frame is lovely and doesn't look like an eyesore in the lounge.

The twins had wildly different reactions to it, naturally. Twin A aggressively tried to dismantle the crocheted llama with the intensity of a demolition expert, while Twin B just lay there having a deep, silent communion with the wooden star for forty-five minutes at a time. It's made from sustainably harvested beech wood, which is nice to know when they inevitably figure out how to pull the frame down and try to eat the legs.

Speaking of eating things they shouldn't, teething is a whole other circle of hell. When the drooling started, it was like someone turned on a tap that couldn't be shut off. We picked up the Panda Silicone Teether to try and save my knuckles from being gnawed to the bone.

It's fine. It's a solid piece of kit, honestly. They chomp on the textured bamboo-patterned bit when their gums are driving them mad. Is it a magical cure for the 3 am wake-ups? Of course not, it's a piece of silicone, not a wizard. But because it's 100% food-grade and doesn't have any weird hollow bits where mold can grow, I can just lob it in the dishwasher when it gets covered in dog hair. It survives the heat and gives them something safe to mangle. Job done.

The reality of the organic cotton debate

If you had told me five years ago that I'd hold strong opinions on the breathability of infant textiles, I'd have laughed in your face. But then one of the girls inherited my predictably rubbish, highly reactive skin. We put her in a standard high-street polyester-blend onesie, and within three hours she had a rash across her chest that looked like a map of the London Underground.

The pharmacist suggested trying natural fibers, so we grudgingly bought a few of the Organic Cotton Sleeveless Bodysuits. I'll admit, they actually made a massive difference. The fabric is ridiculously soft, the flat seams don't dig into her eczema patches, and because there aren't any synthetic dyes or weird pesticide residues lingering in the cotton, her skin cleared up in about a week. They wash well too, which is the only metric that genuinely matters when you're doing four loads of laundry a day.

honestly, you're just doing your best with the information you've at the time. You're going to buy the wrong things, you're going to listen to the wrong advice, and you're going to panic about milestones that literally don't matter. But if you can tune out the noise from the park dads and the judgmental apps, and maybe just stick to a few simple, well-made things, you might genuinely get through a whole day without questioning every life choice you've ever made.

If you're ready to ditch the neon plastic and find a few things that genuinely look nice in your house while surviving the wrath of a toddler, check out Kianao's full collection of sustainable essentials.

The deeply messy FAQ about baby gear and trusting your gut