The 1 Toxic Phrase Everyone Needs To Stop Saying To Parents

When I was seven or eight months pregnant with my first child, I mentioned to a friend that I was headed to a prenatal yoga class.

Her response? “Enjoy that now. Because there won’t be any yoga once the baby is here.”

What a terrible thing to say, I thought. How did she know what my life would be like once the baby was born? I might very well find a way to get myself to a yoga class every week. Of course, I was scared that everything was about to change, but to counter this fear I reassured myself that I could select some parts of my old life to hang on to.

Did my friend, a mother of two, know more than me about the realities of caring for small children? Yes. Was she, in fact, correct that there would be a dearth of yoga in my life once the baby arrived? Indeed, she was. While I regularly brought the baby to mommy & me classes during my maternity leave, my excursions for solo exercise were few and far between during those breastfeeding years.

But was this something that truly needed to be said? Was it helpful to warn me about approaching challenges, or to take away the hope, however misguided, that I was hanging onto? If she’d simply kept that thought to herself, it would have spared me some anxiety.

I’m hardly alone in having this kind of exchange with a more veteran parent. These ominous tales from the trenches are offered up, almost braggingly, at pretty much every chapter of the parenting journey.

“When I was pregnant, I remember being told, ‘Just you wait for those sleepless nights.’ When I had an infant who was sleeping through the night, I remember being told, ‘Just you wait until they’re a toddler and come out of their bed.’ When I had a toddler who had minimal tantrums at 2, I was told, ‘Just you wait for