A Mother's Manifesto: Pleas for Change Across Every Stage of Childhood

There's a particular kind of panic that comes with those first weeks home from the hospital—the kind where you're convinced you're doing everything wrong, and nobody has time to tell you otherwise. A new mother, sent home with nipple shields she didn't need, convinced they were essential to feeding her baby, spent weeks drowning in the logistics of it all. The shields weren't the real problem. The real problem was that somewhere between discharge and those first bewildering nights, nobody had five minutes to show her how to actually latch a baby to her breast. Five minutes. That small gap in time ballooned into hours of stress, guilt, and eventually mastitis—all of it, in hindsight, entirely preventable.

The midwives weren't villains in this story. They were working under the kind of time pressure that makes proper care nearly impossible. They were stretched so thin that the basics—the foundational knowledge a new mother desperately needs—fell through the cracks. The ask here is straightforward: resource the maternity hospitals properly. Give the midwives what they need to do their jobs. If that means better staffing, better pay, better pensions, then so be it. The cost of not doing it is measured in preventable suffering.

Fast forward a few years, and the landscape shifts but the exhaustion doesn't. A mother with a five-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn tries to orchestrate something as simple as a trip to the shopping centre—not a grand outing, just a change of scenery, a chance to let the kids burn energy in a play area while she sits, dazed, pretending not to notice the hygiene situation unfolding around her. But arrival at the car park becomes its own ordeal. The family parking spots are full. She has to squeeze her still-healing post-caesarean body between her car door and the neighbouring vehicle, fumble with car seat buckles designed by someone who has never actually had to use them, and somehow extract a sleeping infant without scraping someone else's paint job. The sweat comes. The frustration comes. All of it preventable if people simply didn't park in spaces marked for families unless they actually had a reason to be there.

Playgrounds occupy a strange space in the parental imagination. They're wonderful for children—stimulation, social connection, exercise, the whole developmental package. For parents, though, they're something else entirely. A friend recently went quiet when reminiscing about the early years, then muttered something about playgrounds the way a soldier might describe a combat zone. Both women shuddered. With the first two children, there was patience. Hide and seek. Swinging games. Catching them at the bottom of the slide and spinning them around until the world blurred. But by the third child, that performance had worn thin. The mother was practically pushing him out of the car, desperate for the nearest coffee. The cruel irony: the older children remember none of this sacrifice. They remember nothing of the brilliant parenting, the patience, the hours spent on seesaws. It was all, in a sense, wasted effort.

The ask here is absurd but pointed: install some kind of device that forces teenagers to witness their parents' earlier devotion every time they pick a fight. Make them see those hours on the seesaw, that genuine engagement. And fine parents ten thousand euros if they use their phones in playgrounds—whether they're taking blurry photos of their child on a trampoline, checking emails, or scrolling through images of other parents having more fun. The phones aren't necessary. They're just a way of checking out, of making yourself feel worse about the life you're actually living.

By the time teenagers arrive, the ask becomes simpler and sadder: a time machine. Not to go back to infancy, necessarily, but to those pram days when the problems were at least manageable, when the exhaustion was physical rather than existential. The column doesn't offer solutions to that particular stage. It just acknowledges that somewhere along the way, the job gets harder in ways that no amount of infrastructure can fix.