~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I breastfed my children. All that health research, so clearly I’m winning.
Although I never managed cloth nappies, which costs me points. One or two of them got something organic, which presumably earns a few back. And I had no epidural during labour — surely that makes me Best Woman Ever.
You see the problem.
Nobody can tell by first grade
Here’s what I’ve noticed as my children have grown: it matters less and less, until it doesn’t matter at all.
By first grade, it is genuinely impossible to look at a classroom and identify who was breastfed, who was bottle-fed, who was in cloth and who was in disposables. The children are simply children. The distinctions that consumed entire forums are invisible within a few years.
Meanwhile I’ve watched women treat these choices as competitive sport — badges declared on profiles, league tables of virtue on baby boards. Enormous emotional energy spent on a scoreboard nobody is reading.
Why it persists
Because parenting is high-stakes and almost entirely unmeasurable. You cannot know whether you’re doing it well, and you won’t find out for twenty years.
Faced with that uncertainty, people look for something they can measure — a decision they made correctly, ideally one someone else made differently. Judging another mother is a way of reassuring yourself.
Which is understandable, and still corrosive. Feeding a baby, however you do it, is an intensely personal decision shaped by your body, your work, your health and your circumstances. Almost none of that is visible to the person judging you for it.
The same thing happens in business
I’m writing about this on a business site deliberately, because the pattern doesn’t stay in the nursery.
It’s the same instinct that judges the woman who took maternity leave and the woman who took two weeks. The one who works late and the one who leaves at five. The one who scaled and the one who deliberately stayed small.
Each is a personal decision with context you can’t see. And each judgement tells you far more about the person making it than the person receiving it.
Women get remarkably little support in business as it is. Spending what we have on ranking each other’s choices is a poor use of it.
What to do instead
Notice the urge. When you catch yourself judging another woman’s choice, it’s usually anxiety about your own.
Assume there’s context. There almost always is, and you’re rarely entitled to it.
Be useful rather than superior. “How’s it going?” beats “well, what I did was…” every single time.
And let your own choices go. You made them with the information and circumstances you had. They don’t need defending on the internet.
The short version
By first grade, nobody can tell. By adulthood, nobody remembers. The scoreboard was never real.
We could all get a great deal more done if we stopped keeping it.
