An anxious mom who was worried about her infant daughter’s unusual behavior has described the “humbling” moment she realized what was actually going on.
It’s perfectly normal for new moms to worry about their baby’s health. A 2019 survey of 900 moms conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Mead Johnson Nutrition found moms spent over 1,400 hours worrying about their baby’s health in the first year.
During this time, it’s estimated that they conduct 330 online searches about their baby’s health and make somewhere in the region of 337 phone calls or texts to their own mothers about symptoms. So, when Taylor Alderman noticed her toddler daughter, Mac, was squinting in an unusual way, it was perhaps understandable that she would be a little concerned.
“She did it for the first time while my mom was watching her,” Alderman said. “My mom asked if I had seen her do it and if I had any idea what it was. I did not at that point and I had not seen her do it. She did it again with me about a week later and it worried me, so I took a video to send to her pediatrician.”
In the clip, which Alderman subsequently posted to her TikTok, tayoverstimulatedmom, Mac can be seen looking towards her mom, behind the camera, while she repeatedly opens her eyes wide and then squints.
“I was worried that her eyes were burning or dry or maybe she had blurry vision for some reason,” she said. When she showed it to her pediatrician, they were not overly concerned.
“We decided it wasn’t an emergency and she had a check-up coming up soon, so the doctor said she would examine her eyes closely then,” Alderman said.
A week later, Alderman was doing some work on her laptop when Mac came over and started squinting again.
“Mac was playing with her toys in front of me and she turned to see what I was doing, walked straight up to me smiling, and started blinking at me very intentionally. She also laughed afterwards like she was being silly,” Alderman said. “That’s when it clicked that she was mocking me and I realized how badly I was straining [my eyes] to read the email.”
Alderman is short-sighted and supposed to wear glasses to do things like work on a computer. Without them, she tends to squint. Quite a lot more than she realized, in fact.
“She was mocking me,” Alderman said. “I’ve now found my glasses and started wearing them again. It helped a lot. Since I started wearing them, she hasn’t done it again.”
Though Alderman may have been left feeling a little foolish, her experience chimed with that of many others online who were quick to trade notes in the comments section accompanying the clip.
“My 2 year old niece used to get up out of her chair and always go “oof” and hold her back. She was just copying me,” one user wrote. “Yeah I was wondering where my baby got his goofy laugh. Then I realized today that it was from me. Same exact goofy laugh,” a second said, with a third adding: “Literally turned on the monitor to hear my two year old in her crib saying ‘I’m having a breakdown’ so I think I might say that a bit too much.”
At the time of writing the video had been watched 2.1 million times.
Alderman said: “It’s absolutely amazing what our babies and toddlers pick up on that we don’t even realize we are doing. It can be hilarious, humbling, or in my case, an important discovery.”
She loves that so many people have shared similar responses in the comments too. “As parents of small children, we spend every day decoding their communications and reading their minds from the moment they’re born,” Alderman said. “It’s nice to know you’re in the trenches together.”
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