by Sabrina Garibian posted in Parenting

Breastfeeding mom, formula feeding mom, crunchy hippy mom, working mom, stay-at-home mom. All of these labels have one thing in common: We are all moms.

I remember taking my son out on his first walk. It took two hours to leave our house. I had to change him, feed him, change him again, rock him, feed him a little more, and finally we were ready for our walk. I made it just outside our building when I experienced mom-shaming for the first time. "The baby has no socks. The baby has no socks!" I heard a lady exclaim to her hard-of-hearing friend next to her. The friend replied "Well, clearly she has no idea what she's doing. Look at her!" while they both looked at me with scowls on their faces. That day I suppose I was dares-to-take-baby-out-without-socks mom, but it's time to turn the labels around. We should not judge one another when we are all trying our best on this crazy, empowering, sometimes frustrating and definitely fun journey through motherhood. Isn't being a mom hard enough"
Mom shaming is real, but in the end we are all moms. There are so many opportunities for judgment: how your kids behave in a restaurant, how soon they sleep through the night, what you feed them. We should stop trolling one another and judging each other and instead embrace our mom label as the only label that matters.
At the grocery store there's another kind of label that matters, the food label. Feeding your children sho...