Everybody LOVES fat babies.

“Fat rolls for days!” 

“95th percentile at 2 weeks!”

“Wearing 9 mo. clothes at 2 months!”

“That kid loves his mama’s milk!”

And so on. These are things that parents of chunky babies brag about online, and I don’t disagree that pudgy babies are pretty dang adorable. I mean, those cheeks! Those thighs! Those bellies! You really do get why people “just want to eat them up!” I haven’t really noticed moms of skinny babies bragging about percentile stats and clothing sizes, but in my experience parents of skinny babies do hear a lot from other people; from strangers to lactation consultants to pediatricians. (We are very lucky that our pediatrician has never said these things to us. She has been totally supportive and amazing and does not at all make me feel like a failure!) As the mom of a skinny baby with some minor to moderate breastfeeding challenges, here’s what I’ve heard:

“He’s not gaining weight as fast as we’d like.”

“He’s so tiny!”

“He’s not an efficient eater.”

“If he falls off the growth curve, you’ll have to start worrying about brain development.”

These things do not make you feel good about yourself as a brand new mother, especially when all.you.do. is feed your baby. Guilt, guilt and more guilt. My struggles were minor compared to others I’ve heard about, and they were still very hard, emotionally and physically. We thankfully overcame them, and I almost did a happy dance at the pediatrician’s office when I calculated that Baby J had made it to the 7th percentile for weight at his 4-month visit. That’s SEVENTH, not 97th. (OK, maybe I did do just a little happy dance, after the doc left the room.).

I was talking about this with a friend whose first baby was something like 8 weeks premature and less than 5 pounds at birth if I remember correctly (and is now thriving and healthy and adorable), and she pointed out that the percentile scale is based on American babies, which I found interesting. So for a very non-scientific comparison, I asked Dr. Google to find me a percentile chart from the UK and used Baby J’s weight at 2 weeks, when by the US scale he was at somewhere between the 2nd and 4th percentile. If I did the calculations correctly, he would have been in the 6th to 7th percentile by UK standards. So that’s not a huge difference, but it is a difference, especially when “they” say anything below 5th percentile is essentially the “danger zone.” I’m definitely curious about how it would compare on other scales in different parts of the world, but I’m too tired to do all that Googling and math.

While I totally get that there are reasons for babies needing a certain rate of weight gain for growth and development, I feel like it’s ONE MORE THING that new moms can be made to feel guilty about. It’s not like I was trying to keep my baby skinny in those first few weeks/months. All I ever did was try to feed my baby and make him pleasantly plump like he was supposed to be, and I felt like a total failure. At one meeting with the lactation consultants, my husband brought up the novel idea that maybe it’s just genetics – after all, he was always a skinny baby, and is still a fairly skinny (and very tall) adult (and his brain is just fine, dammit!). I thought this was brilliant and logical and made so much sense! The LC pursed her lips and said, “maybe,” but didn’t really validate the notion that some babies are just skinny. Yet in my awesome mamas’ group, there are quite a few of us with the tiny baby “problem,” who have all been through various degrees of stress and have worked our asses off to get some meat on our babies’ bones.

If us moms of skinny babies were to publicly brag as much as our counterparts with fat and happy kids, here’s what we might say to celebrate our successes:

“Finally grew out of newborn clothes at 5 months!”

“No more weekly weigh-ins with the feeding team!”

“Making our way up the curve at 7th percentile!”

“My barely adequate milk supply is keeping my baby alive!”

It just doesn’t sound as positive or celebratory. So yes, celebrate the hell out of your giant babies and their many chins and cheeks for days and ridiculously cute rolls; but don’t forget that our skinny babies can be equally adorable and precious and healthy and well-fed. And their brains will be JUST FINE!! And another thing… could you imagine if people talked about adults’ bodies the same way we talk about babies’ bodies?