What to Know
A mom on TikTok just did what the internet does not handle well: she said the simple part out loud. In the viral video, she explains her “how to shower with a newborn” hack: you put the baby in a safe place (like a crib), and then you take a shower. No balancing act. No shower bouncer. No baby strapped to your body for a not-at-all relaxing dual cleansing ritual neither of you will enjoy.
Just a clean, contained baby and a mom who gets seven uninterrupted minutes to remember what it feels like to be a human with shampooed hair. Honestly? Genius. Not because it’s complicated, but because in the newborn fog, even obvious solutions can feel impossible until someone spells them out like a permission slip. Especially if it’s your first time on the new parent merry-go-round.
“Repeat after me,” writes @its.dayank, the mom behind the video. “You are allowed to shower even with a baby! My first baby would SCREAM anytime I set him down so I just never did. It didn’t make me a better mom—it just made me miserable and fed my PPD.”
She adds that you’re “allowed to take care of yourself” and that you “absolutely should.”
I’ll take things I wish I had subscribed to when I was a first-time new parent with increasingly greasy hair and a terrible guilt complex. She’s 100% right!
Newborn life trains you to believe you can’t do anything unless the baby is physically attached to you like a tiny, adorable barnacle. But this mom is basically reminding parents that a crib is literally designed for safe containment, and it’s OK if the baby cries for a few minutes while you do a basic bodily function. Sometimes the most helpful parenting advice isn’t another product recommendation — it’s hearing another mom say, “You’re allowed to meet your own needs.”
A lot of comments were supportive, and a lot were—predictably—full of excuses as to why that person couldn’t possibly put their baby down.
Luckily, one of the top comments shut it all down brilliantly:
“K yall so the special circumstances where your baby had something WRONG with them are obviously not what we’re talking about. Go preach elsewhere. All you’re doing is contributing to making women feel bad for BATHING.”
There are a lot of reasons why videos like this one resonate and matter so much. It’s because it’s not saying you’re failing or doing something wrong if you don’t do this. It’s saying, “Hey, if you’ve been waiting for permission to take care of yourself, here you go!” And that’s everything for a lot of moms.
