--- title: What the Phrase 'They're Only Little Once' Says to Mothers description: At its best, the phrase urges parents to cherish small moments with their children. At its worst, it bullies new mothers into martyring themselves. canonical: https://time.com/6311184/theyre-only-little-once-motherhood-essay/ author: Amanda Montei article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-09-07T15:48:50.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:56.393Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Think Before Telling Mothers 'They're Only Little Once' og:description: "When my first child was a toddler and I could not afford daycare, I tried embracing the phrase" og:url: https://time.com/6311184/theyre-only-little-once-motherhood-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3f9ec525c4f084f4/698a401b457a525ad4d67ec2/motherhood-magnum-photos-children-e1694094840334.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1800 og:image:height: 1013 og:image:alt: Norway. 2018. Nesodden.?Boe, Billie and Anna. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Think Before Telling Mothers 'They're Only Little Once' twitter:description: "When my first child was a toddler and I could not afford daycare, I tried embracing the phrase" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3f9ec525c4f084f4/698a401b457a525ad4d67ec2/motherhood-magnum-photos-children-e1694094840334.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why You Should Think Before Telling Mothers 'They're Only Little Once' > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online [Watch (HLS stream): Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oxvh4VUE.m3u8) (4:07)  _Published 2023-08-24. The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram._ by [Amanda Montei](https://time.com/author/amanda-montei/) ## Amanda Montei Sep 7, 2023 3:48 PM UTC  Norway. 2018\. Nesodden.?Boe, Billie and Anna. Norway. 2018\. Nesodden.?Boe, Billie and Anna. Jonas Bendiksen—Magnum Photo by [Amanda Montei](https://time.com/author/amanda-montei/) ## Amanda Montei Sep 7, 2023 3:48 PM UTC As soon as I became a mother, I began to hear the phrase. _They’re only little once_. Parents and those without children all seemed to agree: most of the [sacrifices mothers make](https://time.com/6045818/supporting-mothers-after-baby-is-born/) can be explained away by the crushing force of time, which threatens to take our young children before we’re ready, or before we’ve done enough to ensure their success. When my first child was a toddler and I could not afford daycare, I tried embracing the phrase. I found a job at an in-home childcare center where I could care for my daughter and work at the same time. Childcare was not my chosen profession, but I knew many mothers who had altered their careers and personal lives entirely so that they could spend more time with their children. When I spoke of my strange and sudden life shift to other mothers and fretted about how long this upheaval might go on, they called up that familiar retort. Things were not quite how I or they wanted them. We had [lost ourselves](https://time.com/6177113/motherhood-sacrifice-roe-v-wade/), given up professional ambitions, friends, community, the pursuit of other forms of fulfillment, everything that gave us an identity and a personality. We were confused and overtaxed, unmoored, a little unhinged. But it would pass, we nodded to each other. They’re only little once. ### More From TIME In part this line of thinking was an effort to cut each other some slack. We brought each other back from the brink of disappointment, sadness, depression, and fury. And we believed that our children were better off when we gave up everything to spend more time with them. **Read More:** [_The Conversation That Changed How I Thought About Early Motherhood_](https://time.com/5787442/motherhood-are-you-ok/) But the effect of this thinking was more guilt, less release. It was hard to parent children who were young without affordable childcare, sufficient [paid leave](https://time.com/6114013/paid-family-leave-four-weeks/), comprehensive postpartum care, or any reentry programs to help me get back to work. I felt disconnected from many moments, particularly as I contemplated who I had become and why I didn’t find more joy in caring for children all day, but I understood that it was still crucial that I _cherish every moment_. I didn’t yet see the outlines of the misogynistic belief that women’s unhappiness was an inevitable side effect of parenthood, much less the limits of how we think about time well spent with children. In 1965,John Bowlby, sometimes referred to as the father of attachment theory, listed a mother who worked full time alongside the death or imprisonment of a parent, war, and famine, as part of his broader thesis on “maternal deprivation.” Since then, ideas about the supposed “peak experience” of parenting children under 4 have given new life to such claims. Conservative figure [Jordan Peterson, for instance,](https://time.com/5175974/jordan-peterson-12-rules-book-interview/) has warned that [parents “miss” this time at their “peril”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbvszkKfLgA) and can’t “get back” precious time lost with young kids. [His words](https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/03/instagram-reels-kids-peak-experience-guilty.html?pay=1691790477902&support%5Fjournalism=please) have made the rounds on social media, softened by nostalgic images of young kids and their parents. But our cultural overemphasis on optimizing this period primarily implicates women, who are more likely to feel the pressure to reorient their personal and professional lives around the creation of “core memories.” Peterson himself acknowledges that women may experience career setbacks trying to make the most of these years, and that such setbacks contribute to the [gender pay gap](https://time.com/6259175/gender-pay-gap-us-pew-report/), but, he says, “no one knows what to do” about that. **Read More:** [_Motherhood Is Hard to Get Wrong. Why Do So Many Moms Feel So Bad About Themselves?_](https://time.com/4989068/motherhood-is-hard-to-get-wrong/) At its best, the phrase “they're only little once” urges parents to cherish small moments with their children. At its worst, however, the phrase bullies new mothers into martyring themselves in service of their children’s development, often by sacrificing their own autonomy, sense of self, and connections to a wider community outside the home. I have since returned not just to my career ambitions, but to other forms of work and connection. At first, I felt pangs of sadness about what I might be missing when I was away from my children. But over time, I came to see that these worries prevented me from recognizing and appreciating the other relationships my kids had built–with daycare teachers, with extended relatives, with other children in our growing network of care. The years we spend with our children when they are young are indeed fast and fleeting, and parenthood often feels like a state of mourning. We reckon with a certain loss of closeness with our children that is unavoidable and healthy, and the longing that sometimes comes with our own experiences of aging. But there is much more grief to be found in keeping to ourselves, in a world that so often wants us separate and divided. The way we understand time well spent with kids also overlooks the fact that a mother’s time matters too. What me, after all, was always there in the early years with my children when they were so young? Certainly a less whole version of the person I am today. However present I may have been in the room, I was not me, but some image of what a mother should be. This is yet another great potential loss for children, and more important, for women, who cannot “get back” the years so many lose to early parenthood. I no longer apply a lens of scarcity to my time with my children, nor do I hoard time with them. We have so many years, and they have so much to extend to others beyond me, and beyond our home. The unavoidable passage of time still weighs on me as I enter midlife, and as I watch my children age, too, coming into other versions of themselves. I long for pudgy baby legs and lost turns of phrase as much as any parent. But now, I also find pleasure in my evolving relationships with my kids. They are less me, more them, every day, an utter delight to witness, as I become less mother, more myself. Rather than cherish every moment, I now cherish the forward movement of time—my children making friends, finding more adults they can trust, picking up slang at school, feeling new emotions, bringing home lessons about how to live among others. My own time spent away from them is richer and fuller too.We are bending toward the wider world, and toward a future that is a bit freer than the present moment. ## Transcript For mental health issues you might be avoiding right now. One, you don't have the life you had before the pandemic. You never will again. When the pandemic was happening and everyone was experiencing lots of like mental health issues, it put a spotlight on mental health creators that were posting online. You can't love someone else until you love yourself as bullsht. Because one end implies that people with low self-esteem or mental health issues are incapable of loving others. Just so. With that, I have a disclaimer on my, you know, TikTok and Instagram that this is not therapy or my mental health pics are not specifically tailored to you. Sure, I'm a licensed therapist, but I'm not your lessons therapist. All the online spaces where I share content. Yes. Even those livestreams where you shoot me questions are not therapy sessions, so I want somebody to like taking my content and then think about it and analyze it. Therapy speak is a new way of saying psychobabble. They're usually more like vulnerable words that talk about like the primary emotions that you're experiencing. But there's other ways that people are using that language, hurt people or manipulate people or control people or sort of like shut down conversations. There's a difference between selfishness and grandiosity and narcissism. It's very rare that you would be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. They tend to believe everything is everyone else's fault, and it comes out of early childhood. There is a stage of development where your ego is separate from other people's ego, and you're able to see that both of those are important. Something is wrong and that development and it leads someone having a really hard time seeing other people's needs as important as their own. Gaslighting is a pretty popular term these days, and what it means is somebody is trying to manipulate you into believing in a reality that's not true. But sometimes people are like, What? You're disagreeing with me. You're not validating my experience, you're gaslighting me, which is not actually what they're doing. So if you say that somebody is a gaslighter, that can be like a pretty incendiary accusation. You and I think that everybody should clearly express what their boundaries are in relationships. It's sort of like a blueprint that you'll offer somebody. So a healthy boundary that somebody might create is I'm not going to continue talking to you if you start to yell at me a different way to use boundaries. That's not exactly correct is to try to control somebody's behavior and manipulate somebody's behavior. You're allowed to say, I don't want to go to dinner, right? That's a boundary. But to be like, you know, well, I'll go if you go to this kind of place, but I'm not going to go if you go to this kind of place and you can't tell me, I can't because I'm allowed to set boundaries. Right. You're now like over stating it. Five small but very brave green flags in a relationship. One you sense their connection with you throughout the day. We keep talking for decades and decades and decades in the field of how we can improve mental health. And the reality is, is that the way you improve anything is with education. Therapists and Instagram and YouTube could do a better job at verifying their licenses and degrees and trainings that therapists have. And if therapists and mental health professionals didn't have to talk about things in coded ways like eating disorders or social justice or anxiety or depression or suicidality, then I think that there could be like some really good education happening online. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6311184/theyre-only-little-once-motherhood-essay/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6311184/theyre-only-little-once-motherhood-essay/"},"headline":"Why You Should Think Before Telling Mothers 'They're Only Little Once'","datePublished":"2023-09-07T15:48:50.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:50:56.393Z","description":"\"When my first child was a toddler and I could not afford daycare, I tried embracing the phrase.\"","url":"https://time.com/6311184/theyre-only-little-once-motherhood-essay/","keywords":["Family","freelance","society-team"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3f9ec525c4f084f4/698a401b457a525ad4d67ec2/motherhood-magnum-photos-children-e1694094840334.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Amanda Montei","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/amanda-montei/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3f9ec525c4f084f4/698a401b457a525ad4d67ec2/motherhood-magnum-photos-children-e1694094840334.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Norway. 2018. 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