If Not "Trust Your Gut," Then What?

What do you say when a Mom looks at you and says, "I don't know what to do."

Maybe she's asking whether to move her toddler into a big-kid bed. Maybe she's wondering if childcare is the right decision. Maybe she's exhausted from months of broken sleep and questioning everything she's doing.

Whatever the question, most of us respond the same way. We want to help. We want to reassure. We want to make the uncertainty feel a little smaller before the conversation ends. That's where phrases like, "Trust your gut," often come from. They're offered with kindness, with compassion, and with the hope that a parent will leave feeling more confident than when they arrived.

I don't think we say them because we don't care. I think we say them because it's incredibly hard to sit with someone else's uncertainty. When someone tells us they're scared or that they don't know what to do, every instinct in us wants to make that feeling go away.

This is where I think we unintentionally go wrong.

We assume the most helpful thing we can offer is reassurance. But what if reassurance isn't what a parent needs most in that moment? What if understanding comes first?

Every time we tell someone to trust their gut, we're ending a conversation that hasn't really begun. We stop wondering. We stop asking questions. We stop trying to understand. Instead of asking what the child might be communicating, or what the parent has already noticed, or what has and hasn't worked so far, we reassure them that the answer is already inside of them somewhere.

I don't think parents need another reassuring phrase. I think they need someone willing to stay with them in the uncertainty long enough for understanding to emerge. What have you noticed? What have you already tried? What do you think your child might be communicating? What did that feel like for you?

Those questions don't magically produce an answer, but they do something much more important. Certainty asks no questions. Curiosity does. That's where understanding begins.

Interestingly, the science seems to point us in this direction, too. When studying the parental brain, Ruth Feldman describes it as developing over time, through relationship.  The brain isn't simply prepared for caregiving; it continues changing as the relationship unfolds. I actually find that much more comforting than the idea of maternal intuition because it means parents don't have to arrive with all the answers. They come to know their child through thousands of interactions, through paying attention, through trying something, reflecting on it, and trying again. Knowledge doesn't appear overnight. It unfolds through relationship.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to the idea that mothering is an unfolding of knowledge.

The next time a parent says, "I don't know what to do," I hope we resist the urge to make that uncertainty disappear. I hope we stay there just a little longer. Long enough to wonder. Long enough to understand.

What might we understand if we stayed there just a little longer?