Why I Stay Close

Blindness, Parenting, and Misinterpretations

A few weeks ago, our crew attended a one-year-old’s birthday party. The crowd was mostly my husband’s friends, so while he caught up with people he knew, I wandered the yard with the baby strapped to my chest, trailing behind my daughter as she fumbled with a bubble wand that barely worked.

Bubble with blury nature background. Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash

Nearby, a couple of fathers joked about “helicopter parenting.” They laughed about how absurd parenting has become, with adults hovering over children in a fenced backyard as though danger lurked beside the juice boxes and balloons.

Their critique was not entirely wrong.

Over the past several decades, parenting norms have shifted toward what sociologists call intensive parenting: constant attentiveness, emotional absorption, and the ongoing optimization of children’s development. Parenting has become more labor-intensive and more performative, especially in middle- and upper-middle-class cultures where investment in children is read as good parenting.

At that party, it was also obvious who was doing the hovering.

While those fathers joked about overinvolvement, mothers followed toddlers to prevent falls, mediate conflicts, and wipe hands and faces. Even in heterosexual households that aim for equity, women still tend to carry more of the apparent caregiving and the less apparent cognitive labor like anticipating needs, coordinating schedules, managing emotions, and planning for holidays and school events.

Contemporary parenting culture rewards performances of investment: themed birthday parties, homemade enrichment activities, color-coordinated lunches packed into bento boxes. None of this necessarily requires sustained curiosity about a child as a person. Sometimes it does the opposite, narrowing attention into logistics, output, and appearance.

Bento box kids’ lunch. Photo by Dana Sarsenbekova on Unsplash

As a psychologist, I am less interested in these idealized parenting standards than in parental capacity. Parents’ ability to emotionally regulate, connect, express genuine curiosity, and respond to the unique needs of their child at a given moment matters so much more than whether childhood looks optimized from the outside.

Children may enjoy the curated parts of contemporary parenting, but what matters more is the relational environment around them: whether caregivers are emotionally available, responsive to their unique needs, flexible, and able to repair after rupture.

In that yard, I was acutely aware of how I must have looked. I looked like the kind of parent those fathers were mocking. I stayed close to my daughter, tuned in to her movements and voice, ready to respond quickly.

What they could not see was that my proximity was not anxiety. It was adaptation.

Because of my blindness, I cannot reliably monitor my toddler from a distance. I cannot scan a space for hazards or quickly tell what she has picked up unless I’m close enough to touch it or ask someone nearby. I cannot parent from afar, so I stay close.

When she tumbles in the yard, I run my hands over her skin to check for scrapes or swelling. From the outside, it can look like hovering or overprotection. In reality, touch is one of the ways I access information.

Other moments can be read the opposite way. When I’m fatigued or my eyes are strained, I get clumsy and uncoordinated. I knock over my daughter’s glass of milk or bump into her. That can look like distraction or inattention.

When my newborn developed a rash, my husband noticed and tracked it. At the pediatrician’s office, the questions about when it started or how it changed were directed to me automatically, even after he was the one to answer. Maternal attentiveness is treated as natural and expected, regardless of who is doing the monitoring.

I felt the familiar wave of guilt, the sense that I was supposed to know something I didn’t. And at the same time, I knew my child was safe and cared for.

I do not drive, which means there are experiences my children will have without me. As they grow older, those absences will accumulate: field trips, performances, school events. Even when I am physically present, I don’t have access to what others in the room can easily take in: faces on a stage, details of a piece of art, the shared visual field that structures the experience.

Recently, my husband realized that our toddler had been answering questions by nodding or shaking her head, and I had been missing it entirely. We taught her (and still remind her) to respond verbally with me. From her perspective, I simply was not responding. I hadn’t recognized her attempts to communicate.

It would be easy, especially through intensive parenting ideals, to frame these moments as parental deficit: not enough attention, not enough participation. But that misses what is actually happening.

My children are learning interdependence. They are learning that people access the world differently, that communication requires accommodation, and that relationships are built through working with human differences.

Disability doesn’t just change parenting practices. It exposes what parenting norms assume in the first place.

During that birthday party, those fathers looked across the yard and thought they understood what they were seeing. I think about them joking near the juice boxes and balloons while I followed my daughter across the yard. From the outside, I likely looked anxious, over-involved, unable to let her out of my sight. They could not see that my proximity was not fear. It’s how I parent safely and stay connected to my child.