Is She Good?

How the assignment of virtue or iniquity to our natural ways of being begins at birth.

AJ Singh
February 26, 2026

People love a baby. They stop in the street to coo over them, frowns turn into smiles as folks catch their gaze with their sparkly little eyes. Despite my limited social battery, I never tire of engaging with strangers over the cuteness of my child. Inevitably though, particularly in my conservative, Conservative, white, aging town, the commentary soon highlights a sickness within the way we view ourselves and each other.

The first question is usually ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’. Only once in 6 months has someone voluntarily referred to my child as ‘they’ when they didn't know the baby’s sex. I still find it so strange and jarring that people would prefer to call my child ‘it’ than use they to mean singular. Once we were in a coffee shop and a person stopped and started talking to me. They were holding an older child and said ‘look, there’s a baby'. They began bobbing about and I realised they were trying to look at what my baby was wearing from different angles. They then said ‘Is it a boy or a girl, I can’t tell from the clothes’. My nesting partner joked later that they may as well have said, as they were weaving about all over the place, ‘Is it a boy or a girl? I can’t seem to see your baby’s genitals’.

The second question is most often this: ‘Is she good?’. They may be more specific, ‘Is she a good sleeper?', ‘Is she a good eater?’. What they mean to ask, what they are getting at, is does she make my life as easy as possible? The message is clear - ‘Good’ babies make their parents’ lives easy. We measure how good or, conversely, how bad a baby is by how little they disrupt the lives of the adults who chose to bring them into their lives and homes. Never once have I been asked, is she happy? Is she well?

I was at a medical appointment for my child recently and she was well slept and well fed and happily cooing in my arms during the appointment. The Doctor said ‘she is so good!’, to which I replied that I enjoy her a great deal but that I have no other frame of reference by which to compare her ways of being against anything. To which the Doctor said ‘trust me, I see a lot of babies and she is by far the best behaved’. This is an excellent example of how early we assign value judgements and virtue to our natural ways of being. By calling it ‘behaviour’, it also implies that this tiny, new being is somehow aware of how her needs and responses are impacting me and is doing ‘her best’ to align to the standards and expectations of those around her. Babies don’t choose how they behave. They respond to their needs, their environment and their caregivers. They are not capable of manipulation or of perceiving what is expected of them. Babies are not good or bad. They have no moral compass, no understanding of ethics, no comprehension of help or harm. They just, are.

These reactions to and questions about my child perfectly demonstrate how our relationships with and to goodness, badness, behaviour and ways of existing are deliberately and systematically warped from the moment we are born, and the inherent ableism at the heart of these ideas. Without guardians to contradict these comments and questions, or to offer an alternative way to view responses to stimuli, personality and needs, children absorb and internalise these messages, thus creating an enormous amount of work for their future selves to unlearn and reframe how they view themselves and their worth.

To understand how we got here we must ask: what drives the requirement of our children to be ‘good’? The answer is that it has emerged to fill the void left by the village we no longer have around us to help raise them. Without that support network, we are unable to take care of children and ourselves fully unless our children are ‘easy’, or we have the financial capability to pay for that support. If your child won’t sleep at night without being held - how are you supposed to function, go back to paid work, look after yourself? How is one supposed to breastfeed every two to three hours while working full-time? What if you are a single parent? What if you are Disabled? What if your child is Disabled? Instead of placing the blame for this impossible situation on the systems that have failed to provide for the basic needs of procreation, we have somehow normalised the lack of support, the lack of community, and made it such that the fault lies with the child themselves. What a number these systems of harm do on us! ‘Don’t blame extractive capitalism, it’s your baby’s fault they have needs!’

When you’re so tired you can’t function, there is supposed to be another person available to you to care for the baby so you can sleep. When you can’t breast or chestfeed because your nipples are cracked and sore, or you don’t produce enough/any milk, or you just need to rest and heal, or your sensory needs prohibit you from breat/chestfeeding, there is supposed to be someone else who can nourish your child (and some children, mine included, will not take a bottle). In Vietnam, South Sudan, Somalia, and within various Indigenous communities, there are practices of Grandmothers and Matriarchs relactating in order to ensure the survival of babies and support birthing parents. When you are losing your sense of self and your grounding in peace and calm, there is supposed to be someone to care for your child while you take a break. The nuclear family model was created and popularised in order to reinforce extractive capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy through solidifying gender roles, isolating us and demonising more communal, supportive practices.

Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, do we really want to raise our children to be the definition of ‘good’ dictated by systems that are actively harming us? Do we want them to be ‘well behaved’ by standards that benefit the few and exploit and persecute the many? Or do we want to raise children who will rail against these limiting constructs and bring a better reality into being?