As Stacey Solomon Responds To The ‘Glove Police’ Why Must We Keep Shaming Mums On Instagram?

Have you ever tried to get a toddler to do, um, anything? After sharing adorable Instagram pictures of her littlest, Rex, playing in the wake of the UK’s recent snowfall, Stacey Solomon found herself on the sharp end of mum-shaming comments questioning the toddler’s lack of gloves.

One sent a direct message – ‘Why is your child not wearing gloves!! His hands look freezing!!!!!!!!’ – and reignited a debate as old as the internet. What combination of feelings, precisely, leads trolls to believe that mother-children photos are actually cryptic cries for input from strangers? That these smart, successful women are just hanging out on social media, desperately awaiting unsolicited parenting advice like a dog frantic for the mail to arrive?

This is by no means the first time that celebrity mums have come under fire based on snapshots of their family lives. Posting judgemental quips is practically a national pastime, one which seems at odds with the everyday intimacy fans demand from celebrities on social media; from P!nk drinking a (decaf!) coffee while pregnant back in 2016 to Kylie Jenner’s nails being too long(?) ‘for a mum’ when she went to Coachella; from Kim Kardashian letting North straighten her hair to Mila Kunis breastfeeding in public, there seems no end to the ways that women are wrong, dreadful, and must be notified immediately.

I don’t have children, but I do have a little brother who just turned three. He wore cat ears to bed the other night, and all I can say is bon courage to the brave soul who wants to try and get him to put on shoes if he’s not feeling it. As for Rex, Stacey responded to the internet’s misplaced outrage with a similar line of reasoning. Penning a ‘message to the glove police’, she gently explained that what you’d like a small child to do, and what they would like to do, don’t always align.

"If I could get Rex to keep his gloves, hat and coat on I would. Believe me. But he is a toddler," wrote Stacey. "Anyone out there with one knows that they start off wearing it all and as the walk goes on they rip their hat off a thousand times, drop their gloves in the snow, and tread on them until they're soaking wet and no longer any use and they moan the whole time to take their coat off” she continued – “and then after all of that they cry when their hands get cold."

Yes. For reference, Stacey has two older boys – Zachary, 12, and Leighton, 6 – who are yet to succumb to frostbite (at least, they appear to be intact not only in limb but extremity too). Characteristically sunny, Stacey went high when her trolls went low with a positive sign off: “Anyone out there keeping all items of clothing of winter wear on their toddlers all day is my hero. I salute you.” I’ll go one further – anyone eating and/or showering as we hit the 12-month mark of this pandemic deserves a medal, and parents like Stacey who are adding home-schooling and childcare to the mix should be in line for a Nobel Prize.

READ MORE: Stacey Solomon's Cutest Mummy Moments