A mom has defended letting her infant son sleep in the shower after she was fiercely slammed online for sharing the ‘hack.’
Last month, Chloe Molina, 25, from California, faced immense scrutiny after she uploaded a video to TikTok explaining why she and her husband, David, had decided to put their baby to bed in the shower while on vacation.
She explained that her five-month-old son, Ezra, was ‘waking up’ all night long while sharing a hotel room with them during their trip to Mexico because he could sense they were in the room with him.
So they decided to move his crib to the bathroom, specifically in the shower, to give him his own quiet place to rest.
She said it helped immensely, and described it has her new ‘number-one travel hack.’
A mom has defended letting her infant son sleep in the shower after she was fiercely slammed online for sharing the ‘hack’
But some people on the web were not a fan of her admission and took to the comment section to criticize her, branding it as unsafe.
Now, Chloe has responded to the backlash to People magazine, explaining that Ezra sleeps so much better in the shower, and doesn’t even realize he’s in a bathroom.
‘He just knows that it’s a room with a door, with blacked-out darkness. He doesn’t know it’s a bathroom,’ she explained. ‘He sleeps the full night… Literally 12 hours.
‘[Babies] know if you’re two feet away from them so they’re going to constantly wake up and see you sleeping right next to them and want milk.
‘Especially if you’re breastfeeding, they can smell your milk, they can smell you.’
She also addressed people who were wondering how she and her husband used the bathroom after they put their son to bed.
‘We would take the shower curtain and just slightly pull it so it could cover his crib and he can’t see us use the bathroom,’ she explained.
‘Then once we were done, we would open the curtain back up. Then we would leave… and he didn’t wake up at all.’
Last month, Chloe Molina, 25, faced scrutiny after she uploaded a video explaining why she and her husband, David, had decided to put their baby to bed in the shower while on vacation
In the original TikTok video, which was viewed a whopping 522,000 times, Chloe couldn’t stop gushing over the ‘hack.’
‘When we travel, our baby sleeps in the shower. The reason why we do this is because for us, when our baby sleeps in our room, he smells us, he sees us, he just knows we’re there and wakes up all the time,’ she said.
‘So we give him his own room, AKA the bathroom, and usually the bathroom is way too tight to fit a crib and the shower is big enough, so we put the crib in the shower.
‘It feels like he has his own room, his own space, he doesn’t smell us, he doesn’t see us.
‘It’s our number one travel hack because your baby gets his own room without paying for another room.’
Immediately, however, the video was met with criticism, as some pointed out that bathrooms often have ‘mold’ and ‘fecal bacteria.’
‘My babies sleep in my room so they can smell me and hear me and know I’m there. Just such a different mindset to prioritize restful sleep over comfort and security,’ one mother scathed.
‘Imagine you go to a new place you’ve never been before and someone sticks you in a dark place that you’re not familiar with. I could never,’ another added.
‘Most showers have mold,’ someone else pointed out.
‘Personally with the strong cleaning agents that hotel room bathrooms are cleaned with that is the LAST place I would be putting my baby,’ a fourth comment read.
A fifth said, ‘Just get a hotel with a room separate from the living room. Or an Airbnb. The bathroom has tons of germs.’
‘I would just be worried about the air quality for a baby in there… everything we know about fecal bacteria… Is there another place?’ a different user asked.
‘I’d be too worried about water pipe would burst in the middle of the night,’ someone else confessed.
Another person commented, ‘Nah I would be terrified it would turn on.’
But some people on the web were not a fan of her admission and took to the comment section to criticize her, branding it as unsafe for the youngster
Chloe told People that she was unfazed by the negative comments, and wasn’t worried for her son’s safety in the bathroom.
‘I don’t really live in that parenting fear mindset in the first place. We don’t sit and live in fear,’ she said.
‘My takeaway is you have to do whatever you feel is best. You were chosen to be this baby’s parent, so if you feel that the best decision is to put them in the shower in the bathroom, it’s great.
‘Everyone has their own parenting style and you’re able to choose what is right based on what you believe is right for your child.’
She said she let Ezra sleep in the shower four nights on the trip, and that each one was successful.
She also said that while she doesn’t do it at home, she has put his crib in a closet when they had a guest over who stayed in his room.
In the end, she said she hoped by sharing her take online, other parents will ‘feel empowered to go on a trip with their kids.’
‘It [really] works,’ she concluded.
