Paris Hilton is receiving a mother-load of mom-shaming.
A clip from the heiress’ Peacock reality series, “Paris in Love,” has gone viral on TikTok thanks to Hilton’s decision to wait a month before attempting to change her son’s diaper for the first time.
The clip, from season 2, episode 3, shows Hilton admitting she’s “scared” about the task.
In the actual episode, it’s established that Phoenix, Hilton’s son, was 32 days at the time. Due to this, text over the clip on TikTok reads “Not Paris learning how to change her [son’s] diaper for the first time after a month,” with a string of cry-laughing emojis.
Hilton’s sister Nicky, a mother of three, is there with Paris, and tries to hide her shock that it’s the first time her sister has changed her son’s diaper.
“You’ve never done it?” Nicky asks.
“No,” Paris confirms, before Nicky and her son’s nanny step in to teach Paris the ropes.
The women teach Paris where the front and back of the diaper is, tell her to be more “gentle” while changing Phoenix, and encourage her to talk to him while she’s changing him.
Paris looks a bit awkward and out of her comfort zone, but does not abandon the task.
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Responses to the clip on social media weren’t kind. Many people accused Paris of being out of touch with reality and not bonding sufficiently with her son, and criticizing her for using a nanny.
The TikTok clip, it should be said, lacks a fair amount of context.
In the episode, after Phoenix’s diaper is changed, Nicky tells her sister that she should slow down her work schedule in order to bond more with her baby.
“What’s your best advice?” Paris asks her sister.
“Learning to say no, and not taking that job. You don’t need the money,” Nicky says. “[Phoenix’s infancy] is such a small window, and it’s so sweet, and you don’t want to miss it. This should be the priority.”
Later in a confessional, Nicky calls her sister a “workaholic” and says she hopes Paris takes the advice to spend more time with her son.
Further along in the season, Paris seems to be making an effort to be more present for her child. In episode 8, she tells her business associates pushing her to take another job that she wants to do “as many things that we can at home as possible, so I’m able to go check on the baby and not have to leave him so much.”
In the same episode, Paris — a survivor of post-traumatic stress disorder — tells Nicky she’s seeing a therapist to help with her fears and concerns about being a new parent.
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“I’ve been having all these really intrusive thoughts just when I’m holding Phoenix,” Paris confides in her sister. “All of a sudden, like some traumatic experience will come back in my memory and I’lll start thinking of all these horrible things that I’ve been through. I can’t even be fully in the moment. It’s just not fair to Phoenix not to get the full me.”
“Parenthood is scary,” Nicky said, admitting to Paris that although she didn’t have “intrusive thoughts” as a new mom, she had a whole lot of “nerves.”
“Am I doing this right? Am I holding her correctly? So you’re definitely not alone.”
Indeed, many women express these kinds of vulnerabilities when they become mothers. In 2018, HuffPost spoke to a group of therapists about the most common concerns they hear from clients who are new parents, including feelings of doing things wrong and missing their old lives.
“The number one thing that I hear from new moms is concern that they are doing ‘it’ wrong,” Gwendolyn Nelson-Terry, a marriage and family therapist in California, told HuffPost. “I work with new moms to develop a sense of confidence in their ability to parent, I help them to understand that mistakes are normal and OK, and I help them to come to terms with and to understand that there really is no such thing as a perfect parent.”