Throw the baby manual out with the bathwater
I can understand exasperated Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg wanting to throw the baby manual out with the bathwater. He says he’s fed up with the prescriptive regime laid down by “The Contented Little Baby Book” and he and wife Miriam are instead rearing their second child according to their own parental instincts.
Author Gina Ford, self-proclaimed as “Britain’s Leading Parenting Expert” though she’s never been a mother herself, has hit back questioning whether he’s fit to be a party leader because his comments have "insulted the parenting choice of more than 2 million British voters.”
Perhaps she could show a little more humility. Best seller she may be, but she’s only the latest in a long, tedious line of baby experts who’ve captured the imagination of Britain’s tired and exhausted mums and dads, all too eager to buy the quick fix to a decent night’s sleep. Experts can be wrong – and time has proved some of them unwise, even dangerous and certainly faddish. Two million consumers may have bought her book, but it doesn’t mean they all buy into her style, a system that’s earned her the dubbing “Queen of routine”. Most of us parents feel we have finally come of age when we’ve learned how to cherry pick expert advice, and when to downright ignore it.
Over twenty two years bringing up five sons, I’ve thrown many baby books out of the window, from an old Reader’s Digest Baby Manual that told me “baby” should be in a strict routine from day one, to another advocating breast feeding right through till the child was four or five years old. I can’t even remember now what the book was called – but it caused a storm in the 80s and went out of print very quickly – after all, who wants to be breastfeeding a school age child, for heaven’s sake? Yet so much babying advice is delivered in dictatorial tones. It’s nursery fascism.
Voicing his frustrations in public, though, Nick Clegg has learned that baby experts like to think they are always right, and many approve their publishers hailing their works as “bibles”. Perhaps they understand that we mere mortals wouldn’t buy the books unless we also bought into the myth that baby experts are gods.
Just take what’s hot at the moment – “Your Pregnancy Bible” by paediatrician Anne Dean, “The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems” by Tracy Hogg and “Conception, Pregnancy and Birth: The Childbirth Bible for Today's Parents” by Miriam Stoppard. All marketed as the magic bullet, the key to happy families. It’s an enormous industry with huge rewards for those who make it to the top of the Amazon lists. Interesting how many of them, though, are regularly “revised” from year to year – presumably because some of the advice gets out of date, or needs a rethink? Gina Ford, a highly experienced maternity nurse and current leader of the pack with no less than six titles on offer, is as famously litigious as she is celebrated as the modern baby “guru”, which is why Nick Clegg smartly issued a public apology. Her book is the ultimate christening or baby shower gift. The new mums and dads of the Ipod age cling to her words with the same biblical devotion that my mum followed Dr Spock (“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" published in 1946, 50 million copies sold), and I clung to Penelope Leach (“Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five” published in 1977, three million copies in 29 languages).
I’ve had five sons, however, and the “expert” advice has changed with each one so I, too, have shared Nick Clegg’s frustration with books peddling “method” as panacea.
My first child, Oliver, now 22, was born in the liberal-minded baby days of the eighties. Nick Clegg would have approved. We were all into birthing pools, feeding on demand and following our own instincts. Doing it all “naturally” was such a mantra it became as much of a tyranny as the over-medicalisation it was trying to defeat.
My first born had what they then called “three month colic”. The baby gurus of the time, Sheila Kitzinger “Ourselves as Mothers” and Claire Rayner “Baby and Young Child Care” assured me that if I listened to their advice (quiet environment, gentle cuddles, a substantial feed and good winding session), plus my natural parenting instincts, our evenings would regain their former peace. I was reminded of the third world where women in rice paddies could give birth, feed the baby, strap him to their backs and get one with the harvest. If they could do it all so easily, why couldn’t I? After the first week of endless baby screaming, I was sure I must be the worst mother in the world because nothing was going according to the books, even though I had consumed every word. Finally I snapped, threw the books in the bin and called a helpline at the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) whose counsellor spent hours with me trying to get the baby to” latch on”. She came to the house and reassured me that it wasn’t about instinct, there was a method that both me and baby would have to learn. None of it worked. In the end, I sent out for formula and bottles, and threw the NCT lady out too.
By the time number two son came along, I was beginning to suss that the books weren’t necessarily right. They lectured that “breast was best”, but I knew it was no sin to bottle feed, even though the books threatened everything from a blighted childhood for him to a heightened risk of breast cancer for me! They said dummies were out and thumbs were in,(dummies they reckoned could cause deformed front teeth and carry germs)but I let James build up a collection of them. As a result – no colicky nights, no infections - and he has always had perfect teeth.
He was born in Australia in 1988. There were two major fads at that time. One was literally to throw baby in the swimming pool – a book called “Teach Your Baby To Swim” showed how babies retained the ir swimming instinct from the womb, and so could be easily taught to swim from almost the first week of life. As a result, “good” Sydney mothers like me queued up at their local pool for swimming lessons with their new-borns. My mother-in-law, who was staying with us at the time, thought I was quite mad. Taking a baby of just fourteen days old to a swimming lesson? She thought he’d pick up a nasty swimming pool bug. But the book said it would be better for him to learn to swim now so he wouldn’t drown as a toddler. So I went. What a palava. He looked cute at two weeks in his waterproof nappy, but he’s no better a swimmer now than the others who learned much later. It was a HUGE book at the time, but it didn’t change the world.
The other fad was for sheepskin fleeces. The experts said babies would sleep better on them. There were whole books about them. Fleeces, they said, would keep them “ breathably warm” and give them extra comfort and stop them fretting. It went with the prone position, of course. Baby was meant to sleep on his tummy, on a fleece, no matter how hot it was outdoors or in. Duvets had just become fashionable – as had cot “bumpers” – all to look pretty and make money for the babywear industry. The “experts” accordingly found sound medical reasons to recommend their use. They would keep baby warm and well protected from draughts...What, in our new centrally heated houses? Later, it was thought that fleeces could cause overheating, and the fad was dropped.
Hot housing kids, too – that was an enormous trend for a while, and spawned a hundred books from “Teach Your Baby To Read” to “The Better Baby Book”. I bought into both for a short while, flashing reading cards in front of my goggle-eyed three month olds, and buying them miniature violins for their first birthdays! I even visited The Better Baby Institute in Philadelphia to find out more. That’s until the whole movement folded under allegations that it was all actually ruining childhoods.
By the time I had baby number three, Sebastian, the prone sleeping position was a classic. Everyone was taught to put baby on his stomach for a good sleep.
This was the biggest fad – preached by all experts at the time. It was even in the government’s baby manual given to every new mother at clinic. It was taught to, and by, every midwife and maternity nurse in the UK and all over the world.
And it was dangerously wrong.
The advice was to sleep babies on their tummies. So much of child care is fad and fashion – and this one was the ultimate.
There never was a scientific reason for it, though once it became popular, the reasons became “babies sleep better on their stomachs”, “there’s less risk of choking” etc.
It is now thought that it was a fad that came from America, with the rise of special care baby units, from the late 60s. The popular image of the well cared-for baby was of the tiny premature infant, lying on his stomach with his bottom sticking up in the air, inside an incubator. Our childcare experts automatically thought that if premature babies did well (as they still do) in the prone position, then perhaps it would be true for all babies. And so they started to teach it, unquestioningly. It was only ever a fad, never a true, tried and tested science. Before long, it was official government advice, taught to and by midwives and maternity nurses for well over 20 years.
I’ll never forget proudly beaming at the sight of my baby sleeping soundly in his cot. He was lying prone, on his tummy, with his head turned to one side and his tiny thumb in his mouth.
My own mother came into the nursery and whispered: “Are you sure he’s all right like that? We would never have put them on their tummies in my day. Baby always had to be put down on one side for one nap, then turned onto the other side for the next sleep. Preferably in the pram and outdoors, even in the coldest weather! And no matter how hard they cried, you shouldn’t ever cuddle them or feed them unless it was time...”
“Oh yes, he’s fine,” I remember replying, totally sure of myself because I’d not only read it in several books, but the midwives had shown me in the hospital, too. “They sleep more soundly on their tummies. It’s best.....”
Sadly, tragedy taught me and thousands of other young parents of my generation, that the experts didn’t always know best, and the books sometimes got it wrong. Babies in the prone position run a much higher risk of cot death than babies lying on their backs. It was a fad that was fatal for some two thousand babies every year in the 80s and early 90s – that was four or five babies dying every day. We know this for a fact because, after the Back To Sleep campaign which I led at the end of 1991, urging parents to turn their babies over, the cot death rate plummeted by nearly 90 per cent.
The rules had been re-written. This time, by me. But when baby number four arrived, I realised that even my new, life-saving Golden Rules were proving a tyranny for others. I was inundated with letters from mums and dads asking me; what if baby won’t stay on his back? What if they keep rolling over? How do you get the babies to read the darn manual?
I was lucky. My new son was a perfect “sunbathing” sleeper. But I was obviously anxious. Co-sleeping was a risk factor in cot death, but only really if you were smoking or drunk. On the bookshelves there were baby books keenly advocating co-sleeping “Three in a Bed: The Benefits of Sleeping with Your Baby” by Deborah Jackson, and violently against it – so I compromised and bought a “bedside bed” – a sort of three sided cot which is designed to butt up against your side of the bed, so baby is right next to you but safe from being rolled upon. It worked for me. Co-sleeping is now actively campaigned against by government advisers, though many baby experts still believe it's great for mother-baby bonding..
By the time son number five came along, I was too busy to read baby books – though I have been known to keep a copy of Australian therapist Steve Biddulph’s tome “Raising Boys” always within arms reach. He has sensible, down to earth advice, especially for single mums of boys like me. Things like trying to find a range of good male role models, how to cope with testosterone-fuelled tempers and how to get sons to tidy their rooms. To me, he’s a guru almost worthy of the acclaim. I see, however, that even he has recently done a total “U” turn on early-years nurseries. Where he once claimed they were good for socialising toddlers, he now recommends that under-twos are better balanced if kept at home with mum. I could have told him that.
Baby care is an imprecise science. The best of parents admit they never stop learning, and get things wrong too. Perhaps we all want to believe that there really is a perfect way to bring up baby, and that’s why we place gurus and experts on a pedestal from which we will inevitably shove them when we feel we know better!
I’ve only held on to a couple of “expert” books, now dog-eared but much loved – Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child, Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys and just one cookbook for young mums that’s still a favourite because the meals still suit my family even though we’re all now grown up – The Book of Children’s Foods, by Lorna Rhodes.
Most baby books mean well, many are useful from time to time, but bibles they ain’t.
There’s a place for baby experts. But it’s not on a pedestal. |
