From the archives: How to survive when you feel trapped by breastfeeding or attachment parenting.

With this blog having been running for eighteen months now, I think it’s high time some of our most popular posts are re-posted occasionally for new readers to see more easily. So, by a very long way, here is the most popular post on The Awakened Parent (then Free Your Parenting) to date:

This post is partly inspired by Sarkozy’s ill-considered words last week, and also by a thread I read on Mumsnet by a mother who is sick of breastfeeding her five month old baby who is refusing to take a bottle.

I think the mother is incredibly brave to come out and say what she did. It’s kind of taboo to say ‘I hate breastfeeding’ in a culture where the whole issue is so sensitive and when we’re told repeatedly that ‘breast is best’.

How do we admit that we resent how breastfeeding ties us to our babies when everyone else seems to be loving it?

I have a hunch that most of the issues we have with parenting in our culture, particularly things like post-natal depression, are born from the huge mismatch between our nature and our culture. I first had this situation explained clearly and logically to me in the book I reviewed a couple of weeks ago (which you can also win a copy of) Breastfeeding, Takes Two by Stephanie Casemore.

Breastfeeding is natural. Mothers and babies are biologically programmed to have a breastfeeding relationship. It is not breastfeeding that ties us to our babies but nature, because staying close to our babies is also natural.

Human babies are born far too early compared to other mammals. In order to squeeze their large heads through pelvises that allow us to walk upright, they need to be born at least three months earlier than they should be.

Many people talk nowadays about a ‘fourth trimester’. Consider that our newborns have been held inside us, constantly nourished, never too full, never too hungry, never alone, never in silence for over nine months. And now consider the shock of being born into a world where you are sometimes desperately hungry, sometimes uncomfortably full, sometimes left alone with no human contact, and, for some babies, occasionally left alone in a room that is silent.

Newborn human babies need time to adjust to being outside the womb, and it’s usually at least the first three months (hence the phrase ‘the fourth trimester’). Many parents will recognise that this is the time their babies start to ‘wake up’ and become more interested in the outside world. Before that point, their whole world is Mummy, and that’s how they’re set up biologically to live.

Babies don’t become clingy and tied to their Mum because their Mums keep them close, they are biologically programmed to be clingy and tied to their Mum. It is normal human baby behaviour.

It is not normal in our culture, however, to allow this to happen. For over a century we have been told by baby ‘experts’ to train our babies to be independent from us as early as possible. To train them to be able to fall asleep, and stay asleep, apart from us. To be with other adults without being distressed – or even to just be alone without being distressed.

We are told we need to send our children to nursery in order to learn how to socialise, and to school in order to learn how to live. It’s as if the ‘experts’ believe that eighteen year olds will still need to be breastfed and sleep with their parents if they’re not forced to learn how to be self-sufficient by the age of eighteen weeks!

But this simply isn’t the case. You can trust your baby to become an independent adult one day, but that’s easier said than done when we parent in a culture that doesn’t trust in that process at all.

And that is the crux of the painful feelings that many mothers experience – the mismatch between what our bodies and our babies bodies are telling us, and what our culture is telling us. In addition, we live in a culture that doesn’t respect or value children, mothers or families.

Children are expected to be separate from every day life, and so are mothers. Consider the media bashing Louise Mensch got when she dared to let her work as a mother come into her work as an MP recently. Our culture says that children should not impact on the rest of our lives…or on anyone else’s lives.

This is incredibly isolating for mothers, particularly those who choose to stay close to their babies. Those mothers who take this approach in our culture risk not only their careers, but also their sanity. We are few and far between – I remember vividly the weeks when most of my Mummy friends started to go back to work, and I felt more and more alone and isolated – and that is not very conducive to happy, contented parenting.

And worse, even if we are lucky enough to find a support network of mothers who also have chosen to stay close to their babies and allow them to grow up in their own time, some of us are weighed down by the terrible feelings of entrapment. Once we’ve made this decision, for many of us that is it – the choice is made and we cannot go back.

Like the Mumsnet mother who said that she has no choice about breastfeeding now that her baby won’t take bottles, the feeling of having no option can be incredibly stifling. Even if we know deep down that we would choose this approach had we the opportunity to make a choice, for some of us, the knowledge that we are now effectively trapped in this role can make it unbearable.

It’s easy to blame breastfeeding for this feeling of enslavement, but it’s not that at all. If this is you, I can categorically say that you haven’t ‘made a rod for your own back’. It is likely that your babies will grow up secure and happy and all this hard work will pay off in the end. It is nothing you’ve done that has created this situation – your baby is simply behaving normally. It is our culture that behaves abnormally, and our culture that has created this situation for you.

Imagine living in a culture where children were not segregated but were, instead, welcomed as full members of society. Imagine working in jobs where babies can come with you, and toddlers can play around your feet while you work. Imagine mothers being valued and celebrated. Imagine a society that did what it could to make life easier for mothers – sharing child-caring duties, large groups of children of different ages who play with and learn from each other, children who are enabled to learn about the adult world by living in it.

Can you see that if you lived in a more natural culture like this, breastfeeding wouldn’t be a tie at all? You would simply keep your baby in a sling, get on with your life, and feed your baby whenever she needed it with very little disruption to you. And when you needed a break from your baby (which you probably wouldn’t), your baby would have been brought up spending so much time around other adults and children that it is likely he’d be more than happy to be held by someone else for short periods of time…so long as that separation is managed by him, not you.

Can you see that if you lived in this culture, it wouldn’t be unacceptable to say ‘sorry, I can’t do this job just this moment because my children need me’? Instead, if you said that, everyone else would say ‘of course! We adults can wait because we have learnt that, and children can’t – see to your child and then we can talk’.

So breastfeeding and responsive parenting isn’t a tie – our culture makes it isolating and solitary, hard work. But how on earth do we do it, then, if we feel it’s the right thing for us and our babies but we live in this bizarre culture?

The best thing I can suggest if you are one of the mums who is feeling this way, is that you seek out other parents who are parenting in the same way you are, and talk to them honestly. When this woman posted on Mumsnet, she expected a bashing, instead, however, she got a rush of other mothers telling her they could totally relate. The next day the original poster said she was feeling much better and it had just been a bad patch. Bad patches are normal, but they’re scary when we have to live through them on our own, so tell people, and let them hold you through it.

Having a support network around you can also help with things like sharing parenting – visiting places together takes the pressure off you, and someone else can help your toddler do up her coat while you breastfeed your baby so you don’t have to get flustered trying to decide which thing to do first.

It’s not helpful to choose support that consists of people who will tell you just to put your baby in nursery, or to wean them off the breast if that is what is important to you, so be prepared with what to say to people who suggest that. Tell them exactly what help you need – a listening ear? an acknowledgement of how hard you’re finding it? practical help like doing your laundry for a couple of weeks?

I’m not going to suggest that you all home educate, but I’d like to share my experience of the home education community, because it’s so interesting. What I’ve found is that a lot of home educators (not all) practice what they call ‘attachment parenting’, but even if they don’t, they are very sympathetic to the very particular demands of being on hand for your babies or children all day every day.

Having my later babies, having already become friends by that point with many other home educators, was much easier than having my first two. I would go along to busy home ed groups, and I would see one of my older children being helped by another adult or an even older child – she didn’t feel such a need to come to me because she was comfortable with these other people.

Someone would always step in to hold my baby while I went to the loo or changed a toddler’s nappy, but if my baby screamed, instead of saying ‘oh, she’ll be fine’, they’d hand her back and say ‘I’ll do the nappy for you’. These whole aftern0on-long home ed groups became a real refuge for me – relaxing, fun, and like what parenting in a community should be like. I would drive home with a heart that felt heavier with each mile, knowing I had two more hours alone with my children before my husband came home.

So you’re not alone if you find breastfeeding, or any aspect of close, responsive parenting stifling and frightening. You’re normal and not struggling with mothering but with mothering in our culture. And your baby isn’t being clingy because of anything you’ve done, but because he’s normal, and you’re expecting him to behave in the way our culture tells us babies behave…which isn’t normal. (Also, check out the bottom of this post, where I talk about the cycle of insecurity)

So find a support network, and be honest about your feelings is my suggestion for how to survive if you choose to breastfeed and/or to parent in this close, responsive way.

I’d love to hear your experiences of feeling trapped by breastfeeding or close, responsive parenting and how you dealt with it.

Images: Pinot & Dita, JMaz Photo & Brighton Sling Babies, Flickr

Edited: I’ve just changed a few sentences to make it clearer that not all mothers feel so oppressed like this. I had tried to be careful with that anyway, as I always am, but I have just adjusted a handful of sentences to make it even more clear :)

How can you help your child cope with the fact that awful, awful things happen in the world?

I was thinking the other day about when I was a kid and we were in C.N.D (I know, I started early!). If you were a kid in the seventies and eighties you may well remember a genuine sense of fear that ‘The Russians’ (A concept that held no other meaning for me except that they always wore huge furry hats) were going to blow us all up at any given moment.

Greenham Common Peace Camp 1984

The mushroom cloud was an oft repeated nightmare image in my head as I tried to sleep at night. Since the credit crunch begat the recession which in turn begat double dip recession and then lurched into ‘bugger it we’re all going to die poor and unemployed’ it has got me thinking about how we can help our children learn about the unpleasant side of life.

It is hard isn’t it? We want our children to have great lives and to be happy and to enjoy being children, at the same time though, we know that they will have to live in the world and that they will have to face things that are scary and sometimes downright sickening. I know some people who believe that life sucks and that people let you down and that your children need to know that.

I also know some people who try to protect their children from any hint of unpleasantness and keep them as sheltered as they can. I can’t go down either of those routes, for me it is about balance, I want C to be aware and I want her to challenge injustice but at the same time, I don’t want her to worry and I want her to be a kid.

I think there is a way through and I believe it is this; we share when we feel it is important for kids to know, we share how it makes us feel and crucially we try to help our kids see ways they can have some power or control over the situation.

A good example of this is that C has always found those ads showing starving children deeply distressing (which is of course the correct response to seeing a starving child). It is a profoundly upsetting and unpalatable fact of our world that there are children starving to death. I can’t make this fact go away but what I wanted to do was to help C feel that we could have a little bit of an impact and so we decided to sponsor a child. It is the tiniest thing really but it is a tangible reminder to C whenever she sees those ads that we are doing something and will keep doing so.

I think that is why being vocal about what is wrong is so important and why we can empower our kids by teaching them that. If we help them feel that they can challenge injustice then they have some control and they know that they can do something – no matter how small.

Emily Pankhurst in Trafalgar Square

To me this is where the hope is when the world seems awful, we can teach our kids that yes; there are terrible, unfathomable things in the world but that we can fight and we can effect change. Tell them about the Civil Rights movement, Suffragettes and the Gay rights movement and talk about how much people have changed the world and are changing it every day.

Many years ago I had a boyfriend who couldn’t understand why I watched the news or read newspapers and then got upset; he thought I should protect myself from it. I was reminded of this when I told C that maybe a section of a show we were watching might upset her; her response took me right back when she said; ‘People need to know what is going on in the world or how can they do anything about it?’. From the mouths of babes comes the absolute truth.

Of course as with every issue I talk about here the key is that you decide what is appropriate for your child and that you do what feels right for you. I truly believe that our children will be out there soon enough fighting battles on behalf of themselves but also on behalf of others and that we can help equip them with the strength, the courage and the fire in their bellies to do so – Vive la Revolution!

By Suzy Colebeck

Images: goforchris, BBC Radio 4, Flickr

Competition!

Don’t forget our competition to win a copy of How Mothers Love by Naomi Stadlen, which talks about truth and genuineness in parenting – closing date 21st December.

The importance of genuineness in parenting.

The formation of relationships is both a conscious and a subconscious process. It is also a physical process requiring the mutual release of the hormone oxytocin. From a physical point of view, you feel good when oxytocin is released and when a particular person’s presence or touch makes you release oxytocin, you naturally want more of it. The more you release, the more you want, and the better you feel – you are falling in love!

But oxytocin is blocked by adrenaline and adrenaline is the hormone that we release when we’re frightened, so you’re not likely to fall in love with someone who is threatening to you. But people can be threatening to us without us really being aware of it.

Just to clarify here, I am talking about the formation of healthy, deep relationships, not relationships that are damaging and built on a damaged foundation – the sorts of relationships we form if we have big inner issues that cause us to crave partners who treat us badly. No, I am talking about relationships that are nourishing and that are good for us.

It is harder to form one of these nourishing, healthy relationships with someone who we feel subconsciously threatened by and it is the niggling feeling that we can’t quite 100% trust someone that can provide that threat.

As adults, we can sometimes become aware of that feeling – ‘something’s not quite right here’ – but we often brush it aside, particularly if we can see other positive sides to forming a relationship with that person.

But this feeling of mistrust needn’t be anything significant – it could just be that that person is holding something back from you about themselves; that they’re trying to behave in a way that is not really natural to them; trying to be someone they’re not.

Now we all do this, don’t we? We all on occasion act in a way that is not the way we would naturally act. It’s good for society that we do! It’s important that we don’t huff and sigh impatiently when the young supermarket cashier takes forever to count out our change; and that we don’t burp in front of our prospective new boss.

But when it comes to forming deep relationships, it is very difficult to really build something strong and trust-filled when the person we are falling in love with is keeping something back from us because our sub-conscious knows there is something ‘not quite right’ there and that perceived threat blocks the free flowing of oxytocin.

Again, as adults, we can work on that. We can talk openly with our partners and gradually we both begin to be more genuine with each other until we reach a depth that is mutually enriching. However, when it comes to forming a relationship with our children, the matter is somewhat different.

Our children haven’t yet learned the art of forming relationships and it is our job as parents to teach it to them, which is easier said than done. But the easiest way to teach our children how to do it, is to build that sort of deep, nourishing, rich relationship with them ourselves in the first place.

The relationships we build with our children are the first relationships they’ll ever have, and the stronger and deeper and more trustful they are, the stronger, deeper and more trustful relationships they’ll be able to form in later life.

And the aspect of relationship forming that has the biggest potential to get in the way of that, in my opinion, is lack of genuineness on the part of the parent. The reason I believe this is because we are sold so many different parenting philosophies and techniques, that many of us find ourselves going for the one that our friends or peers have chosen, even if it doesn’t sit right with us. But we are convinced by good arguments and ‘evidence’. But if something doesn’t sit right with us, then when we do it, we’re not be genuine.

If we do controlled crying even though we’re sitting outside the bedroom trying not to vomit in distress, then we’re not being genuine.

If we bed-share with our babies even though we’re lying stiff with worry and terror, then we’re not being genuine.

If we send our children to school even though we can’t bear to let them out of our sight, then we’re not being genuine.

If we carry our babies in slings even though we feel utterly touched out by the experience, then we’re not being genuine.

If we breastfeed our babies into toddlerhood even though the thought of it makes our skin crawl, then we’re not being genuine.

If we put our children in nursery at the age of three even though we are sitting at home desperate for pick up time to arrive, then we’re not being genuine.

I really, really feel this so strongly – we are all a product of our parenting, our environment and our culture and we are therefore all completely different people. What feels right to one parent may not feel right to another, but our children know when we’re not being genuine and it worries them.

You may be totally convinced by the argument for ‘attachment parenting’, but if you hate being close to your baby, then your baby will know it just as well as if you employ a nanny or au pair to care for her and your relationship stands a far better chance of being strong and true if you are honest with your baby or child.

I’m not suggesting that you should just do what you like in parenting or be 100% honest about your feelings. I’m suggesting that it’s important to be true to yourself and your feelings. It’s not just OK, but vital, in my opinion, that if, for instance, you are feeling touched out by your children that you honour those feelings and allow yourself to feel them. Don’t suppress them – your child will know. It’s almost more about not being dishonest about our feelings, I think.

If you are always honest and never force yourself to cuddle your child when you really don’t want to, then your children will really, really trust the times you do cuddle them and those hugs will be so much richer for it, and the benefit they bring to your relationship with your children will be so much stronger.

In addition, by being true to ourselves as parents, we’re teaching our children good lessons about being true to themselves and being honest about their feelings when they’re older, which will stand them in good stead when they are put in a position when they may say ‘yes’ to something simply in order to please someone else.

It has suddenly become really important to me that I write this post, but I would love to discuss the issue further – please comment if you are moved to!

Images: Kira.bell, daemonsquire, Flickr

Competition!

Don’t forget our competition to win a copy of How Mothers Love by Naomi Stadlen, which talks about truth and genuineness in parenting – closing date 21st December.

How to really have a stress-free Christmas with pre-teen kids around.

The title of this is a little misleading because it suggests that I am going to tell you how to do it – I am not; it’s not what I do and it’s not what this site does! What the title actually refers to is that the way to have a stress-free Christmas is to do what you like – whatever that is! How easy is that?!

It makes me really sad when I hear people say they hate Christmas and I think they are missing the point. We live in a secular society and Christmas doesn’t have a link with religion for many of us but that doesn’t mean it has lost its meaning. Here is what Christmas means to me and what matters to our family at Christmas – maybe it will help some of you feel happier to go with your very own Christmas flow!

• One of the nicest things about Christmas however you celebrate it is that it is simply a break from the norm. Think about it; anything goes, want to eat seventeen kilos of sprouts while lying face down on the rug? Go for it! Want to have a curry and watch Steptoe and Son – fill your boots! You are the parents now, you don’t have to keep all of the traditions from your childhood; keep the bits you like and ditch the rest! At the very least you get a bit of time off, the house can be all sparkly, you can sit around eating and drinking more than usual and people are often far more cheery; that in itself is reason to celebrate!

• Christmas is a brilliant time to help your children learn to be unselfish; all those naysayers who say that kids are spoilt rotten now; it is my experience that Christmas is a wonderful time to help your children understand that other people aren’t as lucky as they are and think of ways to try to help others.

• Christmas to me is a time to give thanks, to celebrate what we have and what we have achieved over the year. I get to thank the people in my life who matter to me, spoil them a bit and show them my gratitude. Children can really understand the concept of showing love and care and make it part of their Christmas too.

• Christmas is light in a dark time in all the ways that might suggest. This time of year can be cold and bleak, we naturally start to want to hibernate and disappear. Christmas brings some much needed sparkle, levity and cheer into this season of darkness. The economic climate is rotten and shows no sign of changing so the chance to just stop for a day or two and celebrate what is good, what we have and focus on feeling thankful is a valuable one.

• Christmas is about tradition, about something that doesn’t change and can be relied upon. We can take great joy in looking at old decorations our kids made, singing songs we have sung for years, watching films and programmes we have seen many times before. It can be as comforting as a lovely warm blanket and a real beacon in a life that can often seem uncertain and in a constant state of flux.

I hope you can see how much this time of year means to me and my family, I don’t feel under pressure to spend more than I have, I don’t need the dinner to be perfect, the house doesn’t need to look like a magazine spread. It is a pure time of thanks and being with those I want to be with. I hope that you will embrace the Christmas that you want and that it will be a time of great joy and a bit of rest for you too!

By Suzy Colebeck

Image: Papurazi, Flickr.

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Competition!

And don’t forget our competition to win a copy of How Mothers Love by Naomi Stadlen – closing date 21st December.

Guest post: Should we let our children play with guns?

Every parent of boys knows it.  They want to play with guns.  You just can’t stop them.  They’ll make guns out of sticks,  lego, bananas, anything really.  Distasteful to adults, do we try to stop it, forbid it, or just go with it?

Before I had a child I would probably have said, forbid it.  Now, I’m not so sure.  After all, they’re just playing.  What’s distasteful to adults is just a bit of harmless fun to a child.  It’s distasteful to us, because we understand what real guns are for, and what death is.  A young child doesn’t.  So my issues with attempting to prevent this type of play are:

1. We are attempting to force our adult perceptions on a child.  Just because we don’t like guns, doesn’t seem to me a good reason to attempt to stop what is clearly quite normal behaviour.  Boys have been playing with guns for centuries.  As long as no-one’s getting hurt, what’s the problem?  I think it’s a bit of a leap to assume that allowing them to play with guns is going to lead to them becoming involved in gun crime later in life.

2. I believe making something forbidden can increase its value in the eyes of a child. Whilst I don’t necessarily want to try to discourage my child from playing with guns, neither do I want to encourage it, and trying to forbid it could well back fire (no pun intended).

3. Children’s play is telling us something.  They express themselves through play, work out issues they have.  Trying to suppress a child’s instincts never works.

Having said all this, I have not yet succumbed to buying a toy gun for my child, but he can imagine all he likes with sticks etc.

Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D., author of Playful Parenting, writes “Pretend guns (the kind you make with your finger or a cardboard tube or a stick) allow children to create games and rules and play out the themes important to them…….On the other hand, toy guns, especially realistic ones, tend to restrict children into playing in very limited ways.”

Of course, guns are not the only type of aggressive play that boys, and girls too, often like to engage in. Wrestling and play fighting is also common, and another area parents often seem uncomfortable with, either because they don’t recognise it as play, don’t like the idea of fighting being allowed – another example of our adult perceptions being applied, or they’re worried someone will get hurt.  I actually really enjoy watching this type of play as children seem to enjoy it so much, and it seems so natural.  It always makes me think of nature programmes on TV showing tiger or bear cubs play fighting.  OK, sometimes someone might end up taking a bit of a bump, but I’ve never seen anyone get seriously hurt.

So are we being over protective? And I think if we watch carefully enough we can learn to quickly distinguish between real and play fighting, and to know when an adult needs to step in if things are getting out of hand.  Too often I think we step in unnecessarily.

Cohen writes of this type of play “They aren’t just practising aggression, they are practising restraint and control as well.”  I think children would really be missing out on some important developmental needs if they were forbidden this type of play. If we’re really worried about it we can always join in!

Cohen goes on to write “I don’t believe you can or should ban all aggressive play. Children need to come to terms with aggression – their own and others’ – and if we don’t let them do it through play, they will do it in real life…..Good creative play….does not make children violent, no matter what kinds of aggressive games they are playing.”

This was a guest post by Jo Whitfield, author of the blog, Parenting with Understanding, and mother to a 4 year old boy. Jo is passionate about punishment-free parenting, evidence based parenting, and parenting through connection.

Images: muslim page & wynner3, Flickr

Competition!

And don’t forget our competition to win a copy of How Mothers Love by Naomi Stadlen – closing date 21st December.

Review & give-away: How Mothers Love by Naomi Stadlen – WIN!

Sorry, this post has been moved to my new website, A Heart Led Life.

Why I love oxytocin.

You’re in labour. Your baby will probably be born in a matter of hours, while your body will do the most incredible thing it’s ever done. But what is actually going on?

Well, it’s all orchestrated by this amazing chemical called oxytocin, which is often nicknamed ‘the love hormone’ – I’ll explain why later on.

This fascinating hormone is coursing around your blood stream, telling your uterus to contract, which pulls your cervix up and open during the first stage of labour, and pushes your baby out during the second stage.

Every contraction sends a message to your brain to send more oxytocin, which causes another surge of power in what is now the largest muscle in your body. But even when your baby’s been born, oxytocin doesn’t just stop working! In fact, oxytocin is an important hormone in many other areas of our lives, not just labour.

Long before you even got pregnant, it’s likely you’ve had many a time made far more pleasant by its presence: it’s released in huge quantities in the weeks we’re falling in love; we get a boost of it whenever we have skin-to-skin contact with someone we care about; and we get a massive shot of it when we have an orgasm.

Oxytocin’s job in these situations is to help you form relationships and build trust between two people, hence the nickname ‘the love hormone’. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to fall in love.

So what causes it to be released? Well, apart from when you’re in labour, when it’s part of the amazing positive feedback loop I’ve already explained, it’s mostly that skin-to-skin contact with someone we care about that does the trick.

Even larger quantities are released if that skin-to-skin contact involves particular areas of your body which are super-sensitive to touch – ear-lobes, genitals, and nipples.

Which brings me back to your labour and birth. Your baby may well be born straight onto your tummy, skin-to-skin, which means more oxytocin. But – get this – your baby’s hands and face are likely to be near one of your nipples, so that gets a whole lot of touch too, stimulating even more oxytocin.

And as you haven’t quite finished the process of birth yet – your placenta still needs to be born – that oxytocin is really important because it keeps your uterus contracting so that the placenta can detach from the uterine wall and be pushed out of your body.

Of course, all that oxytocin is also helping you to fall in love with your baby and helping your baby, who is also getting an oxcytocic rush, fall in love with you. This is what we all call ‘bonding’.

As if the poor hormone didn’t have enough to do – making labour happen, helping you bond – it also has a vital role to play in breastfeeding. When you hold your baby close, and particularly when your baby is suckling at the breast, the resulting oxytocin causes the milk ducts within your breasts to open, and let the milk flow towards your nipple so that your baby can get to it. We call this a let-down, and breastfeeding doesn’t work without it.

So now you know why oxytocin is such an important, exciting hormone, and you know how to get more of it, so get cuddling!

This blog post first appeared on  7 September 2011 at Double Helping Doulas.

Image: thepriapisticpress, Flickr

When should I potty train my child?

As with most things in the course of a child’s development, the very simple answer is to wait until he is ready. This is not just about pandering to what your child wants , but about being in tune with him and working with him rather than against him.

I initially wanted to write this post about getting children to move out of their parents’ bed if they’ve been bed-sharing for some time, but I realised that the principles I wanted to write about apply to so many things and the first thing that came to my mind was potty training.

Leaving aside those babies whose parents practice elimination communication with them, most of us have met parents for whom potty training has gone wonderfully and parents for whom potty training has been a long, drawn-out nightmare of wet underwear and months or even years, of needing to carry around spare clothes.

The problem is that all children are ready for potty training at different times, but our society doesn’t like that. Our society likes to see children doing things at the same time. It likes to see children all being able to read by the age of 6 or 7. It likes to see children all sleeping through the night by the age of six months. And it likes to see children potty-trained around three years old.

We parents are under pressure, particularly, it seems, parents of boys, who often seem to be ready for potty training later than girls are.

The trouble is that a child needs to be both physically and emotionally ready for a new development, and these two things sometimes don’t come at the same time, which can be very frustrating for parents. One of my children was more than ready physically for potty training, but no way was she emotionally ready. We had to break the biggest rule in the potty training book and put her back in nappies for a week!

When children are potty-trained too young – before they are both emotionally and physically ready – it can take far, far longer than if you are able to wait for the right time, but once you’ve got started, it’s very difficult to stop and it’s very confusing for a child if you do a stop-start-stop-start thing for months on end.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the end of the world to go back into nappies if you realise it’s not the right time, but it has to be completely back into nappies (apart from if your child asks to use the potty or loo, of course), not ‘back into nappies for one day, and then try and do potty training again the next day, find it hasn’t worked and then go back into nappies again’.

Often, if you can wait, parents find that their children take only a week or two and a few accidents to be fully, and happily potty trained (in the daytime, at least). So if you don’t feel that age two or three or whatever is right for your child, then try to ignore any pressure coming from friends or family or anywhere and just trust that your child will be ready at some point, and forcing the issue now is probably counter productive.

(Of course, if there are any other signs that there might be some developmental delay, it may be worth consulting with a trusted health care professional, just to rule anything worrying out.)

What were your experiences of potty-training? Smooth? Stressful?

Image: djwudi, Flickr

The WHO weaning guidelines – just for the ‘third world’ as some HVs like to tell us?

This is a fantastically complicated and contentious issue, isn’t it? Debates rage on parenting forums about when is the best time to wean your baby and why, and mothers are given heaps of conflicting advice from the very people who ought to all be saying pretty much the same thing.

Even best-selling authors of baby books, like Annabel Karmel, are saying outright that mothers should ignore the current government guidelines to delay the introduction of solids until babies are around six months old.

The excuse given for opposing what the UK Department of Health (DoH) recommend is that their guidelines have been drawn from what the World Health Organisation (WHO) say and, apparently, WHO guidelines are only relevant for people living in developing countries.

Karmel, and others, think that it’s just about having the resources and equipment to be able to sterilise things properly, and that if you don’t start introducing solids before six months, then your baby will never learn to like new flavours.

I don’t actually understand that argument. There are plenty of things I hated as a child that I love now (I started solids before six months as per the advice at the time), and I see my children’s own tastes changing all the time (all mine had solids at around six months).

But Karmel is missing the point. It is not just about sterilisation, it is about the development of babies digestive systems and how they react not just to pathogens (germs and bugs) but to allergens as well.

Even if we are privileged enough to live in a culture where we have high quality health care, free at the point of delivery, that doesn’t negate the potential effects on babies’ guts of introducing solids too early. And these risks are potentially life-long: allergies, obesity and diabetes.

Is it really worth it? What is the point of introducing solids before six months? Well, according to popular belief, it’s because babies seem to be ready before then, and mothers’ instincts are telling them that it’s the right time.

But the problem is that we have had so many years of being told what the ‘signs of readiness for weaning’ are, that for many of us our instincts have been well and truly buried. We have been told that babies are ready for food when they start grabbing at things and putting them to their mouths, but this is just a sign that they are 4-5 months old.

We are told that watching us while we eat is a sign that they’re ready, but they watch us going to the loo, walking and driving cars, and they’re not ready for that yet.

And, this is often the hardest one to accept, we are told that babies being cranky and starting to wake more often is a sign that breast or formula milk is no longer enough and they now need solids. But actually it’s a sign that they are having a development spurt which is stressing them out, and they need to suckle more to enable them to relax, and also to increase your milk supply to their new needs. It usually passes in a few days to a couple of weeks, and then you get your happy smiley baby back.

Really, the best way to tell if your baby is truly ready for solids (and it will be different ages for different babies) is to let him lead the way. Just as you can trust that he knows how much milk to take and how often, he will know when his mouth and gut is ready for solid foods. When Gill Rapley did her research into baby-led weaning, she found that most babies began to actually eat solid foods at around six months.

As with so much when it comes to parenting, in general, the more we parents try to second guess our babies and interfere with their natural development, the more stressful and worrying it is for us. And it often is counter-productive, creating new problems and sometimes slowing things down.

Pureeing food, and pushing it, however gently, into your 4 month-old baby’s mouth is totally overriding all his natural instincts to protect himself and his gut until he is ready for that food, and, whatever Ms. Karmel says, there is simply no need to do so. Working with your baby is so much simpler – maybe a bit messier, but definitely simpler and easier.

But this post isn’t about baby-led weaning, but about the age at which weaning should start, and why the six-month guidelines aren’t just for developing countries, and the reason is simply because babies know best, and, as Rapley’s research has found, babies usually tell us they’re ready for solids at around six months…which is kind of the time that all the research into babies’ guts says they’re ready too. Clever, aren’t they, those babies?

Images: LeeKelleHer, MissMac, Flickr. 

Guest post: U2, Begging Bowls, and Breastfeeding

I love U2. As evidence of this, I submit to you an image of my daughter’s third birthday cake. (In my own defense, it was her choice to have a “Vertigo” cake not mine, but I’m sure the repetitive playing of that particular CD in our car stereo had some influence on her.) The lyrics of their songs have been applicable to many of my own experiences providing me strength, encouragement, or an important lesson just when I needed it most.

 On their recent album, No Line on the Horizon, the song “Moment of Surrender” has particular resonance with me and, during a particularly challenging period as a stay-at-home-mom, the lyrics brought into focus one of the challenges I had been struggling with: balance and surrender.

“My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control” (elyrics.net)

It occurred to me that this view of surrender is equally applicable to mothering, and yes, breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is a biologically normal activity. It is a biological expectation for both mom and baby and it is, for this reason, that when breastfeeding doesn’t work out, we feel a sense of loss and grief. But breastfeeding is also largely influenced by society, and when biology and society are at odds it creates a sense of imbalance in our lives and experience. I believe it is this imbalance—this yearning for balance and release—that creates such discord with regards to breastfeeding.

If breastfeeding were a simple choice—an option women have as mothers—there would never be such emotional responses to it. No, breastfeeding is biologically expected and, as mothers, we have a desire—as hidden as it may sometimes seem—to return to that natural rhythm, the “unconsciousness”, that is biologically ordained.

Mothering is not only something we learn to do by watching those around us in our society, it is innate in our nature as women and, when we give birth to our children, we have biological processes at play providing us with responses to our new position as mothers. Societal attitudes and pressures influence us at times and draw us away from our biological selves, and this is something that is impossible to remove entirely. But as impossible as it might be, I argue that what we do need to do is regain our balance and return our breastfeeding experiences, even if just a bit, to the side of biology and the innate rhythm that we carry within us.

So returning back to the analogy of the begging bowl and “The Moment of Surrender”, what can we learn about breastfeeding and mothering?

To start, I would suggest we can learn that breastfeeding is something that is part of the mothering experience in the biological sense. We are mammals and breastfeeding is inherent in that. By recognizing breastfeeding not as a choice we make, but an expression of what and who we are, we can begin to understand our connection to breastfeeding—and our responses to not breastfeeding. This is the “return to the rhythm of [our] soul” and the “rhythm of [our] unconsciousness”.

When it comes to breastfeeding, it would be helpful to view our bodies as begging bowls: enough in themselves and capable of providing everything needed. A begging bowl is a Buddhist monk’s one possession. It symbolizes the need to find a balance between “extreme austerity and complete attachment to life” (viewonbuddhism.org), perhaps similar to the balance needed between our biology and society. The bowl symbolizes this “surrender of worry about worldly living and also of concerns for tomorrow” (vanishingtattoo.com). The begging bowl in the Buddhist tradition then is a symbol of ultimate surrender, submission, and selflessness.

Women have been led to believe that our bodies are not enough and that intervention and medical support are necessary to birth our children; this belief extends to breastfeeding as well. Big business with their advertising campaigns want us to believe that a plethora of “things” are needed to breastfeed successfully and among those “things” are products to reduce the pain or discomfort, make breastfeeding more convenient, or assist you in working it into your life; all things that view breastfeeding as a negative and something to be overcome or put up with.

But when we block out those messages, and trust our bodies to be enough—using the symbol of a begging bowl to identify the surrender of worry that we are not enough—we realize the simplicity that can come to the relationship. No longer worrying about what might happen, we can surrender to the moment and trust the experience.

And finally, I humbly offer that breastfeeding—and mothering—is about surrender. Surrender has such negative connotations in our modern society, but surrender can often be a place of ease and actually return power instead of taking it from you. When we accept a truth and surrender to it, the struggle is gone. With breastfeeding, the struggle often comes from the pull between biology and society.

As mothers we have been gifted with an amazing, innate instinct—we all talk about it—and yet we often ignore it in favour of what society dictates as acceptable or correct. For example, you may be told by your doctor that picking up your baby when they cry will only teach them to manipulate you and limit their ability to self-sooth, but your mothering instinct is screaming at you to pick up your baby. Or your instinct might be to nurse your baby to sleep, but the parenting book you just read states that by doing so your baby will never learn to fall asleep on their own.

Surrendering to your instinct, to the unconscious knowledge that we all carry with us, to the biological nature of your being, is not weakness. It is a way of regaining power and balance and returning to the ”rhythm of your soul”.

Breastfeeding is then not a battle and struggle to be conquered or overcome but the rhythm of our biological selves and learning to surrender to it can give us great power and allow us to balance those societal messages that do not always support our mothering efforts.

My daughter may still love “Vertigo” but I hope as she grows up I can convince her to also love “Moment of Surrender” and to teach her the lessons about motherhood and breastfeeding that I have learned from such an unlikely source as U2.

Stephanie Casemore is a mother, teacher, and writer living in eastern Ontario, Canada. She experienced breastfeeding first as a challenge, exclusively pumping for a year for her first child, and then as a healing experience, nursing her second child for three years. She continues to seek that fine balance between biology and society and is desperately searching for her own begging bowl.

Stephanie shares her experiences and perspective in her books: Breastfeeding, Take Two: Successful Breastfeeding the Second Time Around and Exclusively Pumping Breast Milk: A Guide to Providing Expressed Breast Milk for Your Baby.

If you’d like to write a guest post for FYP, please get in touch via the contact form and we can discuss via email.

Competition!

And don’t forget that today is your last chance to enter the competition to win Stephanie’s wonderful book Breastfeeding, Take Two: Successful Breastfeeding the Second Time Around.