Last Monday when I picked Bernard up from his childminder, she muttered something about him perhaps being happier in a smaller group. He had had been awake since 5.30am and was, in my opinion, teething; she told me he had been whining all day, but there was definitely nothing wrong with him, and he was definitely not teething, definitely. I have spent several days fretting over his apparent irritable grouchy badly-behaved and stubborn nature, and wondering if it really is our own fault for not taking a hard-line approach to parenting.
This morning I noticed the appearance of his first molar.
As we go through each stage, I read all the information I can get my hands on (and keep my eyes open for), ask everyone I know, and generally doubt my own ability to understand what is going on. It has been like this from the very start, and I’m fairly sure now that if the midwife who undermined my confidence at our first feed had said something positive, instead of you’re going to have trouble feeding that one, things might have been quite different.[1]
Same thing with weaning on to solids. Most of the information given out by Health Visitors, kindly baby food manufacturers, and grandparents, is quite prescriptive. You should wean at so-many pounds, or so-many weeks; you should start with a thin slop of baby rice; you should be giving him three meals a day after four weeks of weaning. He MUST eat this, he MAY NOT eat that, he WILL be spoon-fed. I am sure that there are babies out there who obey the rules, but mine wasn’t one of them. The problem is that instead of me thinking, ah, Bernard isn’t a rule-obeying baby, so I’ll just wait until he’s ready, and everything will be nice and easy; I got very stressed about the fact that he simply wouldn’t open his mouth, and it was months before he would eat three meals a day, and I spent that time wondering what I was doing wrong.
The answer to that is that I was worrying too much, and putting myself and Bernard under too much pressure to conform to guidelines passed down through a culture where early independence is a criterion for success. In this bottle-feeding society, we are taught to expect that all babies will “progress” from breast to bottle, preferably by about six months old, at which time they will also be starting to master the art of having mush shovelled into their gobs, with a view to being able to leave home at, ooh, six years old, and do their own laundry. As a bonus, parents’ lives will be made much easier, because they no longer have to think too much about how to do it. It’s all laid out there in how-to books and charts and on websites. No-one ever has to look at their baby again!
I really feel that society, the government, baby food manufacturers, channel 4, someone is conspiring to undermine what little natural parenting ability we have left. I find myself advising people to trust their instincts, watch the baby not the clock, let go of all the numbers and statistics and follow the baby’s cues; but I don’t feel as though I’ve ever managed to do that myself. It’s only ever with hindsight that I understand the situation.
- of course it helps me to have someone to blame it all on. [↩]
You know how sometimes people highlight particular key phrases in bold, to emphasise that they are making a very important point and you should be paying attention to this bit?
Well, I feel like this entire entry should be in bold. This is all very important stuff, and the way that you write about parenting stirs strong feelings of gravity somewhere to the left of my liver. Thank you for writing this.
Aaaaaw. Well I think you’re a brilliant mother, you’re both brilliant parents and Bernard is a delightful and delectable and indisputable testament to those facts.