Musings

Anna was 7 months old a couple days ago, and Thor 28 months.

This is silly by yesterday on the Dr. Phil show he had on Dr. Sears and his wife Martha and two of their sons who are peditricians. Dr. Sears is considered the father of attachment parenting and his book The Baby Book is sort of like the AP bible. He has a website www.askdrsears.com. I got the baby book soon after Thor's birth, and read it nearly every day with questions about sleep, development, etc. I felt like it spoke right to me, and I tossed any other baby books I had. On the show, Dr. Sears had such great, gentle insight for the parents, and for Dr. Phil.

Anyway, watching the show really made me think about babies and mothering and how our culture is so incredibly clueless and misinformed about babies. It really makes me sad and a little angry to see how people think they need to treat babies... and even how some of their doctors are telling them to parent! Some of it is unbelievable. I remember after Thor was born how amazed I was that people put infants in another room, in a crib, to sleep. I could not have been paid enough money to have Thor put in another room, away from me, at night. I felt that strongly. I remember saying to Tony over and over again that I couldn't imagine it! Of course before Thor was born I had no idea how I would feel, but after he was actually there... it was all different. Even when he was 10 months old and starting to sleep in another room, those few hours where he slept alone were extremely weird. Like a part of me was somewhere else.

And the notion of weaning at 6 months, or even a year. It was nice to see that even Dr. Phil said the baby who was abruptly weaned at one year and then began pulling her hair out needed to be nursed again. It's so sad that doctors actually recommend abrupt, premature weaning. Or being left to cry -- "teaching" a baby to sleep on its own by closing them alone in a dark room and letting them scream to sleep? I mean, I can see if a mother is completely at the end of her rope, and may abuse her child... but as a normal practice?

We force babies to seperate. We force them to not need us. From birth (!) we want them to be little adults. We push them to sleep alone, to "self soothe," to wean, to stop sucking for comfort (take away all bottles and pacis at a year!), to figure things out for themselves by crying, to eat adult food, to use the toilet as soon as possible. Where has babyhood gone?

This all goes against the biology of babies. Cries are meant to be responded to. Breasts are for nursing frequently and for several years. Babies are meant to sleep by their mamas, for goodness sake, not alone. This is the natural way of things.

Go against nature and I think that we create a society of depressives, alcoholics, anxiety ridden, sleepless people with large amounts of stress and a deep need to "fill up" what was taken away from us. Dr. Sears says that if you do not adequately meet the emotional needs of your child in the first 3 years, they find other ways to meet those needs later on, through negative behaviours, such as bad relationships, smoking, drinking, drugs (either illegal or prescription). The way our society has parented its babies has, in part, lead to a lot of the ills of modern society, I believe.

OK... enough soapbox.