Nestle is the biggest unethical marketer of artificial baby milks world-wide - using artificial baby milks (ie. not breastfeeding) has been shown to increase the risk of obesity - obesity goes hand-in-hand with being unfit - new tv. programme on last night about unfit children - who chooses to sponsor it? Nestle!!!! Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted!

Linda Hirschman is (apparently) meant to be an important feminist, so how on earth can she answer a question like this???:

FARABEE: What about those who say raising children is the most important job a person can do?HIRSHMAN: I have no idea what they mean by that. If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it?

Wouldn’t a feminist argue against the idea that jobs are only important if men do them too?  Or have I got the wrong idea about feminism?  Read the whole article here.  I just don’t understand how people can think that society and, therefore, the world will continue if people don’t choose to spend their time parenting.  We can already see the disasterous consequences of so many children being farmed out way too young to day-care, and yet people still refuse to recognise that parents are the best people to bring up the next generation.  If we continue this way, society will collapse because it is parents who instill morals into their children, *not* nursery nurses (childminders/nannies etc.).  And anyway, as one commenter on the Hathor’s blog quite rightly says, women do most of the parenting because it’s women who have uteruses and breasts, not because men consider it beneath them!  (ok, I’m sure a lot of men do, but there are more and more men choosing to become stay-at-home-dads so it’s clearly not all men who think parenting is ‘womens’ work’!).

 HT: Hathor

So we watched this programme last night, fearful that it would be a real ‘look at these wierdos’ programme, and was pleasantly surprised.  Although the narrator did seem at times to be taking the mickey out of the parents, at other times she sounded genuinely interested and sympathetic.  However, I don’t think they chose the best families to look at.

Firstly, the British family.  I liked them.  They were lovely, honest, happy people, and the Dad was hilarious!  But…and this is going to sound awful…if you’re going to present an unusual form of parenting to the masses, surely the way to do it that is most likely to make it appear a valid, acceptable form to those who don’t yet subscribe to it, is to follow a family that looks completely ‘normal’.  By ‘normal’, I mean look like a family who could easily follow mainstream parenting practices.  I’m playing devils advocate here - I don’t think that there was anything wrong with the British family, but the American families looked a bit more mainstream, and I think that that is the route to choose.  I think that mainstream followers are far more likely to listen to someone who looks like they do, simply because the narrow-mindedness of so many people ensures that they go on looks far more than on anything else.  The over-riding thought in many people’s minds, I believe, would have been “well, what do you expect?”.  Although it’s downright wrong to make an issue of physical appearance, I think the impact of using a family that looks mainstream is much stronger, leading to the “oh!  So it’s not just for ‘weirdos” reaction.  I hope I’m making sense here!  I’ve had this conversation with a few of my friends on several occassions.  One of my friends has dreadlocks and wears gorgeous hippy clothes - we think that very mainstream people take one look and write her off as a hippy, which is fine by her, but does seem to make people switch off and stop listening, as if they already know that what she’s going to say is ‘weird’.  Apart from the fact I don’t wear make-up, I look like most mums - dark hair tied back, jeans and t-shirts - we all think that I have more impact when talking about non-mainstream ideas because people don’t expect to hear me talk about them.

Secondly, the one-child American family.  I was thinking all the way through that the mother was the one in control of the attachment, not the child.  A common criticism of attachment parenting.  Then, lo and behold, at the end the husband said exactly the same thing!  In my opinion, for attachment parenting to work, the child *has* to be in control.  The child *has* to have the opportunities to detach from his/her mother/family and it is important that there is no underlying emotional blackmail going on ie. mum goes on and on about how much she loves being attached to her child leading to the child thinking that is what she needs to do in order to maintain her mother’s love.  Attachment parenting is about being there for your child when and for as long as she needs it - not encouraging attachment, but not discouraging it either.  It’s also about letting your child have the opportunity to be attached to a number of adults, and children, not just to mum.  In an ideal world, children are brought up by a community, not just two parents, and this is when attachment parenting is really healthy.  Babies are carried by their grandmothers; sisters; cousins; aunts - they’re even suckled by them if mum’s not available and baby is in need of comfort!  Babies need to form the strongest attachment to their mum, but to also form strong attachments to other people too, when *they* are ready - not when mum is ready!  Showing this family, I believe, will just reinforce people’s misconceptions that attachment parenting is about parents who don’t want to let go of their babies.

Thirdly - the two-child American family.  I loved this family - I think that this woman talked the most sense.  She didn’t look too unusual and she was extremely articulate when explaining her choices.  I liked it that she talked about asking herself what ‘jungle-mama’ would do in certain situations - it’s something I do all the time!  The British family seemed to work solely on their instincts; the one-child American family worked mostly on mum’s needs; this family worked on a combination of instinct and the experience of thousands of years of evolution.  In the natural world, we wouldn’t bring our children up just on our instincts - they’d certainly be very respected, much more so than they are in our culture, but we’d also listen to our parents; sisters; aunts; grandparents who would have listened to our ancestors - generations and generations of accumulated knowledge of child-rearing would be accessible to us.  Surely this is the best way to do it?  When our girls do something that doesn’t fit with what we expect of modern children, before I worry, I ask myself what a cave-toddler would be doing.  Is this normal behaviour for natural children?  Is what the books say only normal for children brought up the conventional way?  I also ask myself what cave-mother would be doing all the time.  Would she sit down and play with her children all day long?  Certainly not!  She’d have been busy working, with her children running round her feet, occasionally asking questions, helping out, going off to play fantasy games with their friends, sometimes asking to breastfeed; baby in a sling, feeding on and off, not going out of the family’s sight.  If baby cries, mum does something about it asap because to not do so would be to risk the baby’s life.  I’m rambling now!

All in all, I liked this programme - it wasn’t totally ‘look at these wierdos’ but I think it could have been done better. 

Oh yes, and mass breastfeeding sessions (which one of the mums in the tv programme attended with her two nurslings!) - I’ve ranted about these before.  Gah!  I hate them!  People say they are necessary to make breastfeeding more normal.  I don’t think they make breastfeeding normal - I think they make it wierd!  They just serve to increase the perception that breastfeeders are ‘militant’.  I dislike Breastfeeding Awareness Week too.  The only thing that can make breastfeeding normal is by doing it, and by doing it normally!

What a lovely, refreshing article to read.  I have nothing to say, really, about it except that I hope it gets a positive response.

HT: Carlotta

Hathor’s reaction to the boredom article in cartoon format, although she’s got much more to say on the matter on her blog, here and here.

And a wonderful explanation of how we ought not to be answering the socialization question with ‘they go to five different groups a week, we go to friends houses…’ etc.  I’m really pleased I came across this - I just hope that I can manage to answer such questions in this way without sounding facetious!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=397672&in_page_id=1770

I don’t know what to say - poor her!  Her poor children!  I found this article insulting, but I’m not sure why - maybe because it implies that only dull, unintelligent women can find motherhood fulfilling?  I don’t have a problem with her not enjoying it (apart from the effect on her children, but you can’t make someone enjoy something - hopefully her children will not feel too rejected by her :-(), we can’t all enjoy everything!  I agree with her that training for years for a professional career spoils women for the joys of mothering to a certain extent - but it certainly doesn’t do that for everyone.  A huge number of my mother friends are highly intelligent women who have degrees and have had professional careers and they all genuinely find motherhood enjoyable and fulfilling.  Of course, mundane day-to-day housework is boring - no one denies that - but a lot of it can be made more fun if only one can let oneself enjoy it.  If you spend the whole time going ‘oh no!  this is so dull!  how can I continue doing this?’, there is no way you can enjoy it.  If, on the other hand, you are an optimistic person who tries to make the best of things who has a bit of an imagination, it’s easy to find enjoyment in mundane activities.  (or maybe I’m just dull and unintelligent!).  On top of that, it’s actually good for children to be bored - who doesn’t remember the best games they had as children being invented after a protracted period of ‘I’m bored, Mummy!’ whinging?  In my opinion, it’s fine to spend some parts of each day getting on with your own thing - reading, washing up, whatever - as children seem to get more enjoyment out of games they’ve made up themselves than from anything we can make up for them!  I’m not going to go on any further, as I’ve already written a lot about my thoughts on this subject in my post about Rachel Cusk.  I will just say one thing though - why do these women have children in the first place?  If it’s because they think they might enjoy it then find out they don’t, why do they have more????????

An article from the US explains the current world-wide situation regarding the freedom of HEors.  I agree with him entirely but have a couple of other points to add.

1.  Literacy and self-sufficiency also are goals of the public school system. Parents send their children to public school expecting them at the minimum to reach this standard by the time they graduate. 

I don’t know the full situation in the US, but sadly state schools in the UK are consistently failing to meet this standard that, as the author of the article states earlier on, home educators nearly always reach and surpass.  Thanks to the huge number of newspaper reports on the poor literacy and numeracy standards of schooled children (far too few students are leaving school with the required number of GCSE’s in the basic subjects); the fact that so many employers and universities no longer trust GCSE and A-level results (to the extent that some universities ask prospective students to take further exams to prove their worth!); and the increasing number of young people leaving school with no self-sufficiency whatsover (to the extent that the government have introduced a whole programme to deal with this issue); it is now pretty easy to argue the case for HE as a valid form of education on a one-to-one basis.  However, proving it to the PTB seems to be another matter entirely!

2. For example, in Puerto Rico, legislation has been introduced recently to bring home-schools under the supervision of the public school system. Home-schooling parents would be subject to extensive regulation, including the requirement to answer intrusive questions and provide personal information about the family to the government. This action shows a lack of trust of home-schoolers and a failure to recognize the outstanding academic achievements of home-schooled children.

Being a bit of a conspiracy theorist, I don’t think this is actually the whole picture.  I think that the good results consistently shown by HEors is increasing the numbers of families choosing this route for their children and this is a threat to governments.  It’s a threat because governments fear those who think outside the box, and HEd children grow up doing just that.  What is more worrying for governments than rapidly increasing numbers of young people growing up to question them?  Their parents are already questioning the ability of the state to educate their young, what else will they question and try to change?  The only way governments can hope to contain this potential ‘anarchy’ is to try to regulate HEors as much as they can, pushing families to conform.  Governments always have a hiddne agenda, in my opinion, and should never be trusted outright - unfortunately this is what mass schooling does - encourages children to accept authority without question.  If governments didn’t have a hidden agenda, why are they so keen to force parents to give their children the MMR vaccine?  Why do they use the excuse of increasing numbers of measles diagnoses and the fear of an epidemic?  If they were so worried about a measles epidemic, they’d start backing down and offering the measles vaccine as a single…but I doubt the drug companies would continue to support the government if they did as I expect the MMR makes them more money than the singles vaccines!  The governments aren’t worried that HEd children won’t learn enough - they’re worried they’ll learn too much!

HT: Carlotta

We’ve had a lovely holiday and I feel very refreshed.  I’ll try to post some photos soon, but we’re moving house next week so blogging may continue to be a bit sporadic for a couple more weeks.

Gina Ford:  Threats of her lawyers have caused a huge UK parenting website/forum to ban discussions about her and her methods because they’re sometimes a bit rude (or ‘defamatory’ in legalese)!  This issue is actually very worrying, as well as quite amusing.  If she were so confident in her stupid, cruel methods (yeah, Gina, come and sue me too!), she wouldn’t care less about people sounding off about her.  I wonder if she secretly is a bit concerned about quite how ‘contented’ her books make babies…?  But quite apart from all this, what about the issue of free speech (or whatever the proper term for it is)?  How on earth are lawyers allowed to do something like this?  It’s not just that parents are unkind about her, any unpleasant remarks about her methods are actually backed up by many experts in psychology and childcare.  The Australian Association of Infant Mental Health have a wonderfully informative (and very alarming) position paper on the subject.  But even if one or two posters were actually writing things that were unkind about her character, I don’t believe for one minute that it was such a regular occurrance that it is necessary to take legal action about it!  Please can someone with more time and knowledge write a more coherent blog post about this issue? 

…is a very bitter woman’ is what I first thought when I started reading her book ‘A Life’s Work: On becoming a mother’.  She seems to be fuming that she’s pregnant, fuming at what pregnancy/birth books say, fuming at the health care professions, fuming at the whole world, despite the fact she chose to become pregnant.  Once her baby is born, despite the fact she professes her great love for her child, she proceeds to bemoan nearly everything she experiences of motherhood.  Her book angers me because it is so negative - it probably did her an awful lot of good writing it, but I can’t imagine what good it could do to any mothers or potential mothers reading it, except to learn that motherhood is one of the biggest sacrifices you can possibly make, and you will probably hate it, whilst simultaneously experiencing desperately profound feelings of love and awe for your child.  I’m sorry to say that, having had a rather depressing first trimester, I didn’t feel up to continuing to read past the first four chapters - maybe the book doesn’t continue this way and I’m doing her a great injustice!  However, despite how much I disliked reading the book, I have learnt a huge amount from it and can understand why it is one of our ’set texts’ for the BFC training.

Cusk is clearly illustrating fairly common feelings for modern mothers; mothers who maybe have delayed motherhood in order to pursue a career; mothers for whom Gina Ford is the most important baby ‘expert’ since time began.  The mothers I am imagining appear to have such trouble reconciling themselves with the concept of not having complete control over their lives that they need the desperately strict routines that Ford encourages them to enforce.  And it’s hardly surprising…whilst clearly there are many exceptions (and I’m sure that this is also an experience of some young mums), most women having children in their mid- to late-thirties have experienced a relatively long adulthood so far, being in near-complete control of their lives.  They have spent the last 17+ years deciding when and what to eat; where to go and when to go there; how their schedules will pan out for the next year, let alone the next day!  Speaking as a young mum, who spent only 5 years in this way, I can’t really imagine what it must be like to realise that the minute you become pregnant you effectively ‘lose control’.  No wonder some women find it so hard to feel a part of their body move without having asked it to do so.  No wonder some women feel overwhelmed at the prospect of having no idea when or where labour will start, and not knowing how long it will take, or how close it will be to what you plan.  All this we have to somehow learn how to cope with and then comes the baby!  How can you plan what time you will eat, or leave the house if your baby is fed on demand and poos or sleeps at unpredictable times?  How does one easily change one’s lifestyle so totally?  Gina Ford offers a way out: force your baby to fit your life.  Make him sleep when you want him to, leaving him to cry if that’s what it takes; feed him when it suits you; wake him when the timetable says it’s time.  All this also apparently makes it easier when your nanny arrives to take over care when it is time for you to go back to work.  Unsurprisingly, a lot of mothers find that Ford’s routines don’t actually have much basis in reality and they soon learn that their hormones simply won’t allow you to strictly follow what Ford says. 

However, I’m digressing a bit here.  From what she says, Cusk wasn’t a Ford-follower, but she does come from the same group of mothers that are more likely to turn to Ford.  Cusk admirably breastfed for a few months; gave up work to be a full-time mother; and tried to be led by her baby’s needs.  However, the difference between the Cusk-style mother and the ‘earth-mother’-style mother is vast, and it boils down to one thing, I think: where the main motivation for mothering comes from.  I think that Cusk-style mothers have children primarily because of their ‘biological clock’ - because it is what is expected of them, and because they feel the distant calling of their hormones, whether or not they realise that that is what it is!  They get married or move in with their partners (must be PC here ) - the next step is to procreate.  This is what is known among psychologists as ‘extrinsic motivation’ - motivation to do something based on rewards, or something done for someone else out of the goodness of your heart.  ‘Earth-mother’-style mothers, on the other hand, primarily choose to have children not just for the sake of the children, but for themselves - they hear the calling of their bodies and want to birth and mother children just because they want to.  This is known as ‘intrinsic motivation’. 

Before I go on, I just need to clarify that a lot of psychologists and educationalists and other experts, believe that a job or task is easier and learning is more effective, the more intrinsic motivation features in one’s reasons for doing or learning something.  This has clear parallels in the philosophies of most home educators: children will learn more and better if they are learning because they want to; not because they feel they ought to.

Back to mothering: How about feeding choice?  BF helpers are well aware that women are more likely to succeed at breastfeeding if they have decided to breastfeed, or to continue to breastfeed, if they are doing it not just for the baby.  Mothers who decide to breastfeed primarily because it’s ’best for baby’ often don’t get past the first hurdle.  On the other hand, mothers who don’t consider how they will feed their baby to be a choice, who just know they will breastfeed because that’s what they want to do, usually perservere through the tough early weeks (or months if they’re unlucky!) and go on to enjoy a very mutually satisfying breastfeeding relationship.  Indeed, Cusk says she had to give up breastfeeding when her daughter was 3 or 4 months old (I can’t remember exactly which!) - a common time for primarily extriniscally motivated breastfeeders.

Cusk also decides to stay at home with her children rather than go back to work and this decision, I believe, sets the whole tone of the book.  Cusk is extrinsically motivated to make this decision, believing that it will be better for her children for her to care for them herself.  The consequences of this decisioncan be disasterous for mothers: Cusk feels isolated and resentful of her child, experiencing desperately conflicting emotions when she considers the depth of her love for her child.  She is becoming a martyr, sacrificing her fulfilling career for the benefit of her children, and she can’t enjoy her job as a mother because she doesn’t value it - all she values are the incredibly self-less sacrifices she has made.  Mothers who choose to be full-time mothers not only for the benefits they believe it will give their children, but also for the benefits and rewards they believe they will recieve, are less likely to experience these feelings.  They are primarily intrinsically motivated and are therefore more likely to enjoy their new job.  Cusk talks about how hard she finds it to move between her self as a mother and her self as an independent being.  But intrinsically motivated mothers don’t see the two ’selves’ as separate.  Their self as a mother is just a new improved version of their self pre-motherhood.  They enjoy motherhood because they genuinely value it as a job in itself, and they allow themselves to experience the joys motherhood can bring. 

This long-winded rant is not intended to be a ‘I think some mothers are better than others’ post.  It is leading me on to saying that what I have learnt is that, while I have long believed isolated parenting decisions to be right for some families and not for others, and that that should be respected and accepted, I had not realised the depth and importance of this fact.  I had not realised that parenting decisions not being right for a family, might actually mean that they are down-right wrong for that family!  Cusk gave up her job believing that her children would benefit from being brought up full-time by their mother: I suggest that maybe she’s wrong.  Maybe they would benefit only by being brought up full-time by their mother if their mother actually wants to be doing it.  Maybe Cusk’s children would be better off being cared for by a nanny or other childcare for some of the time.  If you ask someone to do you a favour, and they do it, but they really don’t want to be doing it, you feel uncomfortable and guilty.  I wonder if the same thing is true for children.  Children aren’t stupid, they pick up on minute changes in mood and atmosphere - why wouldn’t they be totally aware of their mother’s reluctance to mother them, however careful she is to hide it from them?  And these thoughts could be applied to any parenting choice you could think of.  We are taught, in our training, to offer to mothers certain ‘core conditions’ (a counselling thing), one of which is known as unconditional positive regard, or non-judgemental warmth.  Up until now I have been working on this core condition by looking at my own biases and prejudices, acknowledging them and putting them to one side when supporting a mother.  I now believe, having read Cusk’s book and come to the conclusions I have, that I can offer this core condition even easier just by accepting that, whilst I am able to change a mother’s extrinsic motivation for doing something, by offering her accurate and un-biased information, I can do nothing whatsoever to change her intrinsic motivation for her decisions - only she can do that.  Occassionally mothers come to our groups complaining of a common breastfeeding problem, and whatever we suggest they reject, often without even trying.  They are not coming to the group to try to remove the problem, they are coming hoping that we will say ‘you’re right, your nipples are too sore/you don’t have enough milk/your breasts are too big etc. - you probably need to stop breastfeeding’ - they want permission to stop.  They are breastfeeding primarily for the baby’s benefit, and they don’t want to be the one to make the decision to stop, understandably.  They want to be able to say ‘I had to stop’. 

Ok, I’m rambling now - trying to untangle the mass of thoughts in my head that I haven’t spent any time working out lately.  Will post a bit about my darling girls soon!

How on earth do those people who batter their children in the name of Christianity think that they will win people over with this horrific practice?  I thought that Christians were meant to try to bring other people to trust the Word of God.  Who, in their right minds, would want to have anything to do with a religion that not only endorses but encourages baby beating?  I have to say that none of the Christians I know regularly beat their children, so I am aware that this is a minority group.  But surely a practice such as this is only going to give more gentle and respectful Christians a bad name?  Madness on so many counts!  Home-educating bloggers can hardly be unaware of the issue explained in this website: Stop The Rod UK, as it has been written about in many, many blogs lately - even to the extent of blogs hosted with Homeschool Blogger being boycotted.  I cried reading the extracts from the books that explain how one should go about hitting your baby or child, and why it’s so important to do it.