Patriarchy and the 'detached mother' article

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/26/back-to-sleep-sudden-infant-death-syndrome-cot-death-peter-fleming

Here's a good article from The Guardian on the origins of the Back to Sleep campaign and the research that went with it. Really interesting.

Sorry the change back to back sleeping was around 1992. All the babies in the maternity hospital I was in 1990 were placed laterally.

So you must have had an out of date HV. AFAIK, the back sleeping advice hasn't changed in 30 years. Hardly fashion

The advice I was given from midwives in a large maternity hospital (connected to one of the UK's leading medical schools) in 1990 was to place baby on his side with a rolled up blanket behind him. Lateral- not prone.

So you are simply wrong in your assertion it has not changed in 30 years. The advice on sleeping positions has see sawed. I don't know why you are trying to deny this.

The change back to front was around 1992.

Oh and I'm surprised at you saying you were told in the 90s to put babies to sleep on their fronts. My MIL remembers its changing from front sleeping to back sleeping from 84 to 88. So you must have had an out of date HV. AFAIK, the back sleeping advice hasn't changed in 30 years. Hardly fashion.

Yes of course parents follow advice given at the time - which is part of the reason the SIDs risk was higher in the past, because babies were sleeping on their fronts - but the change in advice to putting babies down on their backs is not fashion! This advice has not seesawed!

Nor is it new - the SIDS research started in the 80s FFS. Arguing against it is just ignorant.

Some parenting advice seesaws back and forth with no good evidence either way. Of course it does. But it does no one any good to pretend that all advice is just fashion and unsubstantiated. It's not. Some advice changes permanently and saves lives.

We do what we are told or told not to do.

On this Lass, I am honestly surprised from you. When I had my kids, I read a lot, but we did what worked for us - a mixture of following and ignoring current advice, a little of what my mum did with my siblings etc. as we discovered what our kids got on with (different each time, obviously, because why would babies make life easy). Health visitors got the smile and nod at their advice and leaflets, and then they left (I didn't provide tea and biscuits).

QI had a good take on this - they had an episode when they went back and corrected the scores for all the right and wrong answers which had subsequently been discovered to be wrong or right. We learn new things, and advice changes. Just look at peanuts! (I know someone who's child was involved in the study that ended up changing the current advice for that one)

I read the article with interest. It had the potential to be good but i agree with others it was let down with the critical language around sleep training etc. I'd be interesting to see how the author compares radical feminist attitudes to mothering, as i suspect it may be quite similar to what is critiqued here.

That said it may have mentioned it...currently sleep deprived due to five wakings a night...am quite befuddled...

The point I picked up on is babies being put to sleep on their backs, which has saved lives. It's frankly crass to refer to lifesaving advice as just fashion

That is not what was being said. In my lifetime the advice on sleeping has gone from supine, prone, lateral and back to supine. And that's not even going into whether swaddling or co-sleeping is good or bad. We do what we are told or told not to do.

I think it's hard to disagree that society values economic production over all, and that it devalues childcare. Childcare being seen as low skilled is shown in the low pay - the same is true of elder care.

I see this thinking on every thread where night feeds and wake ups come up. I've never seen a thread where there hasn't been a sizeable number of posters saying that if you're on maternity leave, or are a stay at home mum, then you ought to be handling all the overnight caring. Anything to do with looking after children - including driving them around - can be done on broken/little sleep because it's easy or mindless, whereas working out of the home requires rest, either because it is more demanding, or as a reward for being the provider.

I can see that might be the best way to work it if you have a relatively easy baby who wakes once or twice for short periods, and the parent working out of the home has a very demanding job, but even in that situation, it's surely not sustainable.

I made no mention of cosleeping, which is obviously not something you can make blanket statements about as the safety of cosleeping depends entirely on the adult who is sharing with the baby.

The point I picked up on is babies being put to sleep on their backs, which has saved lives. It's frankly crass to refer to lifesaving advice as just fashion.

Where I'm from, feminist friends consider breastfeeding a totally regressive and anti-woman thing. They reject it on principle in the name of equality and bottle-feed from birth. Ditto sleep-training. Interesting, as the country in general is much more pro breastfeeding and 'gentle parenting', and certainly has a very progressive take on parental leave.

It's fairly understandable for advice to change over time due to increased knowledge though - but with anything relating to motherhood (because it's usually addressed to mothers rather than both parents), it tends to get wrapped up in all sorts of added guilt and shaming somewhere along the way. I think that's what makes the response to changes so emotionally charged.

We will never get anywhere with knowledge about child development if all research on it is dismissed as fashion

I don't think that is what posters are saying. I find the degrees of inconsistency in what is supposed to be the correct quite frightening.

In 1990 no one would have suggested co-sleeping. I was told to get baby into his own room and cot as soon as possible. I was told off by a health visitor for taking my son in with after his father had left in the morning.

I can't remember when I introduced solids but it was a lot earlier than what is recommended now. Whenever it was it would have been what the child guru of the time, Penelope Leach told me.

I started muttering "wank" a short while in, and gradually escalated to "fucking wanky shite" "guiltmongering fucking hypocritical wankmonger" etc.

So I didn't really have a particularly neutral response to this

I think she's mixing in hard to disagree with statements like the mother-child bond being important, touch being important, with extremely partisan headfuckery like the use of terms like "farming out" applied to use of daycare.

There are many interesting and valuable conversations to be had about how motherhood, women, and children are ill-served by the patriarchy, but they cannot be had with manipulative disrespectful fuckers who seek to dismiss any disagreement as due to patriarchy induced psychological deficits in empathy. No you manipulative wankface, maybe I just disagree?

As an example - this thread is a good one of how it's entirely possible to disagree without being abusive about the parenting of the person you're disagreeing with.

If you're going to talk about 'fashions' in childcare, you'd do well to avoid mentioning SIDs advice. I don't think there's any dispute that the advice to put babies to sleep on their backs has reduced baby deaths. It's really quite awful to refer to such important research and the advice coming from it as 'mothering fashion'.

We will never get anywhere with knowledge about child development if all research on it is dismissed as fashion. Surely we all want caregivers to be as well informed as possible which includes having debates, and research into, things like how often is optimal for a baby to be carried / held.

I wonder if the blog author's hostility to daycare is specific to the way it's run in the US?

Things like childcare ratios vary by state and some states have none at all. I remember coming across a study that found awful ratios in some daycare centres, with 8-9 infants (under 12 or 15 months, I forget which) being looked after by a single caregiver. Many states don't require any childcare qualifications either, and the key worker concept isn't even part of voluntary guidelines I've seen. Combine that with the US norm of minimal maternity leave (so many babies enter daycare at 6-8 weeks), minimal annual leave (so babies might be in daycare up to 52 weeks per year), and a culture of long working days (so many babies are in daycare for over 12 hours/day), and it does look a bit grim.

It's poles apart from the UK model, which isn't perfect but does regulate ratios, qualifications, etc. so a bad nursery or childminder will lose their accreditation if they breach regulations. And babies tend to be 6-12 months when entering childcare, and have the same childminder or key worker who they can attach to, and spend less time there across the day and year. Not so shabby

Agree Lass

I gave birth 1993 and 1995 and then in 2001 and the difference between the first two and the third was astonishing! It was okay to feed the babies at three months (though I didn't do this until they were about 4 and a half months anyway) and then it was not okay and it's six months because it could damage their internal organs. And I said but I was advised differently for my first two but took no notice. To which the answer was but these are now current guidelines.

Thankfully I could eat blue cheese during the first two and ignored the advise on this for the third. As for alcohol, tea and coffee? They were all a no no when pregnant because I just felt ill at the thought of them.

whoputhecatout Quite.

I think that's actually one of the core points of the article - fashions of what's "in" in childrearing have changed rapidly, back and forth, in the last 100+ years, whereas they weren't subject to such rapid fluctuations in the prior centuries or millennia. And the cumulative effect of a lot of these changes and inventions has been to physically isolate babies from mothers, fathers, and anyone else they're attached to, which is an unusual arrangement for babies in historical terms. The pp who pointed out that Mongolian babies are wrapped up and stuck on a boob every time they make a noise - that's not an exception as they're still being closely attended to and in contact with caregivers. Ditto for 4-5 year olds in Tudor and other times caring for younger siblings - that still involves babies being in contact with someone they're attached to. These situations are still pretty traditional childrearing practices and are quite different from relatively recent norms of babies spending hours across the day in prams, car seats, bouncers, etc. and then sleeping in their own room at night. Cumulatively, it means babies spending more time physically detached from attachment figures.

I agree with that much: modern western culture does encourage parents to leave babies physically detached more than was previously the case. Whether or how harmful this practice might be is a different issue (and the subject of current research).

I was previously aware of this blog; it's not about misty-eyed views of a paleo past dressed up as evolutionary biology. The author's agenda is to normalise infant sleep and other behaviours - night wakings are normal, tiny babies can't self-soothe, babies aren't spoiled by being held and cuddled when distressed, etc. - in the face of myths (and claims from HCPs) to the contrary. This article suggests she views such myths (babies should sleep through the night by X months, babies must be taught to self-soothe asap, it doesn't do babies any harm to be left to cry, etc.) as part of a bigger picture of devaluing motherhood and parenting in favour of economic activity: the patriarchy/libfem alliance.

She might be right, at least in part, but I don't think it hangs together in this article as well as it might. Her evidence-based critiques of research concerning infant sleep, etc. are much better.

I am an old gimmer. Consequently I have seen decades of 'mothering fashion' come and go e.g. sleep babies on their backs, no, on their tummies, no, on their sides, no, on their backs (again)

There is stuff I was told to do in 1990 which would make new parents in 2017 recoil in horror. (And I must say, stuff that seems to be taken as gospel truth now that I'm awfully glad I didn't have to put up with)

I am an old gimmer. Consequently I have seen decades of 'mothering fashion' come and go e.g. sleep babies on their backs, no, on their tummies, no, on their sides, no, on their backs (again).

Potty train, don't potty train, let it happen naturally, potty train (again)

Let baby sleep in your bed, no, don't to that you will suffocate the baby, no, of course you won't etc. etc.

Breast feed, no, bottle feed, no breast feed (again)

Be a SAHM, no, nurseries produce a more independent child, no, be with your child at home etc. etc.

All intended to induce guilt no matter what you do, written in blogs and books by people who probably don't know any better than you do.

FFS All we need to know is that you love your child, do your best for its health and happiness, understand your child, treat your child with kindness, compassion and consistency, allow your child space to grow and achieve.

The rest is crap.

Also the sling/ pram issue is ridiculous - babies are heavy to carry around all the time. Mine loves going for walks in the pushchair. I don't feel detached at all (and if they fall asleep by the time i get home it means I can have a cup of tea in peace. I don't feel in the slightest bit guilty about this)

I agree with the basic premise of the article which is to value the work mothers do more. However I think the word 'mothering' should be replaced with 'parenting'. Until fathers are as involved we'll never have true equality (yes I know men can't get pregnant, give birth or breastfeed but they can do everything else and there is a lot of everything else!).

I think many families would love to have both parents working flexibly without it affecting job security. At the moment it's quite often too risky or unaffordable for the man to take more time off or reduce working hours during the early years.

Yes being on maternity leave can be very isolating. I also don't believe it is healthy for the mother to have sole charge of a baby without support or regular breaks.

The article gets a bit extreme in some places. What's wrong with giving a baby toys? They need to explore the world around them which includes objects as well as people.

Better options and more legal protection for parents to work reduced hours (actually for everyone to) and better childcare. Fundamentally society has to change to value both parenting and work. Raising kids is valuable. Going out to work is valuable. It shouldn't be one side sniping at another.
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This, could not have said it better.