Please tell me IABU (newborn being held by smokers)

[honeytea]

I hope IABU.

My PFB was born on tuesday and he is just perfect and adorable (biased mummy.)

I am just overwhelmed by the feelings I have for him, I had anticipated that maybe I wouldn't have strong feeings for the baby right away but I hadn't mentally prepared for the fear I get about many things because my feelings for the baby are so strong.

I think I have had a couple of days of baby blues because I have been feeling so so worried about him. My MIL and SIL both smoke and I am so very worried about them holding the baby, when they hold him I feel like grabbing him and running away :( I will him to cry so I can feed him.

They both smoke outside wearing a jacket(that they then take off inside), they don't smoke in the house.

I am trying to be logical about things, I have been telling myself most people with a baby have a couple of friends or family members who smoke and hold the baby and most babies are fine. My baby is so strong, he was 10 pounds and he is feeding well.

My logical reasoning just isn't working, I took off his clean clothes when we got home tonight and I insisted we give him a bath at 11pm to try to wash off the smoke. I couldn't even smell smoke on him but i felt I couldn't put him to bed with that danger. (Not that he would sleep anyway.)

My friend's baby boy died from SIDS last year and I just keep thinking the same thing will happen to my baby :(

Maybe I should ask them to wash their hands before they touch the baby, MIL is already anoyed with me because I had an "attitude" when they were visiting the day before yesterday, I really didn't mean to my DP woke me up to feed the baby I had only slept for an hour the night before and I was just quiet because I was so tired. I worry about causing more trouble.

I just want to hide away with my baby and try to keep him safe.

Please tell me IABU, I won't listen to my own reasoning I hope hearing it come from other people will help.

This has been a massive issue in our family, my MIL and SIL have fallen out over it. Iv got the same opinion though!

Also MIL visiting you with a brand new newborn and saying you had an attitude!?!?! WTF.

Yanbu. Reads up and show them the info (ask your mw). It's not healthy for him.

Congratulations btw!

Congratulations on your new baby!

I don't think YABU at all!! could you get your Dh to ask them not to smoke at all when they are visiting or being anywhere near your baby? you could use your friends experience of SIDS :( to try to get your point across.
I'm angry on your behalf! I cannot understand their attitude at all.

Remember the midwife and doctors might be smokers!

He is YOUR baby and don't let anyone bully you! I hate the thought of any smoke being around a baby and when my little girl (also perfect) was born I made every smoker smoke outside, wash their hands, eat mints and jackets off before holding MY baby. I wouldn't let them kiss her after smoking either. I was constantly told to stop being silly but I didn't back down. I have really bad asthma and can remember seeing the smoke fill the room off my dads cigarette when I was little, his hands stained yellow and my hair stinking of those horrid things. Yuck.
I use to give my MIL "attitude" too which means "disagreeing" with her. Do what you think is right! X

Congratulations!

Unfortunately, anxiety at this stage post partum is common and normal. For a reason: to make sure you look after and protect your baby. And that is all you are doing. Your out-laws may not like it, but it is tough, it is your baby and you can insist things are done your way. That may not be easy mind.

Regarding smoking specifically, I am surprised that they want the baby to associate them with the smell of smoke, that they can't see how it may be unpleasant for the baby.

As for comments about your attitude, I do think they need putting straight. You or DP need to tell them "it's not all about you" because so far all you have described is selfish, unhelpful and frankly horrible behaviour. Nip it in the bud now.

Enjoy your baby, OP X

Thank you for the support :)

I had my fingers crossed that I was being irrational about the risks.

They can't smoke at when they come to visit us because our balcony has got a meter of snow on it, we were going to clear it but I think it is a good reason not to clear the snow yet.

I think I need to make a plan to get through the next few days, after christmas is over we won't have to see so much of them.

We are going to see them at sil's house on the 24th (their christmas day) and mil will be with us on the 25th. My family arrive tomorrow so I think I will get my brother and sister and parents to try to monopolize the baby as much as possible and give him a bath when we come home.

They just don't listen to me, today I was sil's house and the baby had been asleep for hours because he was being cuddled. My milk was pooring through my jumper (it only came in on thursday and I wasn't expecting there to be so much) I kept hinting that I needed him to wake up because I was wet and in pain and they just ignored me and said things like "you just have to learn to go with their routine now not change them to fit to your routine"

Congratulations!

You feel the way you do because protecting your baby is important.

Look up the current advice on this, on the NHS site. It is very clear. They should not hold the baby for at least half an hour after smoking for example. Show them. Tell them that is how things are going to be.

Stop worrying about 'making trouble', what nonsense! Your baby is more important than anyone's pride about smoking. From what you've said, your MiL's attitude stinks. Stop pandering to her, your baby is much more important.

Remember he's your baby. You tell other people what is happening with him. You don't need to wait to see if they want to listen. This can be hard, everyone has an opinion and a desire for cuddles but they are all thinking about themselves and getting carried away in the moment. Someone needs to keep his needs in mind and keep track of time.

On demand feeding is normal in the early days. You're probably right that he was being kept sleepy by all the cuddles but, unless there's a long gap, he should make up for it. I'm no expert, there are professional advisors available, your midwife etc who can help with this. It will be helpful to learn to hand express for your own comfort anyway.

I smoke. And I won't ever hold a newborn. If I wanted to then I wouldn't smoke before and would be wearing clean clothes with washed hands

Reading your last post, ignore ignore ignore. You're BF a baby not setting the recorder for tv programmes. Feed on demand and if LO hasn't eaten in a while (their tummies are the size of their fists) then just put him on, especially if babies haven't eaten enough, they just sleep. At this age, it's little and often. Make them listen to you - you can always apologise for hormones and lack of sleep to smooth things over if they're upset later on. But get your OH to pull MIL up on the attitude remak. People forget what it was like with newborns and remember the baby days with rose tints. As Priscilla say, nip it in the bud now or you'll have this for years to come.

As for smoking, when your midwife comes to see you, ask for leaflets on newborns and smoking as it lingers on clothes and hands. Leave them out for your SIL and MIL but be aware it's a minefield. Make sure you have your OH's support (let him read the following thelincolnite.co.uk/2012/09/your-health-the-truth-about-second-and-third-hand-smoke/) asit will be his family being pissed off.

Congratulations on your new son. Cluck cluck cluck - will be discussing potential LO no 3 with DH in the morn!

So much good advice already. Definitely they should wash their hands before holding baby, change their jackets or shirts after smoking, and I like the idea of waiting awhile too.

My DH did those things when our twin GC were babies. I was worried about SIDS too. The twins are healthy four year olds now. Smoking is nasty!

The reason I don't want to make trouble is because I really want my DS to have a lovely relationship with all his family, I do like my in laws, my sil was with me at my birth and she was amazing, I even told her not to breath on me as she was making me feel sick (it was the gas and air talking) I am pretending I can't remeber that bit of the birth ;)

I think if i give them info about the risks they would just think I am being silly, I live in Sweden and the smoking culture is fairly different to the uk, it is lots more acceptable to smoke here.

I think maybe I can engineer it so when they go out for a fag i will start to breast feed and let the baby fall alseep sucking I can probably drag that out for 30 mins, he is a pukey little man so that would be another 5 mins dealing with the puke, then I can do a nappy change, that will give them 30 mins to get rid of the smoke naturally.

:)

If that's the case, see if you can find the original Swedish study for below and give it to them.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8478690.stm

ki.se/ki/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2637&a=112254&l=en&newsdep=2637

Good luck! ]

Who cares if they think you're being silly? The important thing is you tell them this is what is happening and enforce it. You are not being irrational in the slightest, they are.

Advice on avoiding SIDS has changed in recent years. They are unlikely to be up to date. You can help them with that. Smoking is one of if not the biggest risk factors.

Don't listen to any 'we did this and our children were ok' nonsense. It demonstrates total ignorance of the way risk works. It doesn't matter if 99% of the population got away with something if you are in the 1%.

I understand wanting them to have a good relationship with your son but you are not going to achieve that by pandering to their unreason. They'll have a far better relationship in future if you can trust them with him. To achieve that, they need to start respecting your rules and you.

You baby = your rules :)

Congrats btw :)

Re your last post, I am angry for you. Babies need feeding a lot and newborns need walking to feed. When people don't want to give me my baby, and I am engorged - I walk over and take her out of their arms, and Something like "she needs to eat now," with a big smile. Yes, it is lovely to cuddle a baby, but newborns need regular feeding!

Tell your dh to make them wash their hands before touching the baby. I can't believe grown women need to be told this.

Congrats by the way and yanbu.

You asked to be told that you are being unreasonable. Well YABU, massively so. And I say this as the non-smoking mother of a preemie whose ILs and own mother smoke. I say it as someone who has actually read the research rather than just listening to the media hype.

The third hand smoke thing has not in ANY way been verified or clinically tested. At all. The original study can be found in the American Journal of Pediatrics here. It's dressed up quite well, but what it boils down to is that it was a consumer poll asking about people's beliefs of the dangers of 'third hand smoke', a term the authors themselves invented.

This was picked up by the media as if it were research results and hysteria ensued.

What is less easy to find out, but can be done with some digging, is that the poll was conducted by the National Social Climate Survey of Tobacco Control, a special interest group who work to legislate tobacco / smoking bans, and who are largely funded by the world's largest manufacturer of smoking cessation products.

There is a good debunking of the science involved in an article here.

The articles linked to byCSIJAnner above are not remotely relevant, I'm afraid. The first BBC article is referring to the risks of maternal smoking, both in pregnancy and afterwards, and the Swedish article linked to is looking at secondhand smoke. However, even secondhand smoke is not a confirmed risk for some diseases: the world?s largest study ever done to examine the association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and published in 1998 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. You can read the abstract here. They conclude "Our results indicate no association between childhood exposure to ETS and lung cancer risk".

There is some research being done at the moment into the possible effects of 'third hand smoke', most notably by the University of California. However, their research is proving somewhat difficult as "?Tackling thirdhand smoke is tough because it?s pushing the technological sensitivity of measurements of pollutants,? said UCSF scientist Neal Benowitz, an authority on nicotine metabolism and principal investigator of the TRDRP thirdhand smoke consortium." I.e. the most sensitive instruments in existence to test for pollutants aren't finding pollutants from third hand smoke. They do seem to be finding some evidence that some pollutants remain (in a room after smoking indoors), see here. However, this is a news article, not a scientific study. There is nothing in that article to indicate what concentrations have been found or whether they are harmful.

I'm sorry for the length of this post, bad science really annoys me.

Having said all of that, no, I don't let anyone smoke around my baby, mainly because tobacco smoke is an irritant that her lungs just don't need to deal with. By the same token, I don't take her for walks along busy roads or leave her buggy near a car exhaust pipe. I do make people smoke outside (and ILs and mum smoke outside at their own houses anyway), but that is as much because I hate the smell of smoke and it lingers.

So, if you are still with me, yes, YABU.

And after monster post...reading your post about them continuing to cuddle him while you were leaking and in pain. That is not good - they do need to listen to you. Honestly, if that happens again, just tell them you need to feed him and take him away. Also, you may want to invest in some good breast pads (or shells if you want to try and collect the milk)

Almost all of the neonatal nurses at the hospital where DD was in ICU smoked. They did a brilliant job and were so professional - if they can with ill and prem babies, I'm sure your relatives will be fine with yours. :)

My now 2 year old spent a week first in neonatal intensive care and then in the special care baby unit after she was born. My mum, a smoker, came to visit us a few times in hospital and did get several cuddles, having had a cigarette outside beforehand. I was instinctively uncomfortable about it but I didn't want to ruin her memories of those first precious few days with her grandchild by excluding her in any way. Interestingly she's a nurse too - loads of nurses seem to smoke, as Duchess points out.

ah sorry, it wasn't Duchess, it was Loops.

I read your post, and really feel for you.

You have a choice...

1. confront it head on and without raising your voice or getting upset, say that your health visitor and NhS advises very strongly about this issue, and that you would appreciate they refrained from smoking when visiting your baby (and yes, that includes smoking outside and then coming in). Have your computer at the ready to show them the sites if they dare dispute this, be strong and clear. This is your baby, and this is the first issue that you are representing him on, do him proud!

1. Or you take the less direct option, and say that you have been strongly advised by your health visitor that smokers use an antibacterial lotion before handling the baby (these are GREAT. No need to wash hands, they just wipe there hands with the clear. Looks like a hand wash. Pick up from super drug, boots etc.). Be consistent on this. When you vIsit or they visit, always have one hot hand, so you can give to them before taking the baby. Nurses and health visitors will do this before handling your baby, and you can be pretty sure they have not just sneaked out for a fag.

1. Your final choice, is that you get a close family member to have a word on your behalf. You need to trust them to put your point across carefully, politely and strongly.

As for your siblings monopolising the baby... I think this is not a good idea, and one to avoid. Will create tension of a different kind. Will probably create a family argument and a very short term solution. Forget this idea.

Good luck xxx

I remember that crushing anxiety in the early newborn days. It passes. You'll still have good relationships with your ILs if you set some boundaries. They're still acting like the parents in charge but you're the parent now and they need to back off. It's natural for there to be a bit of tension as relationships develop into their new roles. You got past telling your SIL she made you feel sick didn't you? :)

Don't let them tell you when the baby needs feeding - she's your baby and you know.

OP - YANBU. I don't let anyone hold my DS if they have been smoking. I know DH thinks I am being over protective, but even if it isn't dangerous, it smells horrible!

TBH, I don't much care if people think I am rude for that. We have a friend coming round later and I have told her not to smoke for two hours before coming if she wants a cuddle!

I appreciate that it is harder with in-laws. I have always had a great relationship with my in-laws, but it became very strained in the weeks after the baby was born. MiL was also annoyed at me, for some reason she couldn't accept that I was knackered!