Health visitor aibu?

[Lollypop27]

Firstly I will add that my children are teenagers so I haven’t had any contact with a health visitor for years so things may have changed.

My friend is due with her rainbow baby in a few weeks. It’s been a difficult pregnancy. She takes everything the midwife and health visitor says as gospel which I can completely understand why.

Yesterday she had a introduction meeting with the HV. They talked about allsorts and friend asked if she needed to try and put the baby in to a routine as soon as it is born. I don’t quite know what the answer was to this but the HV said that from day1 as long as the baby is fed, changed and winded then it should be left to cry. It needed to learn to settle itself and if she keeps picking the baby up she will be makin a rod for her own back. Also that the baby would need feeding again in a few hours so to keep putting them in the Moses basket and walk away otherwise she will have a baby that will never want putting down. She also said that baby didn’t need to be in the same room as friend lives in a bungalow so she would hear the baby anyway.

When friend told me this I was a bit horrified. Surely this advice isn’t right? I thought babies had to stay in the same room as you until they were 6 months? Leaving a new born baby to cry? Have things changed this much in the last 15 years?

When I gently said to friend to do whatever feels right for her when the baby comes she bit my head off. The HV is qualified not me so she obviously knows what she’s talking about.

@Soconfusedbylife

Sorry yes it's this one, should have take a pic of the front.

OP the HV should have given your friend some leaflets including this one, which completely contradicts what she is saying.

just tell her the hv is optional and you can opt out of their services and do with up her newborn how she sees fit

2 kids(8,14)and ive never had one as i refused their services from the beginning

hospital and midwife tried to tell me they were compulsory and i have to have them till i showed them evidence that they are not and a opt in service

both kids had all injections at the doctors surgery but hv wasnt seen

i didnt need someone telling me off if hes put on to much weight this week or he should be doing this as this age,common sense and google can tell me that

you hear so many shit stories about how the hv tell you how to bring up your baby and people are doing it just because they are told so or let them in/see them because they think they got to

@BumbleBeee69 Rainbow baby is a term used for a baby born after loss of a baby or child.

I hope your friend looks into this more op,what bad advice from the HV !
I'm sure that she won't want to leave a newborn cry.

Thank you for all the advice. I was not at the appointment so I can not say for sure what the HV said but friend has never lied to me in 35 years so I believe everything she says. I will mention the leaflets and websites you have advised on.

My worry is that when her instincts tell her to comfort the baby, because the HV said not to she won’t do it however much she wants to. She’s so anxious of getting it wrong that everything a professional tells her to do she will do.

Op I suffer from anxiety and tied myself in knots that I would be a bad mum and was doing it wrong.

I tried to listen to everyone and even went to a bf class and complained about it because their attitude made me feel that if I couldn't bf then I was basically rubbish.

However I wouldn't try and tell your friend the hv is wrong but perhaps ask her, before the hv came along what did she want to do in those circumstances. Also that it's ok to do things her way and use snippets of everyone's advice.

It might be that was how she wanted to mother..reassure her that no one really knows what to do but we follow instinct and learn as we go. She can change the way she wants to do things if something doesn't work.

I get the feeling when baby is here the babies cries will help her to understand the best way to deal with baby.

When my dd came along I have people giving me contradictory advice and I just told them I would do it might way. When I needed help I asked friends, family and the professionals and used various methods until I found one that worked sometimes it was a combination of 2 methods.

She needs to know that it's ok if she isn't perfect, or she doesn't get it quite right, but also that all babies are different and the hvs method might not work for her and the baby so she might want to explore other ways as well in case she needs another method

Sorry that was all over the place, too early in the morning

@BumbleBeee69 - a rainbow baby is a baby that is born after the mother had a miscarriage or stillbirth

thank you, Im sorry I've never heard the term before.

Once my babies were fed, winded and changed they did settle themselves.
But any little murmur and I was there.

Both slept very close (not in bed) to me for months.
Both happy confident adult adults.
My mum told me once that getting dad his dinner was more important than my crying (as a baby).
Anyway as an adult finally got diagnosed with anxiety which
As been treated.
So please don't let your friend feel guilty about picking up a crying baby.

Snoz what a lovely story.
You sound like a great mum
I think people are like that.
If they get enough quality attention they don't need it 24/7.

Like a previous poster I think this might be what she wants to do and she's using what the health visitor said as justification and exaggerating it a little. It's so, so far off the current advice (which is that you can't spoil, over-touch or communicate too much with a newborn) that I think the odds that the HV said exactly this are very low.

My DS is 2 and all advice from the HV was to encourage responsive parenting. It was explained to me that babies that age cannot form habits and are not yet advanced enough to be able to manipulate behaviours. Despite earlier advice to leave babies to cry there is now evidence to show that it is damaging to brain development and the opposite is in fact true. Tell your friend to cuddle away, after her losses I'm sure the cuddles will be just as beneficial to her as they will be to her baby.

Have just been musing on this, and I wonder if the context that your friend missed out/wasn't aware of is that HV thought she was too anxious and was trying to counter that? Eg. she wasn't saying as a blanket thing 'don't have your baby in the room with you', your friend was saying 'but how do I go to the loo?' and HV said 'look, you live in a bungalow, you'll hear the baby, they don't need to always be in the same room as you!' and friend sort of interpreted that and ran with it?

If that is what she actually said then I would complain.
A newborn should never be left to cry. I’m not against leaving babies older than 3 months to cry for small amounts of time. I regularly work with health visitors and I’ve never heard a hv give a mum this advice.
Snoz I think what you’re describing is very different to leaving a small baby to cry it out. One of mine settled herself back to sleep very early on after being placed in her Moses basket and just had a little whinge to herself. My others would have cried for hours if I had tried that.

And when I say never left to cry I mean for more than a couple of minutes. It’s ok to finish on the loo or finish a meal quickly before rushing to the baby.

Don't worry. Everyone knows how they'll parent until the child is actually born. Once she gets that first skin to skin she might find she's the most instinctively responsive mother in the world.

Good point, Judas. You may also find she's a bit less anxious and more willing to follow her own instinct once baby is here safely - I had a horribly anxious pregnancy after recurrent miscarriage and thought I'd be the same when baby was here but, to my great relief, I was/am not. That isn't always the case, though, so as a friend I'd be on close look out for postnatal anxiety and to support and gently suggest she gets help if it does seem to be an issue.