To think that new mums should be given more practical ‘common sense’ advice

[BrownBirdsFly]

I’ve just had my second baby and I’m finding things much easier second time round, but I can’t help but feel sorry for first time mums after the contact I’ve had with lots of healthcare professionals.

For example, the midwife who came to my home on the second day - when hearing I breastfed said ‘you must not drink alcohol - co-sleeping is not safe and shouldn’t be done’ she asked if I’d given baby a dummy and I said no and she said ‘good - we don’t recommend them’.

I couldn’t help but think especially as a new mum trying to do the right thing you could go crazy with this approach! I do co-sleep because I’ve found this is the ONLY way I get half decent sleep. I really wish they would say ‘co-sleeping is not as safe as baby being in a cot next to your bed - BUT if you do it it’s really important you don’t drink alcohol - you sleep between dad etc’.

I’ve got a number of friends who are so terrified of co-sleeping they’re sleeping sat upright with baby on their chest and obviously keep nearly falling asleep which is obviously not safe either!

Likewise for lots of other things. I’m really grateful for all the help I’ve had and know they have to stick to guidelines and give the best evidence based advice, but I’d so love them to say ‘here’s the guidance, but we know sometimes people can’t always follow it and if you need to co-sleep/give a dummy/make formula in advance here’s how you can do that as safely as possible’.

Sorry that got long!

Realistic breastfeeding advice would have been fab. I tied myself in knots about timings and whether to swap sides or not as I had so much conflicting advice given to me as stern fact.
Eight months in. Still can't tell if it's fully 'drained', still can't ever remember what side I fed on last anyway, cluster feeding is a thing, newborns don't own watches.

I had my two children in different hospitals and under different health visitors.
The first health visitor took the approach of telling me the rules by the book.
The second health visitor has a more practical approach (baby is now 4 months) and I feel so much more relaxed and as if I'm not doing everything wrong.

I was advised to co - sleep in the hospital by a midwife - she put my son into bed with me .

DS 1 co - slept for 3 years and DS 2 for 1 year , we were all in bed together.

YANBU.

We went to NCT classes and that gave us a fair amount of information about breastfeeding, but not a lot of practical guidance for after the birth otherwise - all focussed on the actual birth. Looking back, I can’t see why I didn’t think that was odd - spending 8 sessions on the shortest bit of being a parent!

Would have been really helpful to get some decent advice from the HV once DD was born. The 5 day visit was so awful I asked my mum to be i with me for the last one - DD was a bit early and small, but was a good feeder (crickey, I felt like I spent the whole day feeding her!) so didn’t have any weight dip after she was born. HV insisted this wasn’t possible for a BF baby, and that either I was lying to her or DH was sneaker her bottles when I was asleep!

We coslept for a long time, and for us it was essential - DD had a medical condition and couldn’t be left at night until after she had had surgery to correct it (which she waited for for nearly 2 years....). It would have been really helpful to have some good advice on that rather than just “cosleeping can be dangerous, we don’t advise it and it’s spoiling your baby”

It would be absolutely bloody amazing to have some decent advice! Feeding and sleep and more of a minefield than you realise before you have deal with it while severely sleep deprived.

Totally agree. Although judging by this thread it seems to vary across areas/hospitals. I had the most awful night in the post natal ward but the midwife insisted I sit up to feed. Same when I had midwives/health visitors visit me at home, dont Co sleep, its not safe. I ended up giving up on breastfeeding but if I had been encouraged to lie down to feed it would have been so so much easier.

I did with my second and it was a breeze, fed him for a 18 months! Also gave him a dummy at nap times, no issues!

Yup. I had a very experienced MW deliver DD - a professor of midwifery who was there on her one shift a month to keep her experience current. Her advice on co-sleeping was “nearly everyone does it, so here’s how to do it safely”.

YANBU

Mothers are treated like shit in this country let's face it.
What a difference it makes in other countries where there's no hellish communal ward, women are not kicked out after a few hours, there's enough staff to help you with (breast or not ) feeding, showing you how to bath baby, to care for the cord, and all the practical advice you need.
Let alone a monthly follow-up - at least - for mum and baby with a paediatrician. Other countries manage, it's not only for the rich, why are we so behind it's embarrassing.

YANBU. I was so disappointed with the care I received after having DS, both in the hospital and at home from the midwife and HV. So much so that I'm considering a home birth for my second (and I NEVER thought I would want a home birth).

All the most helpful advice and practical help was from other mum's in my family and friend group.

One of the mums on my caseload fell asleep and suffocated her baby.

Of course this is a terrible thing to happen, but practice needs to be evidence based, not based on 'one terrible thing that happened'. Else we'd never do anything.

Your HV is delivering outdated advice. They are supposed to have a non-judgemental discussion about the risk factors of co-sleeping now, rather than a blanket don't co-sleep. Studies show that when HCPs blanket tell parents not to co-sleep, parents will either do it anyway but not talk about it, and are therefore deprived of the opportunity to discuss the risks and making it safe, or they try to avoid it so much that they accidentally fall asleep in a risky situation.

Exhausted new parents fall asleep. It is far better that they do so in a way which minimises the risk to their baby.

I think it depends on the midwife and HV. My day 3 midwife arrived when I was fast a-co-sleep with DD. She tweaked our position slightly, approved what the baby was wearing, showed me how to feed lying down and reassured me I'd done the right thing (vs staying up all night holding her and accidentally nodding off).

Shame the NHS is so strapped because it would be good to retrain lots of them so they could give the practical advice needed; not just to cosleep safely but also as PP have noted, stuff like "put the baby on the floor, it's not going anywhere".

I think health visitors are a big part of this problem, where their advice is based on their opinions rather than actual evidence- especially around breastfeeding.
I had directly conflicting advice from 2 different health visitors on consecutive days - one telling me I must feed baby for 20 minutes each side, not just 10; one telling me to feed baby less because she is gaining weight too quickly.

I'm a fairly confident person so felt OK with ignoring and just carrying on, or looking up facts and stats myself - but an anxious first time mum could be really affected by this.

I know all mums have some anxieties about their babies, but for some the anxiety and guilt is massive and I'm sure health visitors spouting stuff as though its absolute fact is contributing to that.

YANBU

Our health visitor suggested we slept in shifts, baby suffered with apnea episodes and couldn't sleep on his back because he stopped breathing. Seems the only solution was to sleep him that way anyway, and me and my partner pull shifts to watch him 24/7! Baby would have ended up dying in a car accident or being dropped had we followed the advice and become more sleep deprived!

My advice was like that from MW as in - we recommend next to you in a crib/cot but if you choose to co-sleep guidelines are... however we had contact with so many different professionals (DC2 was poorly and 100% harder than DC1) the differing advice is astounding - swaddle, dont swaddle, breast is best, He needs some formula.. immediately! Dummy/no dummy. Etc I had to co sleep, I was so tired feeding him every other hour I kept feeling myself nodding off holding him in my arms

When he was in hospital the amount of staff sharing anecdotal advice on how formula improved their own babies health with no actual evidence based reasoning really annoyed me as DC2 was only 3 weeks old and I was battling hard to EBF.

My health visitor was fab esp second time, said "I'm not going to patronise you with safe sleep advice..I know you and I know you are aware of the safe co sleeping guidelines"

I have 5 DC over a 17 year spread and it always used to both amuse and irk me how the advice kept changing. First Baby: Do it this way, Second baby: Never do it this way! Third: This way is OK again! etc.

Just read up as much as you can, listen to lots of advice from lots of different people and find what works best for you and your baby within certain safety perameters.

It seems like a lot of advice is just poorly communicated, though, judging by this thread.

For example, it's not possible to "drain" a breast, breasts don't have drains, they aren't sinks. You make milk constantly and it's not that big of a deal whether you exactly use each breast for the same amount of minutes. I hate the rise of apps timing this - making women feel like it must be important when it's nonsense. Yes if you have a severe imbalance of time, then you're risking blocked ducts but you'll become uncomfortable before this happens and the instinctive response is to go oh right - better get baby on that breast then. I doubt anybody tells mothers in Tanzania to stand by with a stopwatch.

Car seat time limits are just about oxygen saturation levels in babies which can be reset in about five minutes just by giving them a cuddle outside of the seat, so no need for any daily limit. Just a time limit of one stretch, and you're meant to stop about every couple of hours for the driver's alertness anyway.

It really does seem like some HVs/MWs get the training and then disregard whatever parts of it don't fit into their worldview and just keep on giving their opinion instead

Maybe the training needs to be improved.

YANBU, although my midwife set my bed up for bed sharing with my first (although ultimately that didn't work for either of us at) and to my utter surprise, a midwife at the hospital safely secured my second in bed with me after birth (she has bed shared with me since birth).

It's true that co sleeping is not the safest way to sleep - but it is safe when done correctly.

With my second child, I was far more confident and was looking forward to a drink when breastfeeding. However, as I now bed share, I've decided not to, as after more than two years of not drinking, I'm pretty embarrassingly wasted after one glass of wine.

I know it's all a bit silly. My midwife was hideous for pre natal checkups so the hv actually were better!
It's a shame as new mom's are very vulnerbale

My midwife showed me what position to lie in to safely co-sleep! Saved my life that did.

I also think it depends on where you are. All of the advice we have had as first time parents has been common sense / quite specific to our situation and none of it contradictory.

I never wanted to co-sleep just because I didn’t want baby in my bed but as soon as hubby came in from work I would go to bed and then get up at 1am so he could have 6 hours sleep before work. Obvs not breast feeding so we could do that. Totally understand why people co sleep. I wish there was more information and advice for people to be able to do this safely. That would be better than risking people falling asleep with baby on the sofa / sat up in bed.

Our baby was given a dummy by NICU staff once he was off the ventilator, overnight when we weren’t there. I wasn’t going to give him one as I wrongly thought they were frowned upon and asked why they’d given it to him, and the nurse said the newest research shows they help regulate breathing. They even gave me a leaflet (I forget which charity it was from) which said as much. He’s had one since. And it’s a damn godsend! I don’t know what I was thinking haha.

There is no such thing as "safe" or "unsafe" anyway - these are arbitrary markers, there are only degrees of risk, so something can be more or less safe than something else. I suppose you could decide that something with a certain percentage chance of adverse outcome was unsafe, but it's still just numbers. I think it's a mistake to assume that the notion of some "perfectly safe" way to do anything exists - it is all about comparing risk. And you have to include risks based on what people will realistically do as an alternative - for example yes, of course, the lowest risk thing is for a baby to sleep on their back alone in a clear cot in the room with you, but if the baby won't sleep like that, then realistically that isn't an option (nobody can sleep through crying), so people choose other alternatives, and it's useful to discuss the relative safety of these options. Is it worse to co-sleep? Put baby on their front? Use a sleepyhead? Let them sleep at an incline e.g. Fisher price thingy that was banned in the US? Try to stay awake with them all night, with high chance of failure? Put them in another room? Let them cry until they are sick in order to "train" them? If you suggest just one of these things there are people on MN ready to crucify you as though you had suggested putting baby to sleep in a vat of hot lava, but you must do something, because even doing nothing is doing something which comes with a relative level of risk.

The co sleeping thing really annoyed me. We coslept with both for a short period, was fine as we followed the Lullaby Trust guidelines. But it’s madness that advice really makes parents anxious. A friend was horrified that I’d given DS a cot bed duvet......she sent me so many concerned texts once she’d found out.....DS was 2 at the time! Also another friend got all anxious about how much follow on milk to give her DD as she did t want to break the guideline ...again she was nearly 2 at this point...her WhatsApp group question was “how many mls of formula are you giving?” Collective reply “erm none” ..... I think she’d got so used of following strict rules by our HV that common sense had gone out of the window.

I live in Scotland, and we received a leaflet on how to do “safe co sleeping” when leaving the hospital. Which is very useful.
However, I don’t feel that I was given the right support on breastfeeding. I was told to breastfeed, then top up with formula (as baby was feeding for hours). Then my baby chose bottles over breastfeeding, because of nipple confusion! It’s so hard being a new mum!