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!

OP, you say to give advice about dummies that they should be taken away by X age, but there is no medical reason to say this is needed either. The advice should just simply be that dummies can reduce SIDs but it is not preferred because of X, Y and Z. The choice is yours.

Facts are key with any advice and I agree with what you are saying.

(And before anyone says that dummies can impact teeth and speech - my teeth are naturally very straight and I could talk very well by the age of 1. My mum never took my dummy away until I was ready to give it up.)

Totally agree.

Everyone was lovely but there was no breastfeeding help at all, just told to breastfeed.

I was told to eat more cakes by by HV when my BF DD wasn’t putting on weight. Someone taking the time to sit with me while I breastfed would have highlighted a latch issue (which was also causing me recurrent mastitis).

I co-slept - I understand why they have blanket advice not to though, having worked in a safeguarding team.

I co sleep with all my dc
Didn’t start off and a teenage mother I say bolt upright to breastfeed at the end of my bed each night and was nauseous through sleep deprivation. One night by mistake I fed dd and must have carefully laid her on the floor parallel to where she should have been in the cot ! Got out of bed the next morning and was about 4 mm from crushing her as nearly stood on her.
After that I co slept with no pillows etc and no duvet
With the younger ones I co slept and used a snuza alarm

I agree, with my 2nd DC last year I tried to breastfeed and apart from one midwife in the hospital no one checked if the latch was right. I really struggled and gave up after a week because it was so painful. Also 2nd had colic and reflux and didnt sleep at all unless in the bed with me but my dp wouldn't let me co-sleep as the midwife/HV had said it wasnt safe. Also there was a huge assumption that because I had a child already I needed less advice etc!

YANBU but for everyone like you, there’s another woman outraged at all the “unsolicited advice” telling her how to raise her baby. Usually that advice is practical in nature too. So because a few get offended, veteran moms are afraid to say much of anything to a mom to be unless asked or they are close friends.

Yes, I do think the safeguarding point is relevant. It can seem silly when you're talking in a group of aware, engaged mums like on here but sadly not everyone is like that, and for a not insignificant number of families, it's a case of damage control.

I read that the reason co sleeping has such bad stats is that they include deaths from babies who were sleeping with parents on sofas/upright in bed who fell asleep etc. Ie, unplanned co-sleeping.

Well, of course they do, @CroissantsAtDawn!

Read this: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/unexplaineddeathsininfancyenglandandwales/2017 (the most recent report).

The report says that cot deaths declined in 2017 to the lowest number on record, so your quote above is just scaremongering.

'In 2017, the unexplained infant mortality rate was highest for mothers aged under 20 years' - perhaps these mothers are the ones who would benefit most from education.

We live in the age of the internet. Surely people can't say they didn't know about something, e.g. that unplanned co-sleeping can be dangerous? There's more infomation available than ever! You can look up reputable organisations online to get advice on any aspect of childcare. I don't understand why people don't do that, and arm themselves with the facts.

As for guidelines changing over time, well, scientists learn more all the time so of course guidelines will change if new info comes to light. All we can do is work with the info we have at the time.

Some HVs are great; others are not.

I was signed off by the midwife on second week and only met the health visitor once for half an hour. I was quite grateful to be left alone to use my own common sense and other (trusted, no nonsense) mothers advice. I was lucky to not have any major issues. Hearing some of the pressure some women have been put under by midwives/HV I totally agree with you. I also got some baby scales to avoid having to trudge down to the HV clinic when it wasn’t necessary.

I think more new mums need to be told to do what works for them as long as it's safe! No one needs to co-sleep on a sofa, but in bed it can make lots of sense barring the risk factors mentioned by various posters here. Co slept with mine early on (

What a lovely lot of mumsanetters on this thread - all with practical common sense approaches to parenting :)

@Silvercatowner

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

Sadly it’s not one terrible thing. Evidence shows us that parents shouldn’t co-sleep if they are very tired, smoke or if they have been drinking.

That's just one aspect of the evidence though. Plenty of evidence to point to co sleeping being immensely beneficial for all parties. It's rather insulting to new parents to assume the worst case scenario and work from there.

When I practised I gave parents the evidence based advice, so they could make an informed choice.

HVs are registered nurses who base their work on evidence. It would be patronising to withhold information from new parents.

'You MUST feed at least 20 minutes from one boob, as otherwise they will only get watery foremilkwithout any nutrients.' - DD who never fed for more than 10 min combined and was always around 95th percentile begs to differ.

I also had to reassure a panicked first time mother, who had learned the nursery gave her 16 month old x ml of puree, but she had read the baby should only have y ml of puree at that age..

‘you must not drink alcohol - co-sleeping is not safe and shouldn’t be done’

Talk about missing the point, people.

She wasn't saying co sleeping shouldn't be done at all, she was saying co sleeping shouldn't be done if you have been drinking.

It's about your impairment after drinking not about alcohol getting into the milk.

I had a horrendous time with my DS (who is now 3). The prenatal care was fantastic, but I was consultant led for a (failed) induction and then a c section. My mental health was on the floor and I was begging to have a side room as after 4 days of induction I'd not slept a wink and was prepared to pay. There were rooms available and they refused.

Once my son was born the HCA that 'helped' me with my latch were so fucking awful they reduced me to tears. As far as I could see it, they just wanted to tick a box that my DS had been fed, they had absolutely zero compassion or desire to help me actually learn how to latch properly.

My DS dropped his birth weight in the normal regions, but I was made to feel I wasn't doing enough at all and formula feeding was massively pushed on me in order for him to gain weight. I was so tired, mentally drained and had an infection, still wasn't sleeping, and was expressing every time I could, so I just went with the narrative assuming they were right. I kept expressing though for another 3 weeks and tried latching whenever I could but not once did a HCA help me when I asked and just said 'well he's a formula baby now, isn't he'.

It wasn't until I met a wonderful bunch of women through the antenatal board on here that I realised (albeit too late) that my treatment was poor in hospital and both I and my DS deserved much better. It really affected my bonding processes as I was convinced I was somehow mentally too unwell to be a mother and was failing him.

HVs are registered nurses who base their work on evidence.

I think many of the posts in this thread suggest that this is not universally the case. Was that true of the HV (a midwife in her case, rather than a nurse) who reduced me to tears about my baby’s weight loss and then, when I cried and said I was a dreadful mother, told me I wasn’t ‘as I wasn’t one of those women who went and aborted her baby’?

Or the HV who told me not to co-sleep with my third baby, even though I told her that was my preference and that I was aware of, and practiced UNICEF safe practices. She went back to her office and called me 30 minutes later to say she’d just read a study in the paper about babies dying through co-sleeping so she assumed I would now not do it. I directed her towards the comment that UNICEF had already made on the study and told her I was proceeding as planned. Was her behaviour based on all the evidence or a Daily Mail story?

That first one was the same HV I mentioned earlier, who told me my very alert baby would not develop her brain enough because of her lack of naps. Again, failing to spot the science.

Just little things like the dummy, I know they’re not ‘recommended’ but just saying something like - it you do use one try and get rid of it by the age of x or similar!

She should be saying "We don't recommend them, but if you do use one then it should be given for all sleeps as it helps reduce the risk of SIDS"

It really annoys me when HV's give out part information. My most recent one was incredibly bad for that. Give you half a story that was solely based on her own opinion.

Yanbu it is a real opportunity for healthcare to provide invaluable advice. I’ve worked with a lot of HVs and unfortunately despite ongoing training there is a lot of personal biases, Mumsy type patronising too. There are some excellent pieces of advice in nhs websites, however even things like checking on how you feel, your relationship, giving you a good sense of priorities.

I’m still shocked that at hospitals they seem to feel that the most important thing is how to bath a baby and possibly breastfeeding, but onky if you’ve said you’d try (in which case they hound you even if you’ve tried genuinely and it’s not working). Nothing on stuff like

• your child will not become a mute if you give them a dummy
• sleep is really important for both of you - here are the safe ways
• mixed breastfeeding and formula are possible
• your baby will be fine if you don’t bath every day.
• getting out every day can be great for both of you
• you can stay in your pyjamas for a month if you like
• these are top evidence based health and safety concerns - don’t to them e.g. window blind cords
• these are the top evidence based things that can really help - bonding, feeling like you can cope, what to do if not, social support, slowing down and not trying to be super mum.

I was utterly horrified by the 'advice' offered by the NCT consultant to the point where I asked her what her qualifications beyond having had children. She was a very opinionated woman and some of her opinions about medically supervised births could have seriously impacted me as due to a health condition I needed one. When I pointed this out she tried to suggest that the doctors were lying to me and that I should push for a natural birth. Again I pointed out that I could be putting myself in serious danger and she merely responded with 'women are built to give birth and have done successfully for hundred of thousands of years'. I suggested she look up the childbirth death statistics from earlier generations. We didn't get on after that.

As for my HV, she seemed nice. At this point I was fairly set in my own opinion about how I would parent and didn't feel that I needed advice. But from what I gather every HV gives different advice and the best you can do is assess the risks using common sense.

Doesn't help that babies often have their own ideas which deliberately ignore the official guidelines.....