....to think women find having babies harder now?

[PollyHutchen]

Partly I am talking about giving birth.
Partly I am talking about the experience of getting used to looking after a baby, while also gradually finding ways to carry on with other bits of one's life. And managing to hang onto some sense of well-being despite all the upheaval.

I think there has been a big shift in recent years but I am trying to work out why.

My mum was isolated when she had me (1955) due to living abroad due to my Dad's work and her own mother having died. When we came back to England we lived in a remote place with few neighbours and no family. The cosy view of the supportive community is a bit of a myth as far as I'm concerned. When I had mine I was a single parent some distance away from my parents and I had to work full-time to support myself.
I expect my mum and i we both found it difficult but the difference was we didn't expect it to be easy.

From casual observation I have noticed that older mothers, used to a life that works well on their terms maybe, find it more difficult to adapt to a baby disrupting their life than a younger mum who just gets on with it.

This.

Yes to this - I was late 30s with a good career by the time I had kids and I think this would have been very rare in previous generations. I was used to a brilliant lifestyle, doing what I wanted when I wanted, loads of holidays, etc. my friends were mostly the same.

we moved to be nearer family support but our parents were older by then so not as physically capable and I lost my London network and the spontaneous socialising and holidays. Felt like I’d gone from a life of fun to a life of miserable drudgery tbh. (And yes I love my kids, etc)

on the physical side I felt tricked, like nobody had properly warned me.

This reply opened my eyes a bit, I always feel a bit silly for feeling like being a working mother of two is hard (albeit I’m on mat leave at the moment with my second), when so many others have more children and face more difficult circumstances. But when you add it all up and look at it on paper it really is quite a lot isn’t it!

It depends on so much though. Younger working class mums can end up with very few choices, particularly financial ones if their partner or husband is a piece of shit - see many, many examples on here.

I was very fortunate in so many ways when having DDs and had lots of support but I still found juggling everything when they were little a nightmare and was in rather a bad place mentally at one point. But because I had choices I was able to change lifestyle and sort myself out.

Not really, can’t help that DH’s job meant he was out of the house for all those hours or that there wasn’t anyone to visit. I had PND badly plus a difficult birth/injuries to recover from and for a while was incontinent which made exercise harder, that didn’t help and it was a surprise how little support there was.
I did eventually get out to toddler groups etc every day and the local children’s centre (since closed) felt like it saved my life but found that people with similarly-aged babies didn’t go to the groups - they all appeared months later towards the end of maternity leave.

I didn’t do NCT, too expensive, but the NHS antenatal classes didn’t involve relationship-building with other parents and people were from a very wide area rather than local (local maternity unit had been closed so people were having to travel further).

I found too that no one thought it was anything to do with them that I had no support (other than DH).
The Health Visitor on one of the two occasions I saw her, said they didn’t provide support for PND but I’d be sure to get support from the community volunteering I did pre-baby.
The community volunteering didn’t do anything. When I mentioned my disappointment with this when I left, they looked totally blank and said it was for my family to provide support.
My family posted a (terrible!) book to me. Most of them were dead or too elderly/at a distance to do anything. They’d had babies in the days of a lot of HV support so thought I’d get support for PND from there.

I eventually built myself a support network but it took more than a year. It’s hard to build new relationships when you’re recovering from birth and adjusting to your new life. We really struggled with very basic things like someone to hold the baby when I was at the dentist having a filling. The dental surgery assumed a network of other people available I could bring with me!

The lack of local maternity facilities could be a factor along with shorter hospital stays post birth. People over 50 or so often talk about mum friends that they met in hospital. That doesn't seem as likely in the postnatal environment today and even if you did get chatting with someone chances are that they don't live locally.

One reason IMO if breastfeeding, is the idea that you have to have the baby plugged in almost constantly, which is almost bound to be exhausting - rather than the old idea of 3 or 4 hourly feeds for a newborn - put them down to sleep in between (with -you hope - full tummies) - never mind if they cry or fuss a bit for a while.

Many of those with a garden used to put the baby in the pram to sleep outside, in most weathers.

It’s so often said that ‘most’ people had family nearby to help. Many didn’t, inc. my DM (4 with no help, little money and certainly no car) and nor did my GM with 6 in the 20s, her own parents nearly 100 miles away.

From this thread it feels like there is a perfect storm of a few things,

Too much outside input, judgy comments, toxic mum groups on FB, unhelpful social media "experts" spreading parenting woo, conflicting advice from different legitimate sources, badly worded advice that makes you think you will traumatise your child for life if you leave them to go to the loo or a quick shower. For a FTM who has turned to google in the middle of the night all this noise makes things worse.

The anti sleep training movement is one of the biggest of these social media nonsense woo things that only serves to make mothers lives harder, sleep training is safe and effective and will not traumatise a child raised in a loving home, and mothers are happier when they sleep better it should be actively encouraged not demonised.

Not enough practical support in person, no or limited village, having to pay to outsource support when maternity finances are already stretched. Lack of community support postnatally from HCP too. This goes hand in hand with an overmedicalisation of birth within stretched maternity services that means more and more mothers are coming out of birth injured and traumatised making it much harder to "bounce back" emotionally.

Too much "mum knows best" and PFB attitude from some parents, the two week no visitors rule is bonkers imo and it puts people of wanting to drop in and help. Yes things are different now but unless you have legitimate concerns about friends and families ability to keep a baby safe do not be the baby expert, it serves no purpose other than to make relationships frosty. Not to say some relatives aren't a pain in the arse and some families aren't toxic but in my experience generally people want to help people they love. Some mothers need to just accept that others might not do things exactly how they would and for the most part that's fine.

Sleep training is woo nonsense. Studies suggest that sleep training has no long-term effects - toddlers and older children that were sleep trained have no better sleep patterns than those who weren’t.

And most of all - night waking is NORMAL for babies! They are not designed to sleep for long periods without parental input, and frequent waking is in fact a safety mechanism that helps to prevent SIDS.

But you know babies better not inconvenience mum and need to be trained to self soothe whatever psycho babble woo self soothing means for babies.

@WondererWanderer you just aren't correct - sleep training is safe and effective and improves the mental health of mother.

Very young babies do need to wake regularly, I agree but after 6 months SIDS risk drops off enormously, and we should not encourage families to torture themselves with hourly wakings of a 10 month old when it is completely unnecessary and can save lives.

The long term studies on sleep training could be more indepth but there is no evidence that sleep training is harmful or doesn't work.

A top reason it’s harder seems to be lack of community.

And a reason for that is people not living close to family, or being part of an active and supportive and involved community.

And a reason for that seems to be economic migration (within our own country) - whether driven by ambition and professional goals or desire to earn more and climb the social ladder, or simply need to earn a living.

I also think social media and Mumsnet can encourage over-thinking, worry, self doubt, and a lack of confidence in parenting. Making it all feel more daunting and harder. Paradoxically!

How do you train a baby to sleep? You just train them to realise no one comes if they cry so not to bother.

@WondererWanderer that's not the case at all and this kind of misinformation hurts women and families who are already struggling.

By posting this you are part of the problem.

In my time, we still had to stay with baby and stroke their head and body if they were whingy, but not pick them up unless they were really distressed. It’s not training them to know that nobody is coming, because they know you’re there. They just learn that you’re not going to pick them up to play because it’s sleep time.

@Notreallyme27 exactly sleep training isn't just cry it out - although it works and is safe, there are plenty of methods that can work for different preferences

Yes, I’d anticipated doing this. The midwives even suggested packing leggings and t shirts for on the postnatal
ward afterwards and talking to other mums in the communal room over meals.

I was in for several days after a difficult birth but the reality was I didn’t interact with the other mums at all, beyond a smile. Most were out very quickly, or surrounded by family visiting so didn’t want to talk to strangers. I used the communal room for breakfast but no one else went in there.

The lack of common sense talk about sleep really didn’t help either. So much about it being normal for older
babies/toddlers not to sleep through, normalising frequent waking often for years.
Yes, for a newborn! And the expectation you’d just suck it up as it was “normal”. Which is very very difficult when you have PND. The anti-routine, do everything on demand pressure also not helpful.

I think it’s getting harder because most women will have returned to work at some capacity around their baby’s first birthday.

I love being a mum to my 1.5 year old daughter, but she takes up most of my time and attention. Everyday I am so grateful to be a stay at home mum, but I am the only stay at home mum I know. I am lucky to be very well supported by my husband and extended family.

I cannot imagine how much more stressful it would be for me to try and combine work and parenting, and to rely on childcare centres to care for my daughter while I worked. I’m in Melbourne, Australia where we are in the midst of a childcare crisis with very poor quality childcare centres - I’m not sure what nurseries are like in the UK.

I think the fact that I don’t have to worry about work, childcare or be separated from my daughter means that I am having an overall very enjoyable experience of motherhood.

YABU. Today we have modern pain relief and antibiotics. Birth trauma is very real, but often in previous generations girls received no sex ed so married young and had no idea what they were in for when giving birth.

Undoubtedly birth is harder on your body when you’re older and many of us are having children late, but I loathe this attitude of “it’s harder now”. It’s not, and you have nothing to go on but anecdotes. Years ago there was no contraception, you couldn’t legally refuse sex with your husband, the kids kept coming and most people lived on tiny incomes. Miscarriage and stillbirth were taboo and there weren’t the online support networks and Mum’s groups like there are today.

In some communities grandmothers and aunts lived nearby, but not always and often there was little family or outside help and no childcare.

My generation received sex education. I’m 72 next birthday.

I think the generation that had no or very little sex ed is now well into their 100s if they’re still alive!

@RidingMyBike 100% I think a lot of organisations are worried about making parents feel judged by discussing what "normal" is regarding babies as - and I have seen it on MN people get so offended if their child happens to fall outside of normal, as if it is some great insult.

Yes new-borns wake frequently, they need to, but it is not normal for a 10 month old to be waking hourly, and making women feel like 5 years of interrupted sleep is simply the price you pay to be a good mother is insane.

@HeyThereDelila not much of what you said is true and none of what anyone else has said is particularly anecdotal.
Sex ed in schools has been around for a very long time, there were also birth preparation classes and mother craft classes given by the NHS from its inception. The pill has been around and available for both unmarried and married women since the 60s, family was statistically closer by mothers worked less, and grandparents did help.

Day nurseries, creches etc have been normal since the 1940s when women were needed with the war effort. They were set up by the local authority, very affordable (free for some) and they didn't go away after the war. It wasn't until the 1970s this provision was removed and private nursery's became a thing.

Birth is statistically harder now than when I was born. Induction is over half of all births in some trusts now. Induced birth is more painful, with more risks and more trauma - many of these inductions are not needed as the induction rate has risen the neonatal mortality rate has not changed. As for "older mothers have harder births" yes the maternal age on average is increasing, but older mothers are classed as 35+ the average age of ftm is 28 - and for all women giving birth is 30 - there is no evidence that giving birth at 18 is easier than giving birth at 30.
60% women giving birth choose epidural this has only increased by 10% since the 1990s when epidural became more popular - in the 80s around 10% of births had epidurals - so not much has changed in terms of pain relief for nearly 35 years. As for infection antibiotics have been available since the 1940s.

Yes giving birth and having babies is easier and safer than Victorian times, but from the 60s? Not so much