AIBU to dislike the whole PFB syndrome espoused on mumsnet?

[snowdropz]

It pops up again and again and I think it is a load of old codswallop. It irks me.

Is only your PFB precious?

Is it used as some kind of badge of honour for those who have more than one baby? Oh - she is being PFB?

PFB behavior refers to the preciousness that new parents display of their new child's health, safety, development, and general wellbeing.

Example 1.

Ensuring that a person caring for a 3 day old baby knows what they are doing = normal caring parent.

Ensuring that your own good mother, who raised three of you, has read the three A4 page list of instructions before taking your 3 day old hefty healthy baby into the next room while you are at an appointment = PFB behavior.

Example 2.

Ensuring that your new baby's cries are attended to and his needs are properly met = normal caring parent.

Ensuring that you are never more than arms reach from your baby in an otherwise empty secure flat, and refusing to close your eyes unless your partner's eyes are fixed upon the baby's still sleeping form = PFB behavior.

Example 3.

Ensuring all baby equipment is safe to use = normal caring parent.

Ensuring that the moses basket is never further off the floor than the thickness of the carpet in case the handle snaps and the baby falls and and bleeds and dies and you'd be forced to commit immediate suicide with petrol and a match (for extra, well deserved pain to punish you for your rampant stupidity and carelessness) = PFB behavior.

When we refer to a Precious First Born - we don't mean, actually, that the child is more precious, we mean that the child has been subjected to more parental precious behavior.

Brilliantly put Colditz

And I Never Did Any Of Those.

Maybe that not everyone gets PBS, but am 48 years old and not one member of my family (self included), nor quite large parenting network of friends and aquaintances: in America, France, Denmark, Germany, Wales, Australia, New Zealnad and England - have not had varying degree of hyper-new-parent-syndrome.

Having a child brings the world to life and gets us focusing on the important, little things. I loved feeling filled with wonder and awe, and fear, and love.... And all the other heightened emotions.

But this is quite an odd discussion...The first child is an intense learning-curve for some, but not all people.

I think every first time mother does those colditz
It's only as we have more kids and get more confident, that we realise it was PFB behaviour. I think people should give new mothers a break, I really do. There's probably a perfectly sane biological reason why people go all PFB, and then, with time, they managed to judge risk better.

I think that every first time mother is one too Sakura, but I don't think it does them any harm to be gently mocked in a pleasant way-it helps to get it into perspective. Later on the DCs themselves help-mine roll their eyes and say 'I'm a big boy now!' but the baby doesn't have that option, so a bit of gentle teasing stops the parent taking themselves so seriously. We are only talking about the sort of thing that the parent should roll around laughing about afterwards, e.g. as already mentioned leaving the grandparents 3 A4 sides of notes when they have the baby for an hour while you nip to the dentist!
PFB is perhaps the wrong term and it should be PFTP -precious first time parents. I don't see anything wrong in it. I had no experience with babies and suddenly one was left to my tender mercies-it was scary and I was precious! As time went on I realised that they were fairly hardy creatures and wrappping them in cotton wool was not good for them. Most people only say it because they have been there, done it and got the Tshirt! It takes one to recognise one!

true, sometimes it's good to let a mother know that the baby's not going to DIE if she leaves it to cry for a minute while she goes to the loo.
It does rather feel like the baby will die though, doesn't it, when it's mewling that little vulnerable newborn cry...
I can't stand the tactlessness and mocking that goes on

Well I didn't do a lot of the things dismissed as PFB behaviour . I may have done some though but for instance

-I was happy for others to hold ds from day

• I first left ds with my parents when he was 3 weeks old to go to a local cinema with dh. I was gone about 2.5 hours and left a bottle of expressed milk and instructions to feed him if he cried and to call me if he really wouldn't settle. That was it.

• I didn't mind friendly strangers cooing over him and ever "shock" possibly touching him

- I found weaning reasonably stress free and didn't worry about what I considered were normal gagging reflexes in ds when they happened - I found potty training - and night training pretty stress fee too- note ds took months to train and had regular accidents for weeks. He also didn't night train until over 5 years old and that too about 2 months of regular accidents. We still have the odd night accident now (even the odd poo one)- 6 months later so it could have been very stressful if I had let it be.

BUT - I did find the lack of sleep in ds's early years beyond stressful and it led me to very weird behaviour. Also I did worry obsessively about cot death BEFORE ds was born but afterwards I really didn't too much. I followed the guidelines (probably a bit prescriptively) and didn't think about it much.

• I didn't endlessly talk about him to anyone but close family (i.e parents and dh)

dh was incredibly pfb though (well compared to me) but even he didn't do some of the frankly mad things I've read about on here. Sometimes I do wonder if MN is a very concentrated microcosm of life.

Some of my antenatal friends did do the pfb thing (one of my best friends did it massively) but most seemed quite relaxed after the first nightmare 6 weeks or so anyway.

Never heard of it!

I think i agree with what Sakura says that there is some degree of biological reason, as your hormones are all over the place which can stop you acting as a rational human being. i remember feeling almost a boiling rage when MIL wanted to hold DD1 in the early days...ridiculous what on earth did i think she was going to do.

Bumblingbovine - I agree. When I first came on MN it was like encountering a kind of hyper reality of parenting. Used to get into all sorts of scraps with people (unitentionally) telling them to lighten up and stop worrying that their PFB woud be damaged for life if it passed wind into anything other than a nappy fashioned from finest sea island cotton.

Frankly after 12 months of sleep deprivation DS1 was lucky he was not walking roud with a potato stack strapped to his backside with duct tape.

Interesting replies - although I am not into any mocking gentle or not of mums.

I still dislike the phrase.

The really important thing as a parent is not to take yourself too seriously and to maintain a sense of humour-sometimes they need a gentle nudge!

I think the really important thing as a person is to not take yourself too seriously and maintain a sense of humour ....