Does this make Gwyneth a hypocrite?

[emkana]

All vegan and hippy-dippy on the one hand,
but on the other hand employing a maternity nurse who advocates leaving a less than six-week-old baby to cry for 20 minutes...

\link{http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1774405,00.html\hmmm}

I think it's the difference between forcing and guiding.

With the former, you decide in advance what your baby will do and you do it, whether the baby cries or not. So if you decide (or read in a book that this should happen) that your baby should nap between 9 and 9.45, then at 9am, your baby is in a dark room, whether he likes it or not.

With guiding them, you watch for their tired signs, you watch for their hungry signs and you fit them into your day.

I'm for the latter - the former makes ME want to go into a dark room and cry.

Is the baby-room sound-proof? I think it sounds impossoble to hand over a newborn baby to someone else to look after at night and just sleep through your baby's crying. I know this someone else is supposedly an expert, but from reading the Standard today she sounds more like a granny who decided to write a book? I am probably just jealous of all these celebs who get their beauty-sleep, time to do yoga or whatever while the experts look after their babes.....

I slept in the spare room once when dp was tiny and i couldn't bear her crying for me then. We swapped. It was actually worse to listen to her and i was more awake.
I can't bear it myself, it hurts me to listen to.
I got that feeling too tbh from that article. (That she was a granny who had decided to write a book and now she's a star!)

Sorry, when DD was tiny and DP went in there with her. We swapped back pretty sharpish

good post hunkercaribou - you have to go with the flow with a baby.

what annoys me is the Observer calling hers possibly the most 'sensible' child rearing method of all.

I know!

is that the mad woman who wrote an article about how her SIL was really jealous of her caesarean (or something?)

No, not another baby expert...
Mind you, celebrities live in another dimension and are so self-absorbed and self-obsessed that I think most of their kids are better off spending all their time with nannies or night nurses (though personally I wouldn't leave a 6 week ld baby to cry for 20 mins)

This was the bit which irritated me most:

"Babies are a blessing and they are so very precious but family life shouldn't be turned upside down just to accommodate them"

Er... that's exactly what does happen to normal family life when a baby comes along. Hello, it's supposed to be turned upside down.

I don't really mind all this controlled crying stuff - I can see that if you have a baby who simply won't stop crying ever, you'll be driven round the bend if you don't have some kind of effective technique to deal with it - but it's the growth of this whole idea of regimentation that I don't like, almost seeing the baby as the enemy that has to be pre-empted. It's the whole culture of "pop the baby out, get it in a routine, efficiently lose three stone and get your hair done, then get back into your pre-pregnancy clothes and back into the office" kind of message that these awful books are promoting. They say they're all for the mother's welfare, so that she's not so overwhelmed by becoming a mother, but that's part of the whole weepy, hormonal, joyful experience of motherhood as well. I just feel sad that the culture of childcare guruing at the moment seems to be giving women the message that they can't trust themselves enough to give in to the helplessness and ride with it for a while, before sufacing some months later. It just seems to demand that women surface immediately, but part of the pleasure, as well as the pain, of having a new baby, is just having a good old wallow in it.

Sorry I know that's all a bit hippy lentil-knitting, and I always followed a vague routine, so never thought of myself as being a lentil-knitter, but it's the feeding every four hours (FGS!! What is this obsession? LET IT GO!!) and leaving a baby to cry automatically, when there isn't really a serious problem, which disturbs me.

"I just feel sad that the culture of childcare guruing at the moment seems to be giving women the message that they can't trust themselves enough to give in to the helplessness and ride with it for a while, before sufacing some months later. It just seems to demand that women surface immediately, but part of the pleasure, as well as the pain, of having a new baby, is just having a good old wallow in it.
"

agree totally

I have never been able to let either of mine cry, it just feels wrong for me. I can tell and angry cry and leave for 5 mins but racking sobs, no way.

Friend has an 8 month old and asked me what to do about his teething as her HV said he would get into bad habits if he was taken into her bed! I said ffs, he is poorly, you pick him up and cuddle him, go with your gut instinct.

Bad habits!!

Cailgula, that was beautifully put!

Well said Caligula.
Not only do these parenting gurus give the message that mothers shouldn't trust themselves but I feel they also assume that family unit are nowadays quite isolated. When I had my first baby I didn't really know what to do, but talking to my mum, my Mil, my friends helped me much more than reading one of these books. Mothers unite!

agree caligula.
And FWIW most of these celeb mothers are full of shite - they pay someone to take care of their babies 24/7 while they get plenty of rest and go to the gym, get their hair done etc , then expect us normal parents to take them seriously when they harp on about what joy and fulfillment they have as mothers, and what hard work it is. They can f**k off as far as I'm concerned ! and as for calling your child Apple - these people are a joke.

Brilliant post, Caligula!

FWIW, whilst my 5-month-old daughter does sleep from 10PM to about 7AM, whilst awake, she still wants to feed every 3 hours, w/a cluster feed in the evenings every hour and a half or so.

Can't imagine leaving a newborn for 4 hours if they wanted to eat more frequently.

I'm inclined to cut babies a lot of slack. I mean, they just got out of a place where they were never hungry, cold, uncomfortable into the big, bad world.

FFS, it only lasts a short while and then they're up and about.

Yesterday's Evening Standard has a piece about the woman....what gave me the creeps was the quote she made to the interviewer about cot death. She said 'You've heard of cot death? Well, after I have given Moses his bottle of expressed breastmilk that Gwyneth has prepared earlier, I put him in his cot and say a special prayer over him.'

How's that supposed to make mothers of cot death babies feel? That's it's their fault because they didn't say the right prayer every night?

That alone should make anyone regard her ideas that a crying baby is fine to scream for 20 minutes with a lot of suspicion.

it just says so much that it's the nanny/nurse /whatever who feeds the baby and puts him to bed, and not the parent.Weird!

I would have thought that having an army of staff to do everything else for you - cook, clean, handle the washing and ironing, shopping, etc. - meant you'd actually have enough free time to breastfeed and look after your own child.

After all, plenty of folks do that w/o any hired help.

Guess not.

I think our Gwynnie's too busy with her yoga and meditation expat!

tiktok, I find that really, really sinster actually. what smuggery

and EIS is so right - if I had people to do all the boring stuff in my life, I'd be having a lovely time cuddling up to my baby and enjoying bed time. OK maybe this suits them, but it's certainly at odd with the macrobiotic/yoga/mungbean lifestyle they like to project.

I don't think it is cruel to let a baby cry when going to sleep, it is also not a new concept either, it is also known as controlled crying. We did this with my DD (although only left her for max 5-7 mins between "comforting"). It took us a week, starting with her carrying on crying for up to an hour, but after 2 days she was asleep within 15 mins. We NEVER left her alone for this hour, the method just means you shouldn't pick them up constantly as this is also unsettling, but you MUST let them know you are there. DD was sleeping through at a very early age and we have only had the odd week where she didn't sleep well, she is now 16 months. I think people take this kind of thing too seriously, we figured out DDs eating and sleeping routine ourselves with a minimum of advice from one book, certainly wouldn't pay someone to do it for me!!

i keep waiting for the re-emergence of wet nurses . . .

It also pisses me off that they go on about the way their children slept at six weeks because of starving them in between their four hour feeds. Well guess what, my DS was breastfed on demand, and he too slept through the night, 12 hours, from six weeks. I think if you ahve a baby who sleeps from six weeks through the night, you are just bloody lucky - it's probably got very little to do with how you fed them.

Agree Expat about it being such a short time that they are all over the place keeping you up (OK it was a short time for me, I accept I was lucky). I can understand that if you haven't had a full night's sleep in eight months, you are going demented and feel that you have to do something about it - but this thing of expecting kids to sleep through the night from the age of 2 hours old or whatever preposterous arbitrary date they come up with (which no-one's told the babies about) just seems so unnecessarily prescriptive towards the baby and imo would make new mothers whose babies didn't sleep through until 6 months, more desperate and frustrated than they otherwise would have done.

Perhaps I was a total pessimist, but I fully expected never to have a full night's sleep for at least a year after becoming a mother, so the bonus of having unbroken nights after six weeks was so wonderful, that in all those six weeks I never really minded that much. Whereas with DD, because DS had slept through from 6 weeks, in the 3 extra weeks she took to sleep through, I felt much more desperate and tired than I had done with him, and though part of it was because she was my second and I was therefore more tired anyway, I'm sure that subconsciously, part of it was because I was half-expecting her to start sleeping through the night at six weeks, jsut because her brother had. And the wrong expectation added to my tiredness. I'm sure some of these books, by telling mothers that their babies can and will sleep through from a certain (quite early) date, are setting them up for worse exhaustion and disappointment than they otherwise might have felt.

I don;t care what Gwynnie's nanny does or doesn;t do, but I do care that she (Gwynnie) is endorsing a method of parenting that will undoubtedly cause even more first time mums to feel like jumping off a cliff when their baby is unsettled or wants to be held a lot or oterhwise doesn;t perform like the model baby in the book.

I really wish we could get away from this plug the baby in, click teh start button, type "run" in the box, defrag, clean it's hardrive, now sit down and drink a glass of water while it reboots methodology.

LOL and exactly Frayedknot!