Do you feel like you have damaged your child and are bad mother if....

[mummylovesus]

you have a baby who cries all the time, you pick him up that second but no amount of cuddling and loving seems to settle him, he is awake for hours at night and you are emotionally and physically at the end of your tether because your baby just keeps crying?

My ds cried all the time, and for no discernable reason. I had him checked out, and there was no underlying problem that anyone could see. Once I'd checked he was OK (nappy, feeding etc) I sat and held him, and watched the television with the subtitles on. I found it remarkable easy to dissociate from the crying and give him a cuddle if I wasn't fretting about what was causing the crying.

Some babies just cry.

if it makes you feel better, having had an earful of ds1's tantrums after school pickup the other day (i@m finding him really difficult ATM), he pulled backwards on the baby's buggy so it nearly toppled - I yanked him off, rather too fimrly and he overbalanced, falling into a nearby fence. He didn't hurt himself but I was [shock} at what happened, even more so because it was in front of the school and god knows what a passing teacher might have thought. Christ, they could report me to social services! It was an accident but I'm still deeply in bad mother mode - desperate for sleep after nights ujp with a teething baby and very that this happened to ds1. sometimes I think I'm just not up to being a SAHM..

i guess it depends on the type of person you are zippietoes motherhood is such an emotive subject obviously involving our precious children and we all want to think we have done the very best by them, i think some of us look for reassurance that we have done our best by our kids in other mothers and how they raise ours and if you are not a strong person you may sometimes end up feeling you are failing for not doing the thing that the evidence says you should be doing for example breastfeeding or weaning at a certain age despite the fact you are not doing it because your baby isnt happy with it. i think i am rambling a bit lol but i hope you get my drift :)

Sorry happybebe, should have said something like "this thread seems to want us to pretend otherwise".

oh and frannyandzooey i am not one of these parents who is making pleas to others to stop making me feel bad lol i am very happy with my choices in parenting and dont feel the need to justify them to anyone else or get angry because others dont do the same or look down on me for my choices. :)

lol we posted at the same time, i would agree this post is suggesting we should ignore the evidence but i dont think that just that sometimes the evidence and the reality mean you just cant always do what is proven to be the best thing :) xx

well happybebe if it's any consolation i was desperate to bf dd1 (I even wore horrible nipple shields for weeks before she was born ) but despite every effort she lost so much weight we couldn't leave hospital and when we did we were nearly readmitted eventually i had to admit defeat and formula feed, but never did i encounter any grief about it other than my own

I bf dd2 until she was 12 months

I didn't manage to persuade ds that he would bf although iwas convinced that as it went so well with dd2 i would have got the hang of it..again I was never made to feel formula feeding was wrong..of course it wasn't was it?

mlu
Haven't read the whole thread, but my niece cried and screamed for most of her first 8 months due to an unrecognised allergy affecting both formula and breastmilk :(. She'll be 10 this week and is a wonderful, delightful girl - if anything's 'damaged' her, it's the favouritism shown to her younger brother :(, not the crying as a small baby.

Ladies I'm sorry I started this argument again but I can't help it now, I always try to be as polite as possible and see things from others point of view, but it just becomes rediculous when parents are made to feel that they are damaging their children by following a routine that was started as guide. The book does not say that you must put your child down at 12.30 and let it cry itself to sleep, it does say that you should allow your child 10 - 20 mins settling time whilst always checking on your child to let him know that you are there i.e not alone!!

I promised myself I would never sink this low on MN but I am totally fed up with it!!

Hmmm - from what I remember about psychology there is precious little clear and uncontested evidence for anything.

lucky you zippi not to meet critisism i had it from my own health visitor when i put my baby onto formula after two months of BF and producing less and less milk to the point that one night my DD screamed for 6 hours from 11 pm to 5am and i desperately kept putting her to the breast only to eventually realise i had no milk to feed her with. in that first week on formula she put on 11 ounces. but all my HV could say was the milk was there you just have to keep putting her to the breast, you didnt need to put her on formula. just an example of the critism i myself have met.

that's not criticism, hb, it's advice. when she said it you possibly could have gone back to bfing. (and I'm not criticising either btw)

it was critism, you dont know my HV or the way she said it, i know the difference between trying to help someone and being dissaproving of someone, hence why i changed surgery and had a new HV within the week.

beckybrastraps there have been huge advances in this area in the last few years

seriously, mt?

Particularly with hormonal research - cortisol mostly as it's (relatively) the easiest to measure.

Also, tragically, the research from studying Romanian orphans (remember the orphanages with not enough staff to pick up babies?) has led to huge insights on potential damage from consistent and chronic neglect. They represent an extreme of course, but their tragedy has helped child psychology understand pathological emotional responses in infants and children which can lead to emotional problems as an adult.

There's a very accessible book called 'Why Love Matters' by Sue Gerhardt I'd recommend.

Absolutely, the obvious biological effects of stress on the child can be measured. However, is it valid to take this in isolation? What about the effects on the mother of the constant failure to pacify a crying child? And how that subsequently affects her attitude to her child? And how that attitude impacts on the subsequent development of the child?

Becky I think most people would agree that if the mother's sanity is at stake, then taking steps which may include risking long-term effects on the child due to short-term stress may be acceptable.

I think the problem arises when methods which use short-term stress on the child (and perhaps carry risk of long-term damage) are incorporated into "normal" parenting situations or accepted as the default method.

These are being studied too Becky. I was involved in one when I had DS where I was filmed at night in my hospital room with DS ( I could turn it off if I wanted some privacy but I never noticed it to be honest). I was studying the initial stages of bonding between mother and baby, different sleep patterns eg co-sleeping, or with a cot beside the bed, communication, crying, stress, etc.. The team followed up for a year. I was one of 100s. I got a nice edited highlights vid too, mostly of me bawling my eyes out.

It was studying, not I, sorry..