Slagging Off The Childcare Gurus

[susanmt]

I'll not start it, I just created the thread!!

let's be honest (despite my earlier points) the threads where WWIII breaks out have that ghoulish, rubber-necking, car wreck fascination, don't they? Just a joke, honest!

Oh, come on everyone. Start slagging!

ok, i really hated vicki iovine's "best friend's guide to the first year" (or was it pregnancy, i can't remember!) it started off really funny but after a while i actually found it relentlessly negative - and not all the things she said were absolutely bound to happen have happened at all! E.g. increasing shoe size - eh??

Yeah- that one was annoying and has about a zillion spin offs ie best friends guide to pregnancy, toddlers, teens etc. I remember being uncomfortably aware that I did not share Vicki's sense of humour and that we probably wouldn't have reached the mildly interested aquaintance stage yet alone the best friend stage.

Yes, and how can you have more than one BEST friend? She had about twenty five!

When I was pregnant first time around and friend gave me an old used copy from the 80's of Dr. Spock as a joke. As it turned out I found him unbelievably useful for sensible advice on just about every subject going.
Now, having said that, I am amazed at how vehement everyone is about the "right" way to bring up a baby. I would have thought that our babies are as varied as we are and therefore there couldn't possibly be only ONE "right" way to bring them all up. Barring cruelty and abuse, there really isn't a wrong way to bring up a child. My dh and I hate routine...thank goodness we ended up with a child who doesn't need one. I just hope the next one (due any minute now) is just as flexible...But then my bf and her dh thrive on routine and luckily have produced a child who lives happily on one. I don't think any less of my bf as a parent because she does things I wouldn't dream of doing with my ds. Feeding him and putting him to sleep at exactly the same time every day make her ds the same lovely happy child that my ds is on a widely varying bed and dinner schedule. Surely part of parenting is experimenting until you find what works for your child and the process of doing that involves seeing/asking/reading about what everyone else is doing and filtering it for your own lifestyle and child. Ok dh has arrived to massage my poor pregnant itchy feet, so gotta go.

I think the tone of my postings came out all wrong as I certainly didn't mean them to be vehement Just have noticed that Fordies themsleves make sweeping generalisations which are often inaccurate about other gurus but take exception when the same is done to Ms Ford. Again, sorry for any offence caused!. Disparaging comments about co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding and so on are literally water off a duck's back to me.

thanks for clarifying that, croppy. it can be so hard to get the right message across in print sometimes v. communication in person. i try quite hard to get it right with my posts, but am sure there are things i have said sometimes which have not come across in the way i meant them.

so other than gina who do you really loathe?

My mum still has her copy of Dr Spock - the best piece of advice was "don't eat your child's left-overs." Reading this, my mother thought that Spock was no doubt going to go in to great detail as to why this was damaging for your child. Then she turned the page.... "You will get fat."

SofiaAmes, I couldn't agree more.

Oh this thread has made me fall off my chair laughing. GF lives next to the toilet in our house, where I can read her and poo at the same time. Who the hell is going to make me toast cereal and juice no later than 8am when dh is at work and the sluglet is raising merry hell. That said, I did use it as a gereralised guide to timetables as they were similar to my mother's and she managed to raise 11 children so there must be something in it somewhere. The problem is that I always have the urge to leap to attention and shout Sieg Heil whenever I read it. It's those nasty digs at misguided young maternity nurses thats jus SOOOO patronising.

On another point, am I missing out on something here? I haven't actually spoken to a HV since the sluglet was 10 days old. At her 6 week and 8 month checks, it was like a production line. Conversation was stricly discouraged. I'm intrigued that people actually get childraising tips from them.

Did some of you guys stay up all night or did you just get up this morning and start again (only teasing!) Thanks for the online entertainment, anyway (just teasing, again!) Janh, I am probably remembering incorrectly as I have more and more of a tendency to do these days, but I think that Dr Spock (I always want to say/write Mr Spock) said about 30 years after his first book that he had got it all wrong and virtually changed his whole advice for the 80's book.

Oh I'd forgotten about the best friends books! I borrowed one when I was pregnant and it was so far off the mark i swore I'd never read another one but morbid fascination made me read the baby one, which was even wider of the mark. If I remember rightly there was a lot of stuff about how you would never want your husband near you ever again except to make another baby, which wasn't the case here!
It's trying to follow EVERYTHING one person says which doesn't work, I reckon. And the 'gurus' who generalise as if everything should be the same for every child. Neither of mine, for example, developed anything like the way the 'What to Expect ...' books suggested, and if I had tried to put eithr down to sleep after only 2 hrs in the morning we would have had a terrible screaming match on our hands. Generalisations are great as long as you remember they describe averages.
The best book I had about pregnancy I have lent out, I liked it cos it gave we pictures of the baby in the womb etc ... cost me £5 from Woolies, and was brilliant! Wish I could remember what it is called!

Aloha, re: the after 8am thing, I've heard similar things about eating breakfast and supper, not just to do with children but adults. Digestion or something.

I have to say, I couldn't take anything seriously if it was written by someone called Spock!

Not quite as anti as KS but I totally concur that GF's lack of understanding of what it is to be a mother drips off every page of her book. Before I had ds I thought I'd be tough, unsentimental, put myself & dh first and leave him to cry etc. Then he came along, my heart turned inside out and hearing him cry made me want to cry. I missed him when he was asleep and holding him was heaven. I could no more not make eye contact than I could fly out the window. In a way, I do feel for her, all those babies and not one to call her own.

And what about the Babywhisperer woman,eh? Two daughters but left them in England to be brought up by her mother while she went to the US to find fame and fortune. I truly don't think I'll learn to be a better mother by following her advice.

found the tone of the baby whisperer very irritating - i thought the ghost writer made her sound like daphne from frazier. promises much with some baby types identified (a bit like those magazine competitions - did you answer mainly a's, b's etc!) but not much practical guidance arising from it - imho. but then i think it's probably quite clear by now i do really like to get to the nitty gritty detail with this stuff!

i'm dying to nominate andrew wakefield - does he count as a childcare guru!

why am i suddenly getting that oops i've done it again feeling?

Absolutely Ionesmum, everyone here is trying to do the best for their child, and I don't think anyone should be critisised for that.

But I think the key to it is to take as much or as little from each approach as is appropriate to you and your child. Babies don't come with an instruction manual handed out at birth. If they did we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I just feel it's wrong to expect them to conform to rigid and unnatural rules so early on. Babies are unique with unique needs and wants just like adults. I just find it very strange that we should try and impose routines on them any more than we would on ourselves.

There is no easy answer. No right or wrong way of doing things. It's a case of finding out hat works for you and your child.

But for me the needs of the child are first and foremost and throughout.

I think the needs of our children are first and foremost for most people, Jenny2998 but people interpret how to best to meet those needs in quite different ways? I do wonder if perhaps Gina Ford appeals particularly to people who don't like the feeling that things are rather chaotic and want a strategy to make them feel that the chaos is slowly being combatted. For people who expect or even thrive on chaos because they're pretty disorganised anyway or just expect chaos as a result of a new baby such strategies are quite unappealling and difficult to understand. Almost a personality difference rather than a real polarity in what's best for babies overall. I sometimes think. That's my feeling as a long-term participant in these sorts of Gina/routine rows, anyhow.

jenny, I swear that dd laughed when she saw me reading GF! None of us are morning people so it was always a non-starter, but dd was definitely not a routine sort of a girl, which was fine by me. However, at 6 mo she's suddenly turned the house into a boot camp with feeds and naps expected on the dot and it's drving me crackers!

I much preferred the attatchment parenting sort of book when p/g; however, when I actually had dd I found they just made me feel guilty and inadequate. GF did at least reassure me a bit even if we didn't follow much of her advice. The best that I've read by miles is Elizabeth Pantley, she's into attatchment parenting whilst understanding that mums need to sleep and eat as well!

Scummymummy, you are so clever, that's exactly what I felt. When dd first came home she didn't stop screaming for weeks. We took her to the g.p. having had 2 hrs sleep all weekend and the receptionist said, 'Oh, mine didn't stop crying for 2 years!' I could have brained her. I'm sure she was just saying that she'd been there too but all I wanted to know was how to stop the crying. I felt so much better once the hv started to give us plans to work to, it didn't matter if they worked or not, it was just the fact that we were 'doing' something.