Anyone seen todays Times about Gina Ford's new book?!!!!!

[louby78]

OMFG is all I can say. Anyone who doesn't like her will now see their hatred excel to a new level.

Apparently new mums should go on a date night with their husbands 4-6 weeks after the birth of their new baby and have sex even if they don't feel like it. Other mums share their tips and one woman actually says...."you may have to grin and bear it"!! EXCUSE ME?!

When her mums are feeling down she tells them to have a bath, shave their legs and paint their nails!!!! Not sure about anyone else but when my children were babies I could just about manage to brush my teeth! And as for sex...... well sleep would be my priority but I guess if I'd listened to her my babies would be sleeping through from 6 weeks after I put them in their own room and left them to cry until they got the message.

All this from someone who has never even had a baby. If she too had pushed out a baby bigger than a melon, had to be cut and then stitched together again (not to mention the bruises which made it hard to sit down for a week), then she maybe qualified to offer new mums advice. Until that day she should just keep stum.

It's like reading something from the 1940s. Silly cow.

I do think there are GF mums on MN. They just rarely need to go onto the Sleep boards. Not saying their offspring are perfect, they just maybe have issues other than sleep ones.

at the idea that GF doesn't recommend controlled crying.

Maybe not now... and maybe not the 'controlled' bit.

She doesn't. Crying up and crying down are two things she talks about but these are distinctly different from controlled crying.

I've never let my daughter cry much at all beyond the first few seconds it took me to get to wherever she was at the time.

And it's ironic you have a go at GF re: controlled crying when there are plenty of threads in the Sleep section from mums who've done BLP, saying 'oh no, looks like there's nothing for it but CC' and people replying saying 'it's okay, you'll get through it'. Lovely!

'In fact, the implication is, if your baby is well fed and well rested during the day, they won't be up every hour every night looking for the breast and yelling if they don't get it.'

This implication is a fallacy in a lot of cases. The idea that you can do things right is also a fallacy. Every baby is completely different. There is no one right way, and no wrong way.

(She used to advocate cc, or cio.)

Ideally, breastfeeding should be on demand, and generally, babies will settle into their own feeding routine. However, and this is something parents are not aware of when making the bf decision, breastfeeding generally means a baby who will want to feed more frequently than a bottlefed baby, daily and nightly. There will usually be more wakefulness and it will go on for months. The GF method tends to assume that the behaviour and sleeping patterns of a bottlefed baby will be possible for a breastfed baby.

Nevertheless, waking every hour during the night would not be the experience of most breastfeeding babies and is not necessarily going to happen absent an effort to 'sleep train'. The suggestion that this is the alternative to sleep training is a good way off the mark.

MadeameChin -- the article says that most babies will settle into a routine of getting about 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, on average, by 3-5 months and will require no 'training' to get to this point. The point at which they get to this milestone is a function of biology and not training of the sort that GF advocates. The definition of 'sleeping through' in that article is sleeping for 5 uninterrupted hours.

Suggestions in the article to help babies develop longer nighttime sleep include keeping baby involved with you in daily activities and swaddling for sleep.

People have very unrealistic expectations of their baby's sleep. Older family members have anecdotes about babies who slept through the night from two weeks, 8 hours every night, etc., and four hour naps during the day, and are often very good at making new mothers feel like incompetent idiots by comparing how well they got on to how the struggling mothers are doing and using the word 'normal'. My exMIL boasted to me that she had never once got up in the night for a single one of her 7 children. The older BILs and SILs confirmed that for me. I think she fed them cough medicine in their bottles.

When parents post here about sleep problems at 5-6 months they are as likely to get advice here to go with the flow as they are to be advised to establish a routine.

But surely they're posting because they're looking for help? Being told to go with the flow is as demoralising to a tired, upset mother as going through controlled crying is.

Controlled crying is far, far worse than demoralising. Many parents emerge shattered from the experience. Many start but cannot continue.

All babies sleep through eventually. Maybe the exceptions constitute .00001 of the infant population?

All babies sleep through eventually and I see a routine as a way to encourage that, rather than wait for the magical day to arrive, and slowly get more and more tired yourself.

The routine is selling you a sense of control. That is the real problem most parents have. They are used to arranging their lives to suit themselves and that all changes with the arrival of the baby, crystallising around the issue of tiredness.

Address your need to feel in control and you have half the battle won.

You are right. For me, having a routine appeals to my need to control. I don;t see it as controlling my daughter, though, I just see it as wanting to know exactly how much food shes had, exactly how many hours of sleep she has, and the 'habit' of knowing "right, she's going to want a feed in an hour", "oooh, she's been awake an hour and a half, so probably ready for a sleep now".

Horses for courses, really.

'address your need to feel in control' - I agree that half the battle to dealing with a situation is accepting it first. But what if you can't? For some women it just doesn't come naturally. This doesn't make them bad mothers.

I still don't understand why starting with a baby-led approach and then maybe going down the CC route later on is somehow seen as more acceptable on MN than starting a routine sympathetic to your child's individual needs earlier on?

It wasn't my need to feel in control that was the problem, it was my need to sleep! I freely admit to being a control freak, but actually I was fine when DS was a baby - until we got to 4 months and he started feeding all night every night. At that point I was so exhausted and miserable I was contemplating suicide.

We didn't do crying it out: I struggled on to 6 months and then split the nights with DH when I went back to work. But I'll never forget how wretched I felt for those two months. I still can't think about it now without waves of panic coming over me, and I certainly wouldn't be able to face doing it again. I do seriously wonder how much "post-natal depression" is actually just sleep deprivation.

You don't get more and more tired MadameChin - you get tired, and then that's it. There are lots of myths around sleep deprivation, one of them being that you build up a huge sleep debt that keeps getting larger. You don't, and it only takes a night or two of decent sleep to catch up, or even just four or five hours at the right point in the day.

It doesn't come naturally to anyone. How could it? Your life changes overnight and you are not able to even say 'Wait until I get this figured out' because the baby is wailing right now.

It's not the need to control the baby, but the need to feel that you are not being controlled by her, that you are somehow still the boss of your own life. It's an illusion, that is sold to a vulnerable market.

Again, the polarity is not starting with 'baby led' and then ending up with 'controlled crying' (and notice how that word controlled slips in there?). Maybe for a very small fraction of parents, cc appeals because they feel they have reached an impasse. But for the vast majority of babies, sleep develops without parents feeling they are ready to try this extreme.

Your child's individual needs will be reflected in whatever routine she develops all by herself. The vast majority of babies develop their own routine. The vast majority sleep before they reach the one year mark. There are often blips and setbacks, notably around the four month mark when babies tend to be more about to absorb stimulation from their environment, experience a growth spurt, maybe even start sitting up unaided. Scroll down to Baby Sleep Requirements to see how the average baby fares in two-month intervals. There is a very wide range of 'normal'. Allowing the baby to develop her own routine assures you this is your own baby's individual sleep requirement. The development of an individual sleep routine does not happen by magic. It happens as a result of biology. The night it happens is magical of course.

Dunno if that's fair, MA, don't you think all of us need to feel some measure of "control"? We all need to feel that we are basically "coping". It can be so overwhelming to have a baby, I can understand some folk just wanting checklist to help them know they've basically got it all. (Cannot believe I sound like I'm defending GF, blech, arggggh!).

I cope very badly with monotony or strict routine/scheduling. It makes me very depressed very quickly. I also respond very badly to performance pressure: set me a narrow performance target & I'll just fail it as quickly as possible to get the anxiety about possible failure over with. :)

So my main beef with GF, really, is the tone in her writings that her way is superior to any others; it obviously doesn't and can't suit everybody.

Of course we do. That is why there is such a plethora of baby books, methods, websites, etc. We are sitting ducks for the marketers of all of this. We buy the books or well-meaning friends and relatives buy the books. They end up in charity shops or in the recycling, and some get ceremonially burned. The vast majority of parents end up bumbling along their own way.

The best way to ensure you make a lot of money with your brand if you're pitching it at people who need control/are desperate is to be very authoritative and detailed in your suggestions and to castigate the brands of others.

Please don't speak for us all to suggest that "it" doesn't,come naturally and that "we" all need answers from a book.

Er, think I said for 'some' women. By definition, that means I'm not speaking for you all. And alpine, weren't you defending the book earlier?

This debate has moved on from the OP which was actually about GF's contented mother book. Even I think it sounds a bit daft. I might need help in bringing up another human being, but I'm not that far gone I need help with how to be me.

Ok, to get back to the OP.... sounds shit and extremely patronising, therefore I will not be reading it. Others are, of course, free to do as they please.

Hear hear! :)

I'm all for a bit of pampering if you get the chance. We have to admit that we do feel better when we're all shaved and don't have an itchy head cos our hair needs washing. However I honestly did not have the time to do this in the first 8 weeks after my DS was born. He was bfing every 20 mins at some points, napped very little unless he was cuddled. My boobs were full and leaky all the time and even having a shower couldn't make me feel in the slightest bit sexy, not to mention the bleeding, bruising and generally flabby unattractive belly! Would my husband have like sex sooner? Sure! But did he understand why I didnt feel able to do it? Of course!

As for a date night, I'd have loved nothing more than to have spent a night alone with my husband, however I was bfing, had trouble expressing and frankly didn't want to leave my baby for long.

If this all makes me a bad wife, well I guess I'll just have to hope my husband doesn't read her book and realise how terrible I am!

As for alpinepony - bully for you! Your DP must feel very lucky!