eleutheria >baby

May 14, 2008

Mass Breastfeed in Falmouth

Penryn Breastfeeding group would like to invite all breastfeeding mums across Cornwall to take part in a mass-breastfeed on the Moor in Falmouth to raise awareness and promote breastfeeding.

Saturday May 17th at 12 noon

September 03, 2007

Bringing up Baby

25th September 9pm, Channel 4

TV programme following 2 new mums using The Continuum Concept as a guiding philosophy.

Info here: http://www.silverriver.tv/prog_bringingupbaby.php

August 17, 2007

Make a sling for your baby

If you are having a baby you'll definitely need a sling. No baby should have to be pushed round strapped into a chair. Even if you use a push chair routinely, when your baby is unhappy, you will need a sling on standby (unless you ignore the tortured struggle and screams and plough on regardless). Slings leave your arms free to get on with your normal life. The most useful is the ring sling. It will be useful for years. It is easy to use, and comfortable for wearer and baby. My son (nearly 2) still uses this sling a lot. the Hippy chick is also more useful now for when we're out and about and my son wants to be given a lift.

The ring sling is easy to make: an excellent pattern can be found at sleepingbaby.net
You can buy the rings necessary for making the sling here. They are like heavy duty curtain rings.

August 28, 2006

Street-kids' Disease*

"The baseline fear is that if we give our children what they want, they will always want more. However, this theory is rarely tested because we seldom keep giving until they are satisfied. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because they don’t get enough opportunities to learn what “enough” feels like." Scott Noelle - http://www.scottnoelle.com/parenting/spoiled.htm

Breastfeeding and solid food
Each time you feed your baby, he or she will stop feeding of his or her own accord, when he or she is full. Even if they are feeding on demand, and don't follow any time restrictions, many mothers intervene and pull their baby off the breast because they feel that the baby will never stop feeding unless told when to stop. Of course this is absurd. The baby knows what is enough, and will stop eventually. Equally, mothers decide when to wean their babies off breastmilk. Because we lead such 'busy' lives, eventually, the baby will have to fall in with our needs. More often than not, the adults decide for the baby when enough is enough.

Do mothers who stop their babies feeding according to their own limits create children with eating disorders?

Abundance vs Scarcity
Many adults and older children no longer seem to know when they have had enough food; they need constant filling. Hence the successful development of the fast food industry. With modern fast-food, you can carry on eating forever and never get 'full'. One day I watched on TV Gillian McKeith (You Are What You Eat) telling a fat and unhealthy woman that, though obese, she was still eating because she was starving. She was starving because she wasn't getting the nutrition she needed from her fast-food diet. (Fast-food = "Refined foods ... stripped of their original, natural nutrient content and fiber.") With this, McKeith surprised me, and the woman herself started crying.

By all accounts, we have a problem with food in this country. People stuff their faces or starve themselves and vomit up what they do eat saying "look at me. No one loves me. No one stops me from destroying myself". Food problems are a life-long plea for help. Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept, doesn't talk about eating disorders (I don't think), but her description of "the slob" is relevant.

"He smacks his lips to make himself feel that anyone who is near him is glad to know he is enjoying his food; he imposes his physical presence whereever he can, leaving ash or stains or litter to bear witness to his existence, challenging all present to reject him and his right to be loved. As he find he is rejected, he then reinforces his sad statement to the mother cosmos: 'You see? No one loves me because you don't bother to wipe my chin!' ... His hope is that the mother cosmos will, as a mother absolutely must (his continuum says so) take pity on him for all he has suffered and welcome him at last to her unconditional love. He will never close the door on her return by doing his grooming himself; it would constitute an admission of hopelessness." (p122, 1989)

McKeith is trying to help people accept this hopelessness and move on. Here is her strategy. Firstly, she describes the junk foods we eat for comfort: "These foods really should be called 'non-foods'. They cause havoc with the health of the body as the body is not designed to deal with these nutrient-depleted, industrial, false foods". Next, she recommends "a new lifestyle with an abundance of healthy foods", a Diet of Abundance. http://www.enotalone.com/article/5055.html.

We have created this fast-food industry out of our need for food specifically that would not nourish us: a need for something to put in our mouths and bellies to comfort us. The source of this need has to be related to behavioural patterns learned in childhood. Children are routinely given sweets, biscuits, crisps etc to shut them up and keep them happy. Breastfeeding in abundance and until the child wants to give up is, at the very least, a good way of avoiding comforting your child with junk food. The child doesn't learn to survive independently of their mother (self prescribing food as a comforter when necessary, blind to the nutritional content of junk foods that are alien to our stomachs). When independent enough to shop breastfeeding, the child will be ready to face the world from strong and stable foundations; he or she will have learnt how to tell when they have had enough. Enough nutrition, enough love. They will also be experts in how to fill their needs. Breastfeeding is a perfect way of giving freely. It includes warmth, softness, a show of love and being welcomed, physical contact with another human being, total protection, and is a survival food full of perfect ingredients for a human child. It is unreservably good for the child or baby. The milk is sweet, but still nutritious, not 'naughty-but-nice' at all. The breastfeeding child knows s/he can have everything s/he wants, and can be happy. And, for the child, all this is there for the taking.

We are not doomed to unhappiness because we live in capitalist society. This is just an excuse for not whole-heartedly doing the best for your child, and a way of accepting the way we were brought up ourselves, the failure of our own mothers to support our early needs. We will go to any lengths to maintain these excuses as the truth, believing things couldn't or can't be done differently. Why? Why not go to any lengths to face reality? Conditions for happiness can continue thoughout childhood and into maturity. It is often said that children are happy, and that we lose our happiness the more knowledge (and sometimes, riches) we accumulate. We lose our innocence. Why should this be true? But even so, are children really so much happier than adults? Isn't this also a lie? Don't most children desperately want to be grown up (only to find over the years that growing up wasn't the answer to their problems).

Our problem with food is an underlying problem of not liking ourselves and not trusting our bodies - the message we got from our mothers, keen to get us off the breast as soon as possible. If so, will the food problem really go away with healthy eating? McKeith's method resonated with me because she doesn't just offer healthy eating. She offers an unconditional trust in our bodies. She tells her clients on TV that their bodies are doing the right thing, under difficult circumstances. McKeith's solution to the problem of eating disorders is that of a loving mother: allowing us to eat healthy food in abundance because our bodies know when they have had enough nutrition. It's the best we can do, because most of us will have been forced off the breast prematurely, and are trying to mother ourselves by our use of food. This is our only chance of shaking off our poorly-mothered pasts: forget how badly you were mothered, close the door on your mother's return. Start again and address your actual needs now. Sunflower seeds are a poor substitute for mother's milk, but are a better approximation than junk food because they can do no harm. Love never leads to spoiling.

On TV, McKeith gets the emotional response she deserves when she reaches out to the human being in need and tells them she loves them as they are. I hope it goes far towards filling the needs of the people she works with. We have a collective responsibility, mostly unexercised. And in the mean time, we tend to help ourselves as best we can: eating disorders follow because we never learnt as children what it felt like to have had enough. Don't make your children repeat these behaviour patterns. Break the cycle...

"...if you ever feel like your child wants to be “spoiled,” I recommend you do a little experiment. Consciously drop all ideas of scarcity and spoilability, and fulfill the request joyfully with 100% willingness and no arbitrary limitations. Indulge in the pleasure of giving until your child feels satisfied and stops of his own accord." http://www.scottnoelle.com/parenting/spoiled.htm

*"Street Kids' Disease" was diagnosed by the presenter of a TV documentary about a girl who had been living rough, but had been recently taken off the streets. The presenter was explaining why the girl was fat, and, by implication, why she didn't look all skinny like a steet kid ought to. When confronted by food in abundance, we were told, she ate with abandon. I had never heard the term before, and haven't heard of it since. Documentaries of this investigatory kind are notorious for not finding the thing they were looking for ("there is no yabba here"). I felt the makers must have been disappointed to find a steet kid at last, and for her to be a fat slob (ie, just like a normal person), not a skinny wretch clearly proving her credentials for being filmed.

August 11, 2006

slings / baby carriers

Sew your own sling: http://mtmt.essortment.com/babyslingcarri_reqz.htm
See also: http://www.tccmaven.com/resources/sling.html and http://www.continuum-concept.org/reading/carriersReview.html

The Continuum Website is excellent: http://www.continuum-concept.org/, in particular see the articles. Read it for a happy life for you and your child xxxx

July 10, 2006

slings and pushchairs

Mums with a pushchair are in everybody's way; why do they perservere? The days I have used mine, I have constantly been met with annoyed and sometimes abusive people (obstacles) in my path; this is especially true when 1) walking with other mothers with pushchairs on narrow pavements, 2) in shops and 3) on public transport. These are things we do fairly often*. It is clear that other mums cope, but for me the pushchair is a miserable compromise, and not even a very good one.

Pushchairs give parents somewhere to load up their stuff. Pushchairs also give parents a way of understanding the new baby in already understood terms, giving the illusion that their baby is making no impact on their life: the child is pushed around like a shopping trolley. Ie, the baby is understandable like shopping and no new categories have to be formed to embrace the new life. This is important every time a Mother sets out on her journey from home. It gives her the promise of predictability. We know how shopping behaves. (Being able to "get my head around" what was going to happen and plan for the day ahead has been a major issue for me, and it is for every other mother I have met). Maybe this gives her the strength to leave the house. It is the feeling that everything is going to be OK. But it isn't based on truth. Mothers and babies get through the day in their resilience, but I see that the levels of stress they have to contend with are unnecessary and too high. The pushchair pretends to help, but brings additional stress not directly related to the - already high - stresses of having a baby. There are already many 'unavoidable' stresses. In other words, ways of coping with these can lead to even worse problems. *2

Parents (I mean mums in particular, dads spend so much less time with their children) will do everything they can to maintain high levels of separation from their children and foster a spirit of artifice, rather than instinct, in their dealings with their children. Then they like to wonder why? Questions like "why isn't she independent when I have spent so long instilling the values of independence in her" will be asked. The child may have had her own room from 2 weeks old; she will often have total separation from mother whilst asleep - in a pushchair or cot - from birth; and then a new brother or sister will come along to take over the parents' attention, by which time, 'mummy' is experienced at keeping her love under control. By doing this, parents exchange their future joy for current coping. Mothers do the day to day work in implementation, and fathers collude by their lack of availablity to help.

At a basic level, I have the advantage of being sensitive to the reactions I create in public, and am inclined to blend in and be unrestricted in where I go. I also lived in a top floor flat for the first 6 months from the birth of my son; there was no easy way to bring in a sleeping baby but attached to my body (although I know most other mothers in top floor flats manage to overcome this obstacle somehow). I have used slings from birth with my 9 month old baby. Sometimes only at the last minute in passing do people notice I have a baby. It's easy for me to forget the baby - I know he is completely content and safe - and during these times, I carry on life as I please.

My baby travels in this sling every day and I highly recommend it as the best sling available: http://www.kari-me.com/products.asp. It is expensive given that it is just a long piece of cotton with lycra. I think the company is worth supporting so I bought it without much hesitation. If you can't afford it, it is possible to make your own. There must be stuff about it here (http://www.thebabywearer.com) but I don't know because I haven't got through their registration process.

*Mothers in the first few months of having a baby must have the company of other mothers (if only to get through the experience with minimal depression/madness at this time of heightened confusion); children and babies also thrive on the companionship of peers. So we go for walks together on the narrow pavements provided; shopping and travelling on public transport together - difficult enough as a solitary occupation - is pretty much ruled out.

PS, Why do disabled people in wheelchairs take priority over mothers and pushchairs on London buses?

*2 For me so far, the main cause of unavoidable stress has been the volume of advice I've ploughed through before I let myself follow my instincts. It drove me crazy trying to get my head around what was the right thing to do. My brain felt like it was in complete chaos, just like the baby's unpredictable behaviour. Whenever the little one cried, I'd think of all the wrong I was doing him. Many people settle for the promise of predictablity. I am glad I perservered with the investigation to find a better way: once I did get my head round it, I could start enjoying my baby without restraint.

May 14, 2006

baby books

Mothers and fathers, here is my recommended reading:
Deborah Jackson Three in a Bed & Do not Disturb (a new edition of the latter has been issued with the title "Letting Go as Children Grow: The Benefits of Relaxed Parenting for You and Your Child")
Hetty Van De Rijt, Frank Plooij Why They Cry: Understanding Child Development in the First Year
Mary Renfrew, Chloe Fisher, Suzanne Arms Bestfeeding: Why Breast Feeding is Best for You and Your Baby

Please get these books! They are written with love, intelligence, sympathy and understanding. If you read them at the beginning you may have the confidence to follow your instincts right from the start and not have to worry about doing things "properly". These books all support each other in their philosophy and they make sense in ways that G1n@ F0rd, et al, never could. Together, I believe, they offer all the practical support you will need without any rules to follow blindly.

The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff is another book that is supposed to be interesting along the same lines, but I haven't read this yet so can't recommend.