Parents are inundated with ‘expert’ advice and judgement, but ultimately you must trust your instincts, writes Maia Dunphy
One of the most widely abused clichés you hear when you become a mum is some variation of ‘Ah, parenthood! If only it came with a handbook!’ Guess what … it does. And it has done quite possibly forever.
Some of the most rudimentary prehistoric cave drawings included tips for successful baby-led weaning (this is entirely made up but who knows).
But yes, there are thousands of handbooks – walk into any bookshop and you will see the Parenting/Child/Baby section is probably taking over a significant percentage of the building – not quite as sizeable as Cookery, but thankfully now eclipsing Celebrity Autobiography. Not unlike picking up a travel brochure or joining a cult, it’s up to you to decide what direction you want to take. If you don’t want to buy one of these mothering manuals, you can walk straight to fiction and buy a nice holiday read, but if it’s a handbook you want, then no one can say they don’t exist. The trouble with advice books of any kind is finding the right one for you. There’s no point in trying to work out what’s wrong with your dishwasher by reading the clock radio instructions, and equally, it’s futile applying a set of rules to a baby who isn’t responding to them or who needs a different approach.
What does parenting mean? A hundred years ago it meant ‘keeping your children alive’, and even a couple of generations ago, it just meant ‘raising your kids’, albeit within your own parameters, abilities and means.
Sometime over the last while (I have to be vague as I have genuinely no idea when it happened) people stopped just raising kids and began ‘parenting’. It became a verb with wildly varying connotations. Now we have a string of adverbs that can precede it: tiger, hothouse, snowplough, attachment, helicopter … every time I open a magazine, a new term seems to have been coined.
Fear
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a mother like the thought of any harm befalling her baby. This isn’t a new concept; we all know that fear sells like hot cakes. Hot cakes that should be kept away from babies in case they burn themselves (you see? Fear is EVERYWHERE).
Google ‘nineteenth-century parenting manuals’ and prepare to guffaw at the hilarious and ludicrously archaic suggestions and advice. But then remember that in a hundred years’ time, mothers may be chatting incredulously on their hover boards (they’ll have to become a reality eventually, right?) about the things we do now: “Those idiots let them drink from plastic cups? So toxic!” “They let them play on mobile phones to keep them quiet! Did they not KNOW what radiation was?!” “Can you believe they put them to sleep on their fronts/backs/sides?!” (This seems to triangulate with every generation so it’s only a matter of time before we’re told to suspend our babies from coat hooks to be safe.)
This gem from the book Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols published in the 1920s isn’t quite what you might find in the 1980s bestseller What to Expect When You’re Expecting: “Pregnant mothers should avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease; avoid injury, fright and disease of any kind.” Fair enough, lads. Sounds like something a certain Führer might have said …
Advisors
Most of the early advisors on maternity and motherhood were men. In fact, I think they all were. The rules were simple and often similar: cuddling was bad, leaving babies to cry until their faces inverted was normal, smacking was essential, and raising children was generally not dissimilar to raising animals in a Victorian circus. Parenting was all about detachment and discipline – there were even nineteenth-century ‘baby cages’, a handy device for apartment dwellers that could be suspended out the window to ensure your baby was sufficiently ‘aired’. Maybe that’s where David Blaine got the idea.
Things moved on, and in the 1950s the idea of the ‘good enough’ mother was popularised by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who made a connection between poor parenting and essentially every other single problem in the known world (no pressure, eh, mums?). According to Winnicott, fascism, violence, social injustice (and no doubt reality TV stars had they been a thing then) could all be directly attributed to bad parenting. So he believed that the path to a better society begins in the nursery – and he may have had a point. Most importantly, he stressed that parents didn’t have to be perfect, but just had to do their best.
Then came Dr Benjamin Spock in the 1970s (that paragon of parental guidance who most of us born in the ‘70s were ostensibly raised by) and his more gentle approach of trusting a mother’s instincts. Basically, he made millions from telling people to use their own common sense: nice work, Spock. And then followed the female experts: from Penelope Leach in the ‘80s and her child-centric views – you
had the baby, you make the sacrifices – (tell us something we don’t know, Penny), to militant maternity nurse Gina Ford and Generation X’s Supernanny Jo Frost, whose ‘naughty step’ revolutionised attitudes to disciplining kids (and presumably, carpeting) in the early 2000s.
Recently the 21st Century has seen parenting move into a whole new realm. There is no longer one guru, one attitude or one food pyramid. More than ever before, mothers are educated women who have built careers before having children and approach parenting as they would a job. Their attitude is ‘It has to be done well’. They are parents who are better read and have access to more information than any generation before; parents who know they only have one shot at getting it right, and are determined they’ll be the ones who raise the next well-balanced internet millionaire with a sense of humour and a social conscience. Or maybe just a decent human being. Either way, as parents, we are all looking for answers when sometimes we’re not sure what the questions should be. Every century and every generation think they have parenting sussed, but we are always evolving based on new knowledge and technology. Parenthood is no different, and in our pursuit of perfection, we too will get things wrong, make mistakes and at some point our children will tell us that they didn’t ask to be born (this is always a good time to take out an image of the baby cages and remind them how good they have it).
Based on all this, you might think that I have a tiny clue what I’m on about. Well, you’d be wrong, I don’t. I didn’t read a single book whilst pregnant (for the record, I don’t recommend this approach; you don’t have to read the entire library, but please read something), and only know any of this because I looked it up so I could make some cross references that weren’t just my own whimsical musings.
When it comes to what sort of parent I am, I have no idea.
I know occasionally I want to wrap my little boy up in a cocoon and protect him from anything even remotely negative until he’s 50, and then I realise that makes me sound nuts (but it would make for a pretty amusing surprise 50th birthday party).
The truth is, I just want him to be happy, independent, funny, smart, compassionate and kind, and for that to happen, he’ll have to learn some things the hard way. The most important things we can do for our kids are to give them the best education within our means, teach them that being horrible never works out well for anyone, and remind them that fussy eaters are irritating. If I can get those three things right, ‘you’ll be a man, my son!’ (Although as a pitch for a parenting book, it may need work.)
*Maia Dunphy is a blogger, author, broadcaster and television producer. This is an edited extract from her new book The M Word, based on her blog and published by Gill Books, €14.99