A little respect, please

By Pinky McKay

“Have I ever done anything abusive to you?” I asked my daughter who had just affirmed that I had never smacked her (I didn’t think I had, but needed to check just in case maternal amnesia was causing mummy smugness). After a bit of a pause, my self-image as gentle mummy was shattered. “Yes, you have,” she said with absolute conviction. “When I was little, if we went out, and I had a dirty face, you would spit on your hanky and wipe it.”

That’s hardly a childhood trauma is it?  Heck, I can remember my Nana, all dressed up in her hat and gloves, dabbing at my own face with a bit of spit on her lacy hanky. Mind you, I can also remember squirming at the time, and it got me thinking how easy it is to simply do things to small children and babies, without even considering how intrusive or disrespectful it might feel to them. Just for a moment, put yourself in your baby’s bootees: What if somebody was shovelling food into your mouth, for instance, then if they wiped the left overs off your face with as much sensitivity as they would mop up the high chair tray? How must it feel to have your legs pulled up in the air and your pants peeled off without so much as a ‘please’ or ‘thankyou’? Or, imagine being taken to visit a houseful of people you have never met before and being expected to smile as they hover over you with their beer breath and kisses or pass you around like a tiny parcel from one stranger to another.

Mummy, look at me

Eye contact is an important element of parent child bonding and the development of trust between parent and child: your face is the most potent visual stimulus your baby encounters, and as you and your baby gaze into each other’s eyes, endorphin levels rise in your baby’s brain, producing feelings of joy. Your own endorphin levels will rise and, in turn, you and your baby become emotionally synchronised.

Sadly, much current infant sleep advice includes telling parents to 'avoid eye contact' with their baby. Not only does this go against all natural instincts, but it can have unintended negative consequences for infant development.

I have a beautiful statue on my desk: a black stone carving is the ‘eye contact’ between the mother and her child. Although the carving is rough and has no defined facial features, the two heads are perfectly aligned so that the connection between mother and child is unmistakable.

Don't let anybody 'should' on you

I have just returned from visiting another lovely, intelligent mother who is doing a wonderful job with her baby, but is convinced she must be doing ‘everything wrong’. She feels guilty that she has messed up her baby’s early days (she hasn’t at all!); she feels inadequate because (she thinks) she can’t read her baby’s cues (she is making perfect eye-contact with her baby - their connection is like a lovers’ gaze and as we talk, she intuitively comforts her baby or changes his position at the slightest grimace or squirm); she feels guilty that she has stressed her baby about feeding. The baby was refusing to breastfeed after some inappropriate advice and now the mum is beating up on herself for listening to the advice that made things more difficult. But really, what choice did she have? Her baby was unsettled (as newborns often are), so what desperate, sleep deprived mother wouldn’t be ready to grasp at whatever straw was being offered if it sounded reasonable at the time – or was being offered by somebody who seemed more experienced about babies than a brand new mum?

The Language of Tears

I feel like a really bad mother,” confided Sarah, mother of four month old Molly who, apart from an early bout of colic that was overcome with some simple changes to Sarah’s own diet, has been an easy, happy baby who rarely cries. Sarah explained, “the other mothers at mums' group all talk about hungry cries, tired cries and angry cries and I am sure I wouldn't recognise one cry from another.”