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If there was a way that you could raise your child that would almost guarantee that they were safe from exploitation and sexual abuse, would you be signing up right now? I doubt there are many parents out there who would answer no. And yet the vast majority of parents are Authoritarian, a parenting approach that I am about to argue puts kids at a far higher risk of being abused than they need to be. Peaceful Parenting (also known as Respectful Parenting) however can minimise the risk. 
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There are plenty of people who should be feeling guilty for breastfeeding failure. But the mothers who are doing the best they can with the information and access they have in a culture that is unsupportive and hostile??? Nope. That ladies is called gaslighting. And we women are so used to it, that we didn't even notice. We gaslight each other and ourselves. it's called the Mummy Wars  The hardest thing about having a baby who needs human presence next to them in order to sleep, is coming to terms with the fact that you will never have that 2 hour chunk of time where you can just do housework or have a shower in peace. I found my mood really started to improve when I stopped focusing on the things I couldn’t do (laundry, dinner prep, cleaning floors) or what I was missing (alone time) and started focusing on the things I could do, and what I gained by co-napping. So here is a list of some of the great things you can do whilst co-napping, sorted into categories of Learning, Earning, Nurturing, Fun and Productive. (though many things will cross over depending on personal tastes.)  This is how it goes: Mum's interested in BLW, but then she makes the mistake of telling someone. Her Paediatrician, Child Health Nurse, Mum, Day Care Centre or even Hubby, and she suddenly finds herself being told that it's a choking risk. Now we could link the science, or talk about why the NHS has adopted BLW as their recommended approach. But if you look at things logically, you don't even really need to. So Let's look at the "choking risks" logically  Here’s the thing about PND, we don’t really know what does cause it. But we do know what the risk factors are, lack of sleep is indeed one of them, as are stress and feelings of failure - so why are we advising mothers with PND or mothers already at risk of PND to engage in practices that will most likely increase their stress levels and interfere with their sleep even more?  Do you know the history of what is now called “sleep training” or “Cry it out?” Because I do, and I’m going to let you in on a secret that all those “baby sleep experts”, doctors and child health nurses don’t want you to know. It has absolutely no scientific basis. There is no need for sleep training, there’s no proof that it is needed and there never was, because it was literally just made up.  Being an adult would be easy if life were black and white. Because yes "adulting is hard" but it's not hard because you have to iron your own clothes or pay the bills. It's hard because you have to try to find authenticity and truth in a world full of myth.  Something happens with baby sleep in the second year. It all goes to shit, and your baby either just can't get to sleep, or wakes up in the middle of the night for a play. Here's what I learnt from living through it, and how I learnt to cope.  In our attempts to end victim shaming, we have ended up silencing and shooting down anyone who suggests that we could be teaching risk awareness to our girls. It is going to take time to change our entire society. It is going to take time, to raise a generation of men who do not see women's bodies as their personal playthings. There are quite a lot of steps we need to take before we even get to the point where baby boys will not be born into a culture that views women as holes to fuck. Until then we are fighting within the confines of our current existence. And those confines mean that we have to approach the issue from both sides. 1) teaching boys to question the paradigm 2) teaching girls risk prevention strategies  We have been so conditioned to believe that it is our fault, our bodies that failed, that we don't even consider the fact that breastfeeding is a two way relationship. Both the mother and the baby have certain factors that must be present in order to succeed. Yet our language, our cultural beliefs ignore this. How often do you hear a woman say "We tried to breastfeed but my baby just couldn't." We tried to breastfeed, but my baby failed. You don't. People don't say that. Yet in a lot of cases it would actually be far more accurate than saying that the mother failed, because the issue isn't a supply issue at all it's a transference issue. But we don't even have a decent way of testing which side of the dyad has underlying problems, so our society, so used to blaming women for everything, blames the woman. Our women, so conditioned to blame themselves for everything, blame themselves. When are women on a whole going to wake up to the fact that their bodies didn't let them down, the system let them down?!  |
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