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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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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?  We first have to recognise it. We have to name it. We have to actively teach our children to fight it, to see it. Only we aren't doing that.  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.  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.  I was featured as a guest writer on Evolutionary Parenting today. Happy dance! You can read my article "To end the judgement we first need to go through it" here.  Every newbie asks it. "Why are wraps and carriers so expensive"? In good babywearing groups, you'll get an actual answer. In bitchy groups, you'll get told "No questions about pricing" or "free market capitalisim" and possibly get deleted if you push for an actual answer. (Sorry Americans but groups that have a high percentage of US citizens tend to fall into the later) So why are all the baby carriers so expensive?  Lets face it, kids are expensive. But here's a little secret the marketing department at Fisher Price don't want you to know; most baby stuff is completly unnecessary. Even those things that are so imbedded into our collective subconcious that just the word baby make you think of them. There are however a few parenting philosophies that can save you an awful lot of money, as well as being just generally awesome.  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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