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When thousands of women complain of the same side effects from their contraception; when business is considering adopting period leave; when maternal morbidity and mortality is rising in the USA and the western world has abysmal breastfeeding success rates, we have a much bigger problem than any of those issues individually suggest. 
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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.  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?  Yesterday I wrote about abuse existing on a continuum. I wrote that when we ignore covert abuse, give it a free pass, shove it under the rug and only recognise overt abuse we continue to create a society that has no healthy yardstick by which to measure. That when we insist that things on the “lower end” of the spectrum aren’t “actual” abuse, “actual” rape that we help to gloss over warning signs, and unhealthy behaviour. We normalise them. In some cases we even romanticize them. And as a result it makes the lines between discipline and abuse, anger and abuse, flattery and harassment, sex and rape; blurry.  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.  If there is one thing that having anxiety and depression can teach you, it is that our society is absolutely obsessed with putting all our faith in emotions. We literally let them run, and ruin our lives. And yet, emotions lie And our culture constantly lies about their importance and affect.  This week, three more women and two children have been killed by those who were supposed to love them, Fathers, Boyfriends, Uncles. We cannot point the finger at some “other” and blame them and their “other” culture for this atrocity. This is our doing. This is our culture that has culminated in the massive increase in domestic, family and sexual violence that this year has brought. 62 women in 37 weeks. There is no count for the children. At least one man stands in that tally as well. It's time to call it what it is, terrorism.  In 2014 The Pregnancy Babies and Children's Expo decided to cut one of their scheduled exhibitors/speakers, Dr Bryan Symon from Adelaide. This decision was in response to parent backlash as he holds some extremely controversial views about newborn sleep and breastfeeding. Later in the year they held a debate with "experts" from both the pro-sleep training camp and the anti-sleep training camp. The outcome of which was that they (PBC Expo) decided that there was no reason to prevent Dr Symon from speaking at the 2015 expo. I attended his talk in Brisbane, which included some very interesting "facts", such as the claim that Red-Haired women can not breastfeed. A nurse who had never heard of him before and had been happily agreeing with everything he said, ending up standing up and asking how he could possibly spread such dangerous misinformation. This talk also saw Dr Pamela Douglas from The Possums Clinic being escorted out by security, after disagreeing with Dr Symon. This was my letter to the PBC Expo coordinators in the aftermath of the Expo and the stir Dr Symon's attendance caused online in the lead up.  There are very few upsides to being a single parent with a partner who lives interstate. But one of the few silver linings is that if you decide to bring a new partner into you life, you can choose someone who's parenting values match yours.  |
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