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Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them |
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Hi Minti
I've been perusing around the advice and I've noticed a theme of some of the advice that I wanted to caution new parents about.
Children do not come into this world as problems to be solved but people to be loved. You should be very skeptical about any advice that treats infant behavior as a problem to be extinguished rather than as a communication of a real need. Babies are not wild horses that need to be broken. Things like eating and sleeping schedules that are primarily parent directed show a disrepect for nature. If night wakings were maladaptive they wouldn't be so ubiquitous among newborns. If crying were meant to be met with no response nature would not have designed babies to do it.
There really is another way. You can answer your baby's cries and respect the natural rhythms of your baby and still get plenty of rest and raise a loving ,well-adjusted and unspoiled child who gives you placid teenage years and is a man at 18 rather than putting a moratorium on his adulthood until some woman demands he grow up if he wants to stay in her life. I was lucky to have an older woman befriend me and mentor me who taught me how to achieve this loving way of life.
In a household with this approach it is always known if the baby is sick or in pain because that is the only time there is crying, every older child is distressed to hear the cries of an infant going unheeded, and these older children are never bullies themselves, although they have the moral courage to stand between bullies and the weak and defenseless. These children know from an early age that the people at the extremes of life, the very young and the very old, and the helpless have to be taken care of by those of us in th middle who have been blessed with good health.
Mothers should be particularly skeptical of men writing advice for mothers. Especially men writing books, and especially men like Gary Ezzo who has perverted the meaning of the Passion by saying that babies cries should not be answered because God did not answer Jesus' cries from the cross. There are some wonderful men like Nils Bergman, William Sears, Michel Odent, and Kennel and Klaus but they approach the subject of babies and children with respect for the biological and emotional needs of children and respect for women.
Ladies you have the wombs, and the breasts and the brains to go along with them, and you are at least nine months ahead of your husband. Never let your husband make you go against your mothering instincts. If he were meant to be the primary caretaker of the baby he would have been given the womb and the breasts.
Bottlefed babies in the United States are 70% more likely to die from causes that are not disease causes than breastfed babies. (the increase in death rate due to disease is 20%) Why should this be so? What does how a baby is fed have to do with whether or not a baby accidentally dies or is killed?
Breastfeeding imposes a lot more mother-baby togetherness on a breastfeeding mother. Yes she can pump but it is a lot of trouble and so she does not leave the baby in the care of other people as much as the bottlefeeding mother. But even when a mother is bottlefeeding some studies show that 90% of the time she is doing the care and feeding of the baby herself.
The increase in risk of death is due to the extra time bottle-fed babies are away from their mothers. Since the time bottlefed babies are away from their mothers is often small compared with the time the baby is with his mother it tells you just how dangerous it is for a baby to be in someone elses care. Even when the time is brief the mother-substitutes doesn't function as well in the role of the mother. Being left in a car is much more likely to happen when the dad is driving the baby to daycare and SIDS rates are higher in daycare than in mothercare.
Just today we read in the newspaper of a 2 year old being mauled to death by a pit bull while in his grandmother's care, and a 2 year old girl being killed when her mother's boyfriend crushed her skull...last summer it was being left in a hot car, and last year it was a near drowning in a daycare in a bucket of bleach. Even though babies and children spend more time in their mother's care than in anyone elses care it seems if they are going to die an accidental or deliberate death it is almost always while in the care of someone other than the mother.
Oh yes there are exceptions...the Andrea Yates of the world...but start keeping a file folder of clippings about these deaths and see for yourself...mothers are the best care-takers of babies and young children and only with rare exceptions do men have anything to teach mothers about the endeavor... and probably the handful of really excellent exceptions to this rule had wives who taught them almost everything they know.
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| ADVICE RATING |
3.90 (May work) from 16 votes |
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
The stats about bottlefed infants having a 70% increase in risk of death during the first year of life comes from meta-anaylsis of hundreds of breastfeeding studies....When the meta-anaylsis studies were done I am sure the researchers were only expecting to come up with disease related death statistics- not a sharper increase in death rate due to accidents and abuse.
Recall that in some societies poverty does not impinge on a woman's freedom to breastfeed and mother her own child- in these societies there are types of paid work that allow a mother to work with her child present. I have never seen any data to suggest that in such societies being poor puts a child at increased risk from death due to accidents and abuse, although numerous studies point to an increase risk of death due to illness if the mother bottlefeeds.
There is a protective effect from breastmilk itself but there is also a protective effect from just being with one's own mother, and breastfeeding fosters mother-child togetherness so breastfeeding confers a protective effect beyond infectious disease, which is especially vident
Well designed studies of mothers living in industrialized societies control for socio-economic varaibles grouping children in the same socio-economic class based on whether or not they are breastfed and then making comparisons in outcomes. Comparing apples to apples so to speak. So one cannot divorce the protective effect of breastfeeding simply by pointing to poverty. Controlling for socio-economic class being breastfed still had a protective effect.
Poverty in our society does affect risk of death from accidents and abuse, primarly because it leads to mother-baby separation which is inextricably linked to breastfeeding rates. Where poverty impinges on a mother's freedom and thus ability to breastfeed and be with her baby as much as wealthier mothers.
. Women who have never given birth tend to be better infant caretakers as a group than childless men. Childbirth makes further changes to the structure of the female brain and the hormones of lactation further improve the woman's child care-taking behaviors. Being a woman, a mother who has given birth, and lactation hormones helps women and mothers assess risk properly and do the right thing more often even when doing so involves more work.
Another interesting apsect is that a dose-dependent response exists between how much breastfeeding is happening and other protective behaviors. Exclusive breastfeeders as a group showing the least amount of risk taking, partial breastfeeders showing a little more risk taking, and botlefeeders as a group showing the most risk taking.
Does this mean every breastfeeding mother takes less risks with her infant than every bottlefeeding mother-? NO! It means that lactation can improve a mother's capacity for assessing risk, and each mother can be a better risk assesor if she is supported in breastfeeding when she has the biological capacity to make milk.
On the continuuim for being good risk assesors men are almost always going to fall below women because risk assessment and patience are related to brain structure and oxytocin and prolactin levels.
Each of us comes to parenting with cultural, familial, and personality traits that gives us tendencies to parent in a particular way, but being a woman, a mother, and a breastfeeding mother helps us parent better than we otherwise would without these brain/hormonal advantages which we may refer to as "mothering instincts."
I am not impugning the character of all men. I am married to a man who is a great father, and I mentioned several men who have good parenting advice for mothers. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, and some men will be better primary caretakers of infants and small children than some women.
In a particular couple the father might be the more sensitive, responsive, altruistic, and best assesor of risk between the two parents. In this situation probably both parents sense that the father is the better care-giver and the father ends up doing the lioness's share of the work of infant care...ha, ha...
But in the usual case the mother even if she is not the birth mother, even if she has never given birth, and even if she is not breastfeeding is more sensitive, responsive, altruistic, and protective than the father is. This is not a denounciation of fatherhood or a denigration of maleness. This risk-taking behavior of men has its advantages in other areas of life, just not in the direct care infants and todders for extensive periods of time. The balance of femaleness and maleness is good for children, which is why the traditional family has been the basic unit of long-lived and psychologically healthy societies.
Sometimes women of today need to be encouraged to maintain their pervue over what is best for infants and toddlers because it is the fashion these days to confuse equality in dignity between men and women with equalness in the capacity for every particular task.
The most common theme I see in male writing about parenting infants and toddlers is that men are much more likely than women to view ubiquitous infant and toddler behaviors as maladaptive instead of as good survival skills...they treat normal behaviors as problems to be solved through training as if the infant is a wild pony to be broken. It seems as if these men never even considered the possibility that there might be harm to letting a baby cry it out. They seem to believe only good can come from imposing a schedule on the baby that the dad finds most convenient.
I never see anyone challenge their assumptions, and ask them for references...or ask them for proof that their methods of imposing their will on the baby's eating and sleeping cycles is good for the baby.
When books like Gary Ezzo's Babywise have caused the failure to thrive of thousands of infants the book is still sold in stores and extolled by parents who place a higher value on uninterrupted sleep and parental convenience than on what is best for the baby.
I know mothers can offer similarily uninformed opinions, but I have to say I haven't seen bad advice such as "controlled crying" offered as vociferiously from women as from men, and I have never seen this sort of advice coming from breastfeeding mothers who have experienced a normal course of nursing. A normal course of nursing is exclusively breastfeeding for 6 months, predominantly breastfeeding for one year, and family meals suplemented with 4-5 nursings a day through the second year of life. A normal course of nursing is biologically optimal from the baby's point of view.
Even Elizabeth Pantley the author of the "No Cry Sleep Solution" didn't practice her own advice about sleep training with her own child (the child that inspired her to write her book) until he was over a year old. But she offers her advice up now as if it were applicable to younger babies. She thinks that breasts "adjust" to not being emptied at night.
Yeah, they "adjust "alright- they "adjust " downward- as in "less milk"- which is not much of a problem when you have a child over a year old eating solids, but is a big problem when your baby is under 6 months old and you want to suceed at exclusively breastfeeding him.
Pantley is cautious about very young babies but I get the impression that she thinks something magical happens to the physiology of babies and breasts by the time the baby is 4 months old so that the baby and the breasts can go 8-10 hours without being emptied with no comensurate drop in milk production.
Breastfeeding mothers who impose parent directed feeding schedules on the breastfeeding relationship find it does not work, escpecially during the first six months after the birth of a baby. If a mother tries to feed her baby only every 3-4 hours and get him to sleep through the night eventually one of two things happens,-
1) the mother abandons the hyper-scheduling and begins to nurse on cue or "opportunity" feeds frequently to get her milk supply back, or
2) the mom doesn't figure out that her schedule is causing her to lose her milk and she ends up bottlefeeding wondering what happened to her milk supply.
A challenge to prove it is offered to me when I suggest there is some wisdom in nature.
But let's turn that idea around...where is the proof that baby's natural sleeping and eating rhythms are not best for best for them?
Where is the proof that the mothering hormones, oxytocin and prolactin, don't make mothers better caregivers than fathers?
Where is the evidence that male and female brains are exactly the same?
Where is the evidence that what differences do exist between female and male brains, female and male hormones make no difference in the capacity the male has for taking optimal care of an infant?
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
The stats about bottlefed infants having a 70% increase in risk of death during the first year of life comes from meta-anaylsis of hundreds of breastfeeding studies....When the meta-anaylsis studies were done I am sure the researchers were only expecting to come up with disease related death statistics- not a sharper increase in death rate due to accidents and abuse.
Recall that in some societies poverty does not impinge on a woman's freedom to breastfeed and mother her own child- in these societies there are types of paid work that allow a mother to work with her child present. I have never seen any data to suggest that in such societies being poor puts a child at increased risk from death due to accidents and abuse, although numerous studies point to an increase risk of death due to illness if the mother bottlefeeds.
There is a protective effect from breastmilk itself but there is also a protective effect from just being with one's own mother, and breastfeeding fosters mother-child togetherness so breastfeeding confers a protective effect beyond infectious disease, which is especially
Well designed studies of mothers living in industrialized societies control for socio-economic varaibles grouping children in the same socio-economic class based on whether or not they are breastfed and then making comparisons in outcomes. Comparing apples to apples so to speak. So one cannot divorce the protective effect of breastfeeding simply by pointing to poverty. Controlling for socio-economic class being breastfed still had a protective effect.
Poverty in our society does affect risk of death from accidents and abuse, primarly because it leads to mother-baby separation which is inextricably linked to breastfeeding rates. Where poverty impinges on a mother's freedom and thus ability to breastfeed and be with her baby as much as wealthier mothers.
. Women who have never given birth tend to be better infant caretakers as a group than childless men. Childbirth makes further changes to the structure of the female brain and the hormones of lactation further improve the woman's child care-taking behaviors. Being a woman, a mother who has given birth, and lactation hormones helps women and mothers assess risk properly and do the right thing more often even when doing so involves more work.
Another interesting apsect is that a dose-dependent response exists between how much breastfeeding is happening and other protective behaviors. Exclusive breastfeeders as a group showing the least amount of risk taking, partial breastfeeders showing a little more risk taking, and botlefeeders as a group showing the most risk taking.
Does this mean every breastfeeding mother takes less risks with her infant than every bottlefeeding mother-? NO! It means that lactation can improve a mother's capacity for assessing risk, and each mother can be a better risk assesor if she is supported in breastfeeding when she has the biological capacity to make milk.
On the continuuim for being good risk assesors men are almost always going to fall below women because risk assessment and patience are related to brain structure and oxytocin and prolactin levels.
Each of us comes to parenting with cultural, familial, and personality traits that gives us tendencies to parent in a particular way, but being a woman, a mother, and a breastfeeding mother helps us parent better than we otherwise would without these brain/hormonal advantages which we may refer to as "mothering instincts."
I am not impugning the character of all men. I am married to a man who is a great father, and I mentioned several men who have good parenting advice for mothers. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, and some men will be better primary caretakers of infants and small children than some women.
In a particular couple the father might be the more sensitive, responsive, altruistic, and best assesor of risk between the two parents. In this situation probably both parents sense that the father is the better care-giver and the father ends up doing the lioness's share of the work of infant care...ha, ha...
But in the usual case the mother even if she is not the birth mother, even if she has never given birth, and even if she is not breastfeeding is more sensitive, responsive, altruistic, and protective than the father is. This is not a denounciation of fatherhood or a denigration of maleness. This risk-taking behavior of men has its advantages in other areas of life, just not in the direct care infants and todders for extensive periods of time. The balance of femaleness and maleness is good for children, which is why the traditional family has been the basic unit of long-lived and psychologically healthy societies.
Sometimes women of today need to be encouraged to maintain their pervue over what is best for infants and toddlers because it is the fashion these days to confuse equality in dignity between men and women with equalness in the capacity for every particular task.
The most common theme I see in male writing about parenting infants and toddlers is that men are much more likely than women to view ubiquitous infant and toddler behaviors as maladaptive instead of as good survival skills...they treat normal behaviors as problems to be solved through training as if the infant is a wild pony to be broken. It seems as if these men never even considered the possibility that there might be harm to letting a baby cry it out. They seem to believe only good can come from imposing a schedule on the baby that the dad finds most convenient.
I never see anyone challenge their assumptions, and ask them for references...or ask them for proof that their methods of imposing their will on the baby's eating and sleeping cycles is good for the baby.
When books like Gary Ezzo's Babywise have caused the failure to thrive of thousands of infants the book is still sold in stores and extolled by parents who place a higher value on uninterrupted sleep and parental convenience than on what is best for the baby.
I know mothers can offer similarily uninformed opinions, but I have to say I haven't seen bad advice such as "controlled crying" offered as vociferiously from women as from men, and I have never seen this sort of advice coming from breastfeeding mothers who have experienced a normal course of nursing. A normal course of nursing is exclusively breastfeeding for 6 months, predominantly breastfeeding for one year, and family meals suplemented with 4-5 nursings a day through the second year of life. A normal course of nursing is biologically optimal from the baby's point of view.
Even Elizabeth Pantley the author of the "No Cry Sleep Solution" didn't practice her own advice about sleep training with her own child (the child that inspired her to write her book) until he was over a year old. But she offers her advice up now as if it were applicable to younger babies. She thinks that breasts "adjust" to not being emptied at night.
Yeah, they "adjust "alright- they "adjust " downward- as in "less milk"- which is not much of a problem when you have a child over a year old eating solids, but is a big problem when your baby is under 6 months old and you want to suceed at exclusively breastfeeding him.
Pantley is cautious about very young babies but I get the impression that she thinks something magical happens to the physiology of babies and breasts by the time the baby is 4 months old so that the baby and the breasts can go 8-10 hours without being emptied with no comensurate drop in milk production.
Breastfeeding mothers who impose parent directed feeding schedules on the breastfeeding relationship find it does not work, escpecially during the first six months after the birth of a baby. If a mother tries to feed her baby only every 3-4 hours and get him to sleep through the night eventually one of two things happens,-
1) the mother abandons the hyper-scheduling and begins to nurse on cue or "opportunity" feeds frequently to get her milk supply back, or
2) the mom doesn't figure out that her schedule is causing her to lose her milk and she ends up bottlefeeding wondering what happened to her milk supply.
A challenge to prove it is offered to me when I suggest there is some wisdom in nature.
But let's turn that idea around...where is the proof that baby's natural sleeping and eating rhythms are not best for best for them?
Where is the proof that the mothering hormones, oxytocin and prolactin, don't make mothers better caregivers than fathers?
Where is the evidence that male and female brains are exactly the same?
Where is the evidence that what differences do exist between female and male brains, female and male hormones make no difference in the capacity the male has for taking optimal care of an infant?
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
Winnie,
All you have to do is use an internet search engine like Google and put in words like "breastfeeding" and "death" and you will find the Chen and Rogan studies among hundreds if not thousands of others that elaborate on specific facets. Chen and Rogan published in the prestigious Pediatrics and in the Journal of Human Lactation
I think Linda Folden Palmer has done a good metanalysis but I'm having trouble getting my computer to open the bookmark, you may have better luck...there is a condensed version at naturalfamilyonline but if you can find her full length version its better....she did not do as an extensive review as Chen and Rogan so she didn't find a relationship with accidents but this was part of her bias...she states in her article in Natural Family online that she didn't expect to find any differences in deaths due to accidents or abuse so she didn't do enough research in that area...
Chen and Rogan didn't expect to find a relationship but because they cast a wider net they found the relationship...it is an alarming rate because it was higher than the increase risk of death due to infectious disease...
If you have have a working knowledge of statistics you will be able to convert the stats to layman's usuage...if you don't you'll have to work on that before you will be able to glean everything from the primary sources.....
I'm hazzarding a guess that when babies get sick from not being breastfed they can be saved with medicine more easily than they can be saved from the trauma of a serious accident (that is more likely to happen when they are not being watched by their own mother)...like drownings and getting hit by a car etc...
You can search "Ezzo" and find all sorts of information about the problems with his book or just buy his book Babywise and see for yourself. His book is an "Ezzo" light version of what he taught in the classes where he justified letting babies cry it out because, according to him, God did not answer Jesus' cries from the cross. He claims his wife breastfed their kids but I don't see how she could have had enough milk doing things his way. Either she didn't breastfeed very long or she did things her own way when her tyrant husband was out of the house.
You can do the same with any of the guys who give great advice like Dr. Sears, Nils Bergman, Kennel and Klaus, David Palmer DDS, etc some have books some have websites...
The FDA has done studies about mothers compliance with health care messages...like car seat usuage, back to sleep campaigns, well baby care check ups, and even esophageal burns...Sara Beck Fein is a researcher I saw at a conference who presented her findings about mothers compliance changing over time a dose related response to the amount of breastfeeding she was doing....
Much of my working knowledge comes from attending breastfeeding conferences but I am sure there are other ways to access the information, the providers of the conference have to meet standards set by the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners, and the IBCLE has some of the strictest standards for accreditation and continuing education of any of the health professions. Lactation consultants have to re-certify every five years with 75 hours of continuing education and every ten years we have to take the board certification exam all over again...I don't think physicians have do that...
I appreciate your skepticism but you have to remember that billions of dollars are at stake in the formula industry, as well as a lot of sacred cows of feminism...researchers who are the bearers of bad news are often black listed....even among lactation specialists! Researchers who present data that mothers are important not just the milk can get a cold reception because lactation consultants are people too and many of them have wanted to believe that pumping breastmilk and putting it into a bottle is just as good as mothering through direct breastfeeding....
US Daycare researchers like Jay Belsky have had to leave the US for the UK where at least "slammers" are in the minority....(this is the term coined bytdaycare workers for mothers who put infants under 6 months of age into fulltime daycare)
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
Hmm, I thought I was going to get an insight into instinctive parenting. I think you make some good points, but I would worry if anyone turned down a fathers instinct, because of his lack of mammal glands. Fathers can have the most amazing instincts towards their children if given the chance to bond and share in the care and up bringing. My Mum worked nights so she could be there for us in the day, my father was our prime night time carer and was excellent, he got his skills from his father, because his Mum died so young. Also it is not only men who can distract a new mum from her natural instinct, women are pretty clever at giving out the rot too. I am also confused as to where you get bottle fed bubs being away from their Mums? A statistic is it, from where. I think the time a child spends away from Mum is up to Mum and bub. I bottle fed two girls and they were with me at all times up to about a year old and could get away. I know of breast fed bubs who are popped into a cot in a seprate room for all naps. I also wonder how much, lack of education and poverty enter into the statistics on the deaths of bottle fed babies in America. I suspect that it is not the bottle feeding that is at fault there, but social issues. Breast feeding is still mostly done within the educated middle spectrum classes. In Britain a few months ago a little girl was mauled to Death, by two family dogs while in the care of her breast feeding and loving Mum. I am wary of speculation and more so of statistics, and having spent my working life sorting through statistics for a living, I know just how misleading and dangerous they can be. All swans are white, because I have never seen a black swan or in the case of statistics, dont want to admit having seen a black swan because that would be seen as different or going against the norm. I would really be interested to see your research links and name of books,authors and publishers that you used but forgot to credit.
Cheers Winnie.xx
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
Well I really enjoyed and agree with the theory that children don't come into the world as problems to be solved... Like crying, pooping, and throwing tantrums, vomiting getting sick and all that - it is life. The difference is, that suddenly you are the main carer for someone and it is your role to ensure that at all times their needs are met. Then you need to train them as they grow, that they can trust you to meet those needs, and they can begin to lengthen the time frame expected, and you can relax and grow with each other.
While I breastfed, I pumped from the first day, and I also used formula now and then from 6months onward... I recommend it to anyone who wants to try it - it gave me a lot of freedom. However I would never tell anyone that they should or shouldn't breastfeed or bottlefeed... In that respect I was a little disappointed by the rest of this advice. Especially the suggestion that a child is more likely to die if left in the care of someone other than their mother... seriously - that is just a tad opinionated and not substantiated at all.
That whole thing about men not being trustworthy because God didn't answer Jesus' cries from the cross??? That is the first time I have come across that - is this theory of yours from personal experience, or proven research? By the end I was at a loss to understand exactly what you were trying to convey... What are you trying to convey?
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Re: Mothering Instincts: Don't Discount Them
The theory about babies cries not being answered is Gary Ezzo's justificfation for pushing his cry it out method of parent directed feeding and sleep "training"- Babywise...its not mine at all...I'm appalled by it...
If you would never recommend breastfeeding than I guess you would never recommend using a car seat or any other safety measure to other mothers....
Formula feeding from the beginning would have given you even more freedom than expressing and bottlefeeding mothers milk but you knew there were benefits to exclusive breastmilk feeding for six to seven months of life....so you gave up some of your personal freedom for the good of your child but you drew the line a the point where you thought whatever benefits there were for the baby were so small it was no longer worth the sacrifice of your freedom...fair enough...
But what you did not know was that there are also benefits to having all of the mothers milk come directly from the breast, and never using any artificial nipples and allowing the baby and toddler to get his sucking needs met at the breast through the second of life....
Or if you knew of these benefits you did not perceive them to be that dramatic or worth the inconvenience of having to keep mother-child separations brief enough that artificial milks, artificial nipples and bottles would not have to be used...I would recoomend David Palmer's work to you
I certainly thought similar thoughts at one point in my life as a mother, but the more I have learned the more I realize that even the little things we do have a ripple effect and so it is best to at least have direct breastfeeding through the second year of life (no artificial nipples) and mother baby togetherness for about 3-4 years as an ideal that we shoot for even if we can't always attain it...
When we begin with the assumption that breastfeeding and mothering just don't make all that much difference that we should have ideals we should aim for in this regard, when we don't put the issues in an ehtical framework, we get on the slippery slope to a society where artificial feeding is the cultural norm and most children experience substantial mother-child separation during their first 3-4 years of life.
Nils Bergman work on the development of the limbic system might change your mind about the importance of mothering in particular.
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(December 2007) (
