Tired

I'm sitting in my living room at the end of the day and I am so tired I could cry! The boys are both in bed, the baby was very restless today so we didn't have a nap, he wouldn't lie down, he would only sleep in the carrier which wasn't much help for my nap. I could've had one standing, like a horse maybe? How do parents who don't carry their babies manage? I really feel for them... little one has an average nap time of 20 minutes alone, in the carrier or the wrap he can go for ages. I wanted to post something profound but I'm too tired... I've been wanting to go back to some sort of Buddhist practice but when exactly do I sit down and meditate on my own? I suppose babywearing meditation could be a new technique, or does it exist already?

Weird... in a carrier with a dummy

Not sure how natural this is but my little one will only sleep in the carrier with a dummy... here he is as I write!

Upset with the Sunday Times

A friend of mine bought the sunday times (I would normally have nothing against it, my mother reads it) and I found myself getting rather cross just looking through it. First comes an article (in the main paper) on how bullying is good for children as it teaches them to stand up for themselves... do we want to go there? Then (in the style magazine) there's a review on the latest Penelope Leach's book (the anti-Gina) and I think: great! That's unexpected! Just to find the review a p**s take of responsive parenting. It made me feel very sad, even if people are told the truth they would rather go through the pain of baby training, for what? A glass of wine with the husband at the end of the day? We have that same glass of wine and baby is free to join us with his milk if he wants to. He adds to our evening instead of being seen as a nuisance.

What every parent needs to know

It was suggested I read this book (by Margot Sunderland), it arrived today and I have already devoured 40 pages of it, thanks for the suggestion!!!
It explains in layman terms what Sue Gerhardt in her Why Love Matters covers in her book, and expands it to cover strategies and advice on coping with distressed children.
Effectively it is about how babie's brains are nowhere near finished (so any distress like being left to cry will affect brain development) and how adults need to help children to regulated their emotions, this gives them a model they will use for the rest of their life. So the mother who is always there to soothe her distressed child by picking him/her up is not spoiling the child or making him/her a weaker individual. Far from it! She is regulating his/her feeling and showing the child that no matter how upset you get, there is always a way to feel better and to calm down.

Continuum and stages of development

One thing that really surprised me while reading the Continuum Concept was that the Yequana children did not seem to go through the same stages of development (read Freud and Erikson) that ours do. For example: in the UK we refer to toddlerhood as the "terrible twos", this corresponds to Freud's anal stage where children learn about (and challenge) authority, so toddlers are expected to be little terrors, anyone noticed how many kids t-shirts (for boys at least) there are with "monster" written on them?
So why don't the Yequana children do the same? Is it because they don't fit into the western model of child development? Or is it that they have negotiated the first stage (learning about trust) so well that they don't have the need to challenge the people they trust so much?
What does this say about our unruly toddlers? That they don't trust us?
It could also be our definition of "bad" behaviour that needs looking at. I was recently in Italy and a lady in the playground kept telling off her toddler for all sorts of imaginary misdemeanors, was he really naughty or was the mother the one with the problem?
I find it hard to define what is "naughty" behaviour with my two year old as he has such joie de vivre that any mess he makes is not that important, so when is he challenging? He certainly says no and "don't want to" a lot but mostly I feel that he has a point (like not wanting to wear a specific pair of shoes, how do I know how comfortable they are?). Sometimes he does get upset when our plans don't coincide (me: go shopping, him: keep playing) but I find that after the initial upset (he's still small enough to be carried to the car...) he adapts to the situation quite well. Would a Yequana baby just follow mum blindly?

Stay at home mums

I've just finished reading Why love Matters by Sue Gerhardt and I found the same considerations as the Continuum Concept on stay at home mums. Essentially that our culture does not allow us to be mothers and workers at the same time. Mothers with new babies often find themselves isolated, at home alone with the children, while partners continue to work. This might only be for the time they are on maternity leave or for longer. For women who identify with their working self, this can be very hard, coupled with the feeling that we are letting "the sisterhood" down by not being a productive member of society. If life is too short to stuff a mushroom how come I'm at home preparing the 100th meal/snack this week?
I feel very fortunate in the sense that I've had a very full life before my children were born, I am not in paid employment at the moment but see this time at home as a chance to catch up on a lot of reading and studying (when the kids are asleep) and I love carrying my baby and taking them both to the park and for walks.
But I can see that for a lot of mothers this isn't the case. We love our children desperately but what about me? The woman that was?
The solution according to both books is to integrate caring for children with a social/working life, in more rural situations the children are expected to be with the mother at all times so there's no such thing as child time and adult time, as she is part of a larger family/community others also take turns in carrying and looking after the babies, older children follow the adults and either engage in the same tasks or play independently. In an ideal society the mother would be able to take her baby to work or to spend her day with other mothers. At the moment the only women who can really do this are the work from home mum or the self employed ones.
A good example is my sister: she runs her own tattoo studio, still carries and sleeps with her one year old who goes to work with her every day, he is now crawling so when she is busy he either plays on the floor or is held by one of the other people who work there.

How did this happen?

This is the sad evidence!
As a rule I never buy anything branded, especially not for the kids, the only exception is Peppa Pig which my older son adores, so how come I found myself at home after a shopping excursion with all this stuff? Plastic as well...
It all sort of escalates... I was shopping for cutlery for the kids to go in the caravan, my son spotted a dinosaur (his other obsession) so we had to get toy story cutlery, of course the stepchildren will want the same but one is a girl so what would she like? Oh she likes hello kitty so there goes cutlery for her as well. Now let me think... the older kids have their own plates and cups but my little one doesn't so it makes sense to get him matching toy story ones... but then I know what's going to happen: the others will see the new plates and get upset that they don't have new ones... and so on...
It seems like a silly thing but it bothers me, how did someone like me who believes in all things natural end up with a load of branded plastic, I can't really blame it on the kids, they looked at them and promptly complained that they wanted the sippy cup as well, so making them happy by buying stuff is clearly impossible. Why did I even try? If I'd bought a set of bamboo plates it wouldn't have made any difference to them. I guess that being born and living in a consumer-driven society is more entrapping than I thought. Am I exaggerating?

Sleeping baby, restless toddler

You'd think that having a baby and a toddler in the house would require some work, you would also imagine that the baby is the one keeping you up and the toddler would be used to the concept of sleep by now... But no!!! You would be wrong.
I blame this on the wretched baby books I read while pregnant with my first, how babies need routines and suchlike, how you should put them in a cot to sleep preferably in their own room. Well, this is my experience: number one was in his own room at 6 months (although we had co-slept for a couple of months, then he was in a crib next to us) and effectively "trained" to sleep at certain times (the hardest work you can imagine, especially if you don't want them to cry) and the result? He still has trouble sleeping and wakes up often, he comes into our bed and is uncomfortable, fidgets, cries out and ends up in his own room after an hour or so. Poor thing is in no man's land.
And baby? Baby is as close to the continuum as I can manage, sleeps with us and is carried around in a sling. Sleeps a treat!!!

The caravan

Well... I have truly joined adulthood: today we picked up a brand new caravan! After years of camping and roughing it at festivals my age has caught up with me, as well as having two small children and two smallish stepchildren who tend to get lost or join other familier for supper when we're putting the tent up, the idea is that this way we just turn up and make a cup of tea!
But I have this nagging feeling: would the continuum tribe approve of a caravan (well... they probably wouldn't approve of my dishwasher either...) and would Buddha have travelled round India in a caravan had it been available to him? Am I getting old?
But it is a rather lovely caravan...

So true!!!

The science

The more psychology and general science I study, the more cross I get!!
When I came across Bowlby and the attachement theory during my counselling course I thought: why doesn't everyone know this? We now know so much about child development but this is not filtering through to all parents. Why? My own GP suggested I leave my baby to cry so that we all get a good night's sleep... Was he not aware that during the first year of life (according to a theorist called Erikson) babies learn about trust, they form an idea on how safe the world is based on their carers response to them, so letting a baby cry for an hour does not seem a good lesson to learn.
It has also been mentioned to me that most women won't want to know anyway, women have fought very hard to gain the equality we cherish today so the thought of having to stay at home with the children seems like a step backwards, but all I'm saying is that the information is out there, lets find out as much as we can about our children's development, and it's real science I'm talking about not faddish baby books...

Am I just fortunate?

I was discussing attachment parenting with someone today and I had one of those moments when you hear yourself talk as if from a distance, and I thought that I sounded a little overbearing... I mean, I don't have to go to work so I can happily carry my baby around all day with me. It doesn't matter if I have a crap night's sleep because I'm trying to bring my toddler in line with continuum values (and by the way, that one failed... he's back in his cot and happily sleeping 12 hours a night without a peep) because I can have a nap in the afternoon. So how do working mothers manage it? My other example is my sister who runs her own business and takes the baby to work with her, has done so with all four her children. But is it then that we are just fortunate?

Continuum babies

I read the Continuum Concept while pregnant with my second child and it made a lot of sense to me. It comapares child development in an amazonian tribe and in the west with rather amazing results, it seems we have lost our human "continuum" and are bringing up our children in an artificial way which is convenient to parents but detrimental to the children.
While I was reading I realized that I had made some rather bad mistakes with my first child (now a toddler) mainly trying to put him in his own cot and room way before he was ready, this has caused all manner of sleeping problems and he now still wakes up at night, does not really like his cot but feels uncomfortable in bed with us or in a "big boy" bed of his own.
The problem I feel comes by trying to "train" him and have him conform with the society I live in where children are expected to sleep on their own preferably in their own room, with my second baby we are trying to forget what society expects from us and what is convenient to us as parents, we are doing what is right by him. So I carry him in a sling (I also did this with my first althoug I did feel the pressure from those around me to put him down in a pram or baby seat), he sleeps with us and I will breastfeed him for as long as possible. To my surprise this way of doing things is much easier than the prescribed one of putting him down for naps and feeding him at certain times as I don't have a fight on my hands, he's happy and so am I. I'm not sleep deprived because we sleep together and I don't have to get up to make bottles in the middle of the night as I just roll over to my side and feed him, very often we're both asleep again in minutes...

the good enough mother

This sentence comes from a clever man called Donald Winnicott. It's the imperfectly attentive mother who does a better job than the "perfect" one who risks stifling her child's development as a separate being.

Hello

First post here.
As mentioned in my description, I have two very small boys (2 months and 2 years) and have trained as a psychotherapist. This and some of my other interests (Buddhism, human rights, and most things hippie...) have bought me to question a lot of stuff I earlier took for granted. I hope to make sense of some of it here!