And I’m not talking about the ones in white coats that have gone to school to become experts. Well, I somewhat am, but not completely. In this day and age there are many people just itching to tell you how you’re doing it wrong, and they have so many opportunities to do it. I had a great conversation with my auntie yesterday who is a nurse practitioner on the mainland, and she was telling me about a great conversation she had with Ronald Barr, a doctor that produced the Purple Period of Crying video. He studied a tribal culture and their babies to examine what caused prolonged periods of inconsolable crying. His research revealed that all babies cry, and that there are “high criers” and “low criers” even in a culture that does “all the right things” when it comes to parenting. The babies he studied were nursed on demand, worn in slings, in the company of others for the majority of time, etc., and there were still high criers in the group. What he deduced was that some babies cry more than others, and it has nothing to do with environment. It got me thinking about the guilt we inadvertently put on new mothers without even realizing we are doing so. So mommies of new babies, tell me if you’ve ever held your wailing baby in a public place and heard any of these:
1. Maybe he’s hungry? The guilt factor: You are obviously ignoring your baby’s cues and starving him. You are a sucky mommy. This is probably the most unhelpful but most contributed comment when your baby cries. New mommies tend to not starve their babies, so chances are that feeding is one of the things that is rarely neglected. However, when somebody makes this seemingly innocuous comment, here is the New Mommy Thought Process: I just fed him! Hmm. Well, maybe he didn’t get enough? Was he really done nursing? Maybe I took him off too soon. I guess I could feed him again, it couldn’t hurt. Then all of a sudden, new mommy is unnecessarily nursing their baby again on the advice of somebody that hasn’t got a clue if the baby is hungry or not. Plus, the extra food in the tummy may just be too much, which can possibly cause a nice little case of acid reflux, making baby even crankier.
2. Maybe you’re overfeeding him? The guilt factor: You can’t find any other way to soothe your baby besides sticking your boob in his mouth. You are a sucky mommy. This one is not vocalized as much as it is talked about on the web. There are quite a few websites that claim that colic is caused by overfeeding. The baby’s tummy gets over-full then of course the overflow spills into the esophagus, causing acid reflux. This does make some sense and could happen if you overfeed, but unfortunately these websites also advocate a feeding schedule: nursing only every 3 to 4 hours. Dr Barr conducted research on the same tribe that I mentioned before but this time studied how well the infants learned. The research showed that the babies that were nursed on demand learned at a steady rate, but the babies that were fed on a feeding schedule had periods of time when they were not learning (probably due to low blood sugar). Like the hungry question, this question makes new mommies question their own maternal instinct which is wrong, wrong, wrong! My son would sometimes nurse again twenty minutes after finishing his last feed, and he gained weight like gangbusters. My first daughter was a once-every-three-hours kind of gal, and she’s wee. Talia is somewhere in the middle. All babies have different needs, and mommies have to trust that their babes will let them know when they want to nurse.
I’m going to continue this later, but for now, here is a link to Dr Barr’s PURPLE site. I liked it.
http://www.purplecrying.info/sections/index.php?sct=2&sctpg=10&
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