The Mule

As a full time mother I know myself to be distinctly in the minority, and often experience that rather awkward, exposed feeling of realising that everyone else apart from me has left the dance floor. In the twenty first century Western world, the 'norm' for many women is to return to work and choose alternative care for their babies and children, and increasingly, pressure from government, society and the material world dictates that less and less women are making the choice to remain at home with their children. In 1981, only 24% of UK women returned to work within a year of childbirth; by 2001, it was 67%, and the most recent figures from the Department for Work and Pensions says that 76% of mothers now return to work within 12 to 18 months of having a child. Prior to motherhood, I was a therapist, a profession which has a fairly long history of upsetting feminists and women in general with the news that care by someone other than a primary attachment figure, and in particu...

'Crying it out'...'controlled crying'...'sleep training'....when I had my first baby nearly four years ago, I was told that I needed to do it by everyone from my hair-dresser to my Baby Massage teacher, who handed out badly baked cakes and half baked parenting advice and told me my baby would never sleep through the night. The practice of leaving a baby to cry alone in a cot in order to encourage them to learn to be less dependent on their parents at night is so common and widespread in our culture that it is considered an absolutely normal if not essential part of a baby's first year. The number one best selling author of childcare books in the UK, Gina Ford, recommends it in several of her books, and even the NHS endorses it: on their website and in the book 'Birth to Five', handed out to all new mothers in England, they state: By the time your child is six months old, it’s reasonable to expect them to sleep through most nights. If there’s no o...