The Mule

The question of whether or not babies can learn to 'self-soothe' continues to divide parenting writers and experts. Does a baby left to cry alone in their cot eventually find ways to comfort themselves, to make themselves feel better? Or do they simply stop crying after a while because they realise that nobody will come and that there is nothing they can do about it - they learn that they are helpless? Let's look at this from a fresh angle. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, let me ask you a question: How do YOU 'self-soothe'? Think for a moment. The shit is hitting the fan. You are distressed. You have lost your job. Your relationship flounders. Someone close to you is sick. The usual suspects. You feel 'emotional'; you are upset, jangled, stirred. What do you do? How do you try to regulate yourself, to bring yourself back into balance? You might sit with your difficult feelings for a while, aware that they are part of life's patte...

'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...

In our modern world, very few mysteries remain.  We can measure the distance from the earth to the stars, and explain the voids between.  We can travel to the bottom of the darkest oceans, and reveal their secrets.   We can see inside our own bodies, our veins, our cells, and we can even know the sex of a baby long before it is born.  Little wonder, then, that when we ask ourselves, 'How much milk is my baby getting?', and we can't provide an answer, we find this disconcerting, to say the least. Breast milk, and in particular, the quantity that has left our own body and is now residing happily in our baby's stomach, is difficult to measure.  We might try pumping, so that we can see how many millilitres we can produce, but this does not give any real indication of how much our baby is actually getting out.  Not only are babies mouths unsurprisingly more efficient than a plastic sucker, but the actual loving act of nursing and looking down at our babies fac...