My weekend was spent in a two-day course called Bringing Baby Home. This is a class that teaches expecting parents about what to do once the baby is born and into the early years. We’re glad to have gone and we learned some great tips in some areas that were foggy to us. The teacher was very informative when it came to the most recent studies as well as our local and provincial (and even European) laws and recommendations as they have changed quite frequently.
I have spoken about the onslaught of child-rearing advice we have been getting which for the most part we appreciate as we process and glean what we can from it, but I have noticed how much parents believe their way is the right way and all other ways are wrong. It’s easy to slip into this mindset as I know friends of mine have done their own research and received their own mountain of advice they had to sift through. There’s also the challenge of trying to create a discourse about certain topics which seems to more often than not lead to arguments. For instance, if a new study has deemed swaddling may cause more harm than good and recommends not to, parents who have swaddled their baby get defensive and say the study is bunk. That leaves new parents like us to figure out how to best reconcile what they have learned through courses and research with what their family and friends have learned in their own experience.
For fun, I put together a list of topics that seem to be the most controversial. I’m not picking sides here, this is more observational. Ok, I picked sides a few times.
Swaddling
This one surprised us. We’ve been told by family and friends who swear by it that it is the way to go. That it makes baby feel like it’s safe back in the womb and will help it sleep, not to mention unable to move. Apparently, according to some latest studies, this may increase the likelihood of SIDS. And if the baby isn’t premature, then why would we want to pretend it’s back in the womb? Also, Registered Nurses in our province are no longer allowed to swaddle babies. Ok, I did say I wouldn’t take sides, but my bias might be shining through here.
Sleep Training
This brings us to one of the topics we’ve received the most advice about. There’s an enormous market in sleep training and on every cover of all parenting magazines are tips on how to get a baby to sleep in order that we get more sleep. The course changed my mind on this topic. We tend to label a baby good if she sleeps for longer and bad if she doesn’t sleep. Once I recognized this I snapped out of that thinking. On a related topic, it was recommended by the course teachers and our city that baby sleep in the same room for the first 6 months, but not in the same bed.
Pacifiers
This one I do have a bias on. In the reading I did I found that among the benefits is that it may reduce the likelihood of SIDS so it may reduce the likelihood of death. Other than it helping your baby not die, it can calm the baby down when fussy, prevent thumb sucking, and reduce stress. The potential downfalls are if used too early it may make breastfeeding more difficult (so don’t do it early?), it may cause a dependency that you’ll have to wean off later and I won’t continue with the downfalls as there are none that would rival the preventing baby from dying thing.
Car Seats
Learned more than I cared to hear, but did pick up some useful information such as Sweden requires children to be in a car seat until age 5. This seems straightforward to me. Follow the law in the car seat’s installation and don’t drive like an idiot.
Diapers
There is a whirlwind of information on diapers. Cloth, eco-friendly, scented, not-scented, dyed, non-dyed, cloth with lining, GMO, chlorine-free, latex-free, compostable, diaper cover, swimming diapers, and that’s just the beginning. Thankfully, our own David Suzuki has put together a chart for us when consideration of our environment.
Vaccines
The course did not touch on this one, but it’s become a topic of discussion in our family. When did Jenny McCarthy garner so much influence?
Ultimately, we are thankful to be able to benefit from the experiences and information of our family, friends, courses, and doctors, and I believe that these decisions should be considered your own personal ones. If you’re not sure, do your research. I personally tend to side with science (which is just another word for knowledge) while considering all the experiences and advice we’re given. These things are not necessarily mutually exclusive of course.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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