Ignoring the ‘experts’ and sticking with the hard to follow guidance as a mom

Posted by Liane Azevedo

Being a Mom has changed my research interests. Now, every time I see something related to physical activity, diet or even sleeping behaviour in early childhood it grabs my attention.

However, I must confess that it is not always easy to follow the public health recommendations that are set for moms on how we should raise our children. More important, I think, is to fight against the pressure that you receive from family, friends and sometimes complete strangers to follow their guidance.

For me this started with breastfeeding. Being born in Brazil where breastfeeding is the rule rather than exception, I have never considered any other option. However, I must say this hasn’t been an easy process. I faced several challenges including mastitis, bleeding, and the fact that my son woke every hour during the night to breastfeed. As soon as I mentioned these problems to other people the first advice I received was, “Give him a bottle.” But I don't want to give him a bottle. Then you’re told that your milk must be weak, which is why he is waking up every hour and so on... (Note: my son was born on the 50th percentile and after 4 months he was on the 90th just with breastfeeding). 

Pieter de Hooch: Mother nursing her child, c1674 

People appear to want to impart their ‘expertise’ on every phase of his development. They say: “Why did you let your child feed himself? Now he is a fussy eater and look at the mess he does! Look at my son he is 2 and I still feed him and he is not a fussy eater”. Then when it comes to sleep they suggest the use of techniques such as ’control crying’, in which you let your child cry until he/she settles down. Being a very soft mom (I know I will pay for this later in his teenage years), I can’t cope with this idea. Luckily, I found some scientific evidence to support my decision (you can always find what you want to, when you search for it). According to this paper “Leaving an infant unattended and in distress, advocated by many clinicians, is not the only efficacious method by which sleep consolidation can be achieved and may not be either necessary, ethical or biologically sound.” It basically says that crying is the way a child communicates with its parents and by ignoring it, you will be blocking this communication. So, that will do as justification for me.

This all reminds me of a presentation I saw recently at the North East Physical Activity Forum, with the intriguing title: “Why we should shut up about the long-term benefits of physical activity”. Although the presenter didn’t give any scientific evidence to her comments, the main message was that long-term benefits of physical activity cannot persuade people to start physical activity. So, we should advocate the short-term benefits such as “have more energy”, “sleep better”, “meet people”, and “reduce anxieties, worries and depression”. I don’t necessarily agree with her comments, probably because I work in this field and the long-term benefits strike me more than the short ones. But this might be worth investigating. However, if I decided to look for the short term-benefits on how to raise my child, I would probably be doing everything against the recommendations. Don’t breastfeed, let him cry himself to sleep, and leave him in front of the TV so you can have your own time. I’ve learnt that sometimes you need to stick with hard to follow guidance to see the benefits which, might take a while to show but, are much more important than the immediate comfort that you would probably get from not following them.