angry breast milk?

Nov 25, 2012

Oh, my.

Read this Bad Baby Advice and laugh hysterically.

Did you click over and read the whole thing? If not, do it. Now. It is worth it to learn of all the ridiculous advice given to mothers in the past.

This line in particular made me snort…loudly.

Absolutely no night feedings, he wrote, no matter how young the baby, nor how much it cried. “If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism,” Sackett warned, likening overindulgent parents to Hitler and Stalin.

Socialism? Really? I am as anti-socialism as they come, but how on earth does nurturing a baby and responding to their very real biological needs lead to socialism?????

How about this one:

Several advice books suggested that mothers could harm their babies by thinking the wrong sorts of thoughts. The Sadlers, husband-and-wife doctors who collected their wisdom in 1916, blamed “angry” mothers for causing their babies’ colic. Mothers could also run dry by engaging in “worry, grief, or nagging,” they wrote. In his 1877 book, Advice to a Wife, Chavasse informed mothers not to nurse for too long. Once the baby was past 9 months of age, nursing could cause “brain disease” in babies and blindness in mothers.

This kind of nonsense drives me batty. And when I hear stuff like this repeated to mothers today I want to scream.

Instead of screaming (usually…sometimes I still succumb to screaming), I try to speak to their soul with something along these words:

Listen to your heart. Listen to your baby. Trust yourself and fall in love with mothering. God created you to mother. He will guide you. Your baby needs YOU and your milk and your arms and your heart. Nothing else.

I am so grateful to be a mother and to have had the courage from the beginning to parent with connection and love and attachment and intuition.

These so-called experts can fly the coop.