Rockpools and ruins,
Salty air and shipwrecks, Crab-hunting, Rock-clambering, Mud-squelching, Seaweed-popping, Butterfly-chasing, Imagination-fueling. Clouds of starlings startled by seagulls; Bursting, reforming, swooping, swirling. Secret pathways and overgrown hideaways Lead to adventure; hidden, waiting. Sun shining silver on Kentish mudflats; Oozing with great expectation, Rolled up in a Sunday stroll.
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I wrote this a couple of years ago as an article for my local NCT publication that I was involved with producing at the time. Something brought it to mind recently and I thought it was worth revisiting. Of course there is much more that could be said on the subject but this was my brief contribution:
You’ve got a healthy baby – that’s all that matters in the end, right? I’ve heard this or a variation on it a hundred times or more. And how can I argue with it, as though I would rather have had a wonderful birth and a baby in NICU? – Of course I wouldn’t. Yes of course I’m grateful for the fact that my baby is healthy, but does that mean it’s all that matters? It seems there is a bit of a battle raging at the moment in the media and online community between those who feel natural birth is being hindered by the ‘system’ and those that feel that natural birth is being held up as some kind of unattainable ideal of womanhood while in fact being totally pointless. As I write this I have just read an article in the Telegraph arguing that home births ‘really are the VIP labour option’ and the new NICE guidelines, as reported by the BBC, suggesting that midwife led units are recommended for low-risk pregnancies and even home births for second-time mums. Despite this there still seems to be a defensive resistance to the idea of natural birth with its proponents portrayed as sneering or smug as though they had achieved some kind of badge of honour. Perhaps there are women out there who want brag of their ‘achievement’ (I’ve never met any) but I really feel for most women who have had a natural birth it is an intensely personal and intimate thing that has nothing to do with how others view her and everything to do with her, her baby, her family and her own feelings of personal empowerment. Things don’t always go well and thank goodness we have such advanced medical intervention when that happens. Women should have freedom of choice in how they give birth and what is right for one woman is not necessarily right for another but I just want to give the case for why we should not dismiss the goal of ‘natural birth’ and ‘the positive birth experience’ (a term that is thrown around rather lightly) out of hand – not just for the time of the birth itself but for the impact it has on the subsequent breastfeeding relationship. A little while back I heard Kirstie Allsop on Woman’s Hour as guest presenter. Having chosen birth as her subject she bemoaned the fact that women seemed now to be not only concerned with outcome but had turned birth into an experience. She spoke as though natural birth were a mere fashion fad. We’ve come a long way from the days of giving birth under chloroform but this saddened me. Once pregnant, if all remains well, giving birth is something that has to be experienced one way or another. The ‘positive outcome’ mantra seems to be repeated so often it has hypnotised us into a state where nothing else matters – or we feel we aren’t allowed to say that it does. It maintains a long-held trust of ‘the doctors’ and, for women, a mistrust of our own bodies. This might sound extreme but I believe we live with a deep underlying cultural mistrust of women’s bodies. The majority of women approach giving birth with fear and lack confidence that their bodies are up to the task ahead of them. When birth goes ‘wrong’ and intervention is required (or at least occurs) these fears are proved founded and the implicit mistrust continues. This may not be consciously thought out, or spoken, but what underlies it is this: My body was not able to give birth to this baby without help so how can my body now sustain this baby without help? Even when breastfeeding is initiated, any little obstacle or perceived dissatisfaction in the baby leads the mother to believe it is her milk (read, body) which is at fault. Of course there are hundreds of subtle reasons why women do not continue to breastfeed that deserve discussion of their own but for now I would like to dwell upon the issue of birth and how this affects mothers. A ‘positive birth experience’ is empowering to women. This arises from the everyday miracle that has occurred in delivering new life into the world but also from the positive hormones that flow unhindered through the mother’s body. Imagine giving birth and instead of seeing it as a necessary evil, seeing it as possibly the most positive experience of your life. Having that amazing feeling of achievement (nothing to do with applause – just personal!) is an incredible wave on which to begin bonding with baby and embarking on a breastfeeding journey together. And after all it is that relationship which endures far longer than the birth itself but the relatively short experience of labour and birth has a lasting impact that can cast a very positive or negative shadow over the start of motherhood which can set a tone that is difficult to alter. There are also the more obvious physical advantages of natural birth – the recovery time is much shorter which therefore leads to greater ability to care for the baby and any other children. The feeling of well-being is much greater and likelihood of immediate skin-to-skin contact with baby, which is very important, is also much higher. Statistics show that intervention leads to increased likelihood of further intervention. It seems that conversely one positive experience leads to further positive experience. Positive birth is much more likely to be followed by positive breastfeeding initiation. The key to this matter is not to make an idol of natural birth or to place an intervention-/drug-free birth on a pedestal but rather to emphasise the importance of the birth experience, as a whole, being positive for the mother, and this may mean different things for different women. It doesn’t even necessarily mean things going according to the birth plan. I understand that things don’t always go well – I know personally how it feels to have a negative birth experience so I’m not talking from a position of everything having been easy and straight forward, and there are ways to mitigate how that negative experience affects the subsequent bonding and breastfeeding experience with the newborn baby, but I hope that I might have given some food for thought on why we might want to give a little respect to ‘natural birth’ and not dismiss it as a goal. I will just end with a couple of thoughts that could help if things don’t go well: make sure you already know where to go to for reliable help with breastfeeding before you go into labour. NCT, BfN and LLL can all help. Maybe go to a meeting before baby arrives so it won’t be a new or daunting experience when you go along with your new baby. Make it very clear in your birth plan that skin-to-skin is important to you even if you end up with a caesarean or other intervention, and having those around you understand this so you are able to make up for that time that might have been missed – however desperate they all are for a cuddle with the new arrival. Understand that after a caesarean birth the body may need time to ‘catch up’ having not gone through the full physical process of delivery but know that this will most likely happen with some patience. Having some good quality support in this situation is really helpful. Dear Head Teacher,
After his Reception year I took my son out of your school. You were not interested to know why and it was of no consequence to you. I wrote you a letter then but I never sent it because I knew you would file it in the bin. However, my feelings on a particular aspect of your school have not dissipated in the time since my son left, that aspect being the 'Child of the Week' award. It is not the main reason I moved him to another school – there are so many more – but the fact that you can’t see a problem with this system concerns me so greatly. Why do you want to teach children they are failures in their first year of school? I would like to assure you that I am not writing this as a ‘my child hasn’t got Child of the Week’ complaint. My concerns for the children include those who receive the award as well as those who don’t, and are primarily for the youngest members of the school, but extend to the older ones too. I feel it is important to remember the simple fact that how the children perceive something is of far greater importance than how it is intended. Many of the children perceive the award as a sign of their worth, acceptance and value in the school. Very little information is given to parents about ‘Child of the Week’ as regards to how and why it is awarded but more importantly about what the purpose or benefits of such a system are. Given that following the ‘Golden Rules’ seems to be the principle reason for receiving the award, I conclude that the purpose of it must be to encourage the children to comply with these rules. You have stated informally that its purpose is to reward the children who are well behaved but do not necessarily get the high achievement prizes in other areas. Well-intentioned as this might first appear, I assure you it is having a whole host of unintended consequences. Let me tell you a little story about two sisters at your school – I’ll call them Jessica and Katie. Jessica was the model pupil, always one of the first each year to be awarded the star. Her mother took this all in her stride, heard complaints of other mothers and shrugged them off as unjustified. When Jessica was in year two her sister joined Reception. Katie was a different kind of child. She wasn’t naughty or badly behaved but she was quiet, a little shy and did not enjoy public attention as her sister did. She eventually got the star badge towards the end of the Reception year. The same thing happened the next year as Katie was in year one and Jessica rose to year three. Katie didn’t get the star at all that year and their mum started to see things a little differently, now enduring a different experience despite parenting the two girls as similarly as she could. The following year things changed. Katie, now in year two was awarded the star early in the year by her new teacher. Jessica, however, had not yet received the star that year and her world was thrown upside down. Her identity as the ‘star child’ had been threatened. This seemed to highlight that her confidence, which had seemed so good, was precariously balanced upon the point of this star and all it embodied. Not only had she ‘failed’ to achieve it but her sister had got it first. Jessica was distinctly unhappy about the situation and their mother had cause to reassess her opinion of the whole thing as well as to have to mitigate the damage caused. Even if Jessica had continued to achieve the star in the first few weeks of term, and repeat it later on, every year of her school career would she have been unscathed? No. Her mother just wouldn’t have seen the damage it was doing in time to do much about it. When the praises ceased she would have struggled to cope with it and, quite likely, engaged in all manner of ‘people pleasing’ behaviours in order to regain the feeling of self-worth the badges had given her. Yes, the world is competitive and honours success but, for the most part, the outstanding achievement is recognised. This system of awarding a child each week and leaving a few by the wayside bears little resemblance to the real world as far as I can see. I can see the this system is presented as a ‘positive’ system aiming to give positive encouragement rather than punishment but the simple fact is that where reward exists there is punishment by implication when the reward is not given. Whilst I have concerns all round, my greatest concern is still for the children who don’t receive the award. I have my son as a very obvious example in this but I know others who are, or have been, in a very similar position. I assure you that having not yet achieved the award does not motivate them to behave better – the truth of their experience is more like this, to a greater or lesser degree: they try hard, they perceive themselves to be following the rules as best they can but they never receive the award so they conclude that their best efforts are not good enough and also that they are not good enough. They feel unaccepted and unvalued by the school. The conclusion is not ‘try harder!’ it is ‘why bother?’ As a parent I perceive that the school does not value or appreciate the good that I know is in my child so I conclude that he is not the ’right’ sort of child for the school. The fact that a child of four or five years old can go through a whole year at school without being shown the school’s primary form of appreciation, value and acceptance I find nothing short of horrendous. I understand it is not the school policy to give every child the award by default but rather that they should ‘earn’ it. In my opinion if it is not possible to find something good in each and every child in the class during even one week of the year then something is going very badly wrong. A system that can allow even one child to start their school experience feeling discouraged and rejected is a system that needs to change. At the risk of stating the obvious, young children perceive time quite differently to adults and a year is an extremely long time. For the child who receives the award in the last week of term this is better than not at all but they still suffer an entire school year of the feelings I have described. If you absolutely insist on keeping this dreadful system perhaps you would consider a daily award for the younger children that would be more fast-paced, reduce the weight of a weekly prize and give every child the opportunity to receive the award more frequently. It would also give the teachers the opportunity to reward smaller achievements that for some children are very significant and can be easily lost in a whole week. And while you’re at it, maybe encourage teachers to be more creative in finding the good in each and every child so that they are all valued. Whilst my son was at your school I spent a lot of time and energy performing ‘damage limitation’ in an effort to make sure that my son’s sense of self-worth was not affected by his inability to achieve this award. I feel very strongly that it is unacceptable to be put in this position. I feel I managed to protect him from the damage that could have been done but it has not been easy. I would really like to know what the school suggests parents should say to their children when they are crying and asking them why they never get ‘Child of the Week’? Should I tell him it’s because the other children are better than him? Or that his best efforts are not good enough and he needs to try harder? I am at a loss to know what would be advised because the things I have had to talk to him about I can guarantee are not what you would be advising me, because if they were there wouldn’t be a system like this in place. I assure you I am not the only person who feels this way but no one dares speak up to you because of your unflinching belief in your own infallibility. Lack of complaint does not mean that there is widespread support for the system. In conclusion I would like to quote Alfie Kohn whose work I would encourage you to look up: “[G]ood values have to be grown from the inside out. Attempts to short-circuit this process by dangling rewards in front of children are at best ineffective, and at worst counterproductive. Children are likely to become enthusiastic, lifelong learners as a result of being provided with an engaging curriculum; a safe, caring community in which to discover and create; and a significant degree of choice about what (and how and why) they are learning. Rewards--like punishments--are unnecessary when these things are present, and are ultimately destructive in any case.” But why I’m having to tell this to a head teacher is really beyond me. My beautiful child
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A New WayFinding myself on the other side of motherhood. Writing with honesty, candour and passion through the challenges of motherhood and life. |