Tag Archives: babies

So are you going to have another one?

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I’m losing count of the number of times I’ve been asked this question.

At best, it’s when my adorable toddler is running around being cute.

At worst, it was during a job interview – something which I think it is actually illegal to ask me.

But every time I wonder what exactly I’m supposed to answer.
Generally it’s a well-meaning question.
But actually it risks being quite personal and intrusive.

Think about it in the context of work.
Now I’ve had some months to think it over, I think the correct answer would have been: “would you be asking that if it was my husband sitting here in this interview and not me?”
If it’s a question that an employer might want an answer to from a thirty-something woman, then there’s a whole load of assumptions that go behind that.
It correctly assumes that I would have to take time out of the office to have a baby and deal with the immediate issues with breastfeeding a newborn and postnatal maternal health – that’s one thing a father can’t do instead.
But I suspect it goes rather further than that, assuming that I would be taking the parental leave for any future child all by myself.  While for a couple, you may think of yourselves as a unit, at the moment your employer almost certainly doesn’t.
It’ll be interesting to see, if our law changes in 2011 to a system of shared parental leave, whether the assumption shifts from being that one parent will take all the leave to an assumption that each will take half.
And what did I actually say when I was asked?  Well, it was suffixed by, “I hope you don’t mind me asking…” and I think I said, “no it’s fine, and not at the moment“.
But it was sufficient for me to feel negative about the idea of working in that team.  What would’ve happened if I had joined and then got pregnant?  A sense that I’d gone against what I’d said before joining the team and therefore betrayal and untrustworthiness?

But it’s not just parental leave that figures in that sort of thinking.
What if my toddler or newborn was ill and I needed to take time off to be with them?  The rough truth is that childcare doesn’t do child illness.
You hear about “pink medicine babies” – the guilty reality that if the child is just a little under the weather most parents will shove a spoonful of calpol down their throats and deliver them to the childcare provider anyway.  They then spend the day dreading the call to say that their little bundle has a temperature and needs picking up NOW.  It’s not ideal from an employer’s perspective.  It’s not ideal from a parent’s perspective.  It’s certainly not ideal from the child’s perspective.
But – particularly in a recession, where it’s a financial imperative that people are in work- it happens.  All because people are afraid to take time off work to be there when their child is ill in case their work decides it can do without them, permanently.
Is it any wonder that the lesser-earning parent is often the one that takes the time out?   But again it is not always a matter of choice.  I keep hearing about employers who don’t exactly say to fathers that they can’t take time with their children but imply that they are letting themselves and the team down. But wouldn’t it be better if that didn’t automatically mean Mummy had to let hers down?

So are you going to have another one?
Is the question any better in your personal life?
It happened to me yesterday.
I was just getting my hair cut, and my toddler was pushing one of the chairs around the salon.  I’m sure she only meant it in a he’s-cute-wouldn’t-it-be-lovely-to-have-more way.
But it’s a risky question.

What happens if the answer is “Good God, no!  Awful little blighters, don’t know why we had the first one!”  Not the case for us, thank God, but how would the questioner feel if that was the answer they got?

Who knows what circumstances the family are experiencing?  May be they are sandwich generation, with adult caring responsibilities as well as a small child?  Not having a second one might be a matter of necessity rather than choice.

Who knows if the person they’re asking has tried and failed for months? Miscarriages are not exactly a bundle of laughs and not usually the thing to share in smalltalk situations.

The thing is, unless you are already pregnant with the next one, which I am not, it is impossible to answer that question without sounding defensive.

And you get all kinds of advice offered to you as if to compensate for the embarrassment caused.  Sometimes it just digs the hole deeper.
But ultimately the old platitude is the best: “it’ll happen when it happens“.
I don’t think you can really go wrong with that, as when it happens may be never…

So we just cross our legs?

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Two days on and I’m still feeling cross about it!

Yes, it’s the Daily Mail again with the outrageous headline that babies born just one week early risk serious health problems.
On how many levels can a story be hurtful?

It’s carefully presented as being a warning about the dangers of elective caesareans which tend to take place at 39 weeks (and in so doing again perpetuates the attitude that having a caesarean is about being too posh to push). 
But look at the statistic it presents… when it comes to caesareans, up to 7% are elective, apparently – so that means that about 93% of caesareans are emergency or planned? 
That’s hardly an overwhelming level of too-poshness. 
There is a question though over why we have such a high level of caesareans over all – double the World Health Organisation’s recommended level (but why is there a recommended level?  Surely this was about demedicalising birth in e.g. the former Soviet Union? Could this be a formula babymilk style issue where something recommended for a good reason and has unintended consequences for some mothers?). 

But hold on, it gets worse… “the full 40 weeks”? 
My son arrived at 38 weeks and I was assured that he was full term. 
A day or two earlier of course he would have been premature, but I needn’t worry as 38-42 weeks is full term and perfectly normal. 
That of course assumes that my due date was correctly calculated in the first place (I didn’t know, when first pregnant, that the length of your menstrual cycle plays a part in those first calculations – why would I know that?) 
I didn’t expect my waters to break at 38 weeks and my son to arrive less than 12 hours later. 
I’d have preferred him to hang on in there.  I wasn’t completely ready, the house was not tidied and I hadn’t even got my overnight bag packed!
But I turned out to have pre-eclampsia, and he had IUGR, plus some placenta problem so his hormones triggered labour so he could survive.
How was I supposed to keep him in there longer, exactly?
And, given the risks we were both facing, surely it would be ludicrous for me to worry about anything more than ensuring we could both live and thrive?

The thing is, there’s no real consideration in the article about why a baby might be arriving early.
It is entirely possible that babies arriving earlier than 40 weeks are doing so – like my son who was a natural birth and my niece who was an emergency caesarean – because they are experiencing difficulty in the womb.

But how much does that extra week really matter?
If children born 24-27 weeks tend to have a greater propensity to special educational needs (and if the article is right that the level is nearly 7 times more than those born at 40 weeks, then roughly 300 in every 1000 born that early), then it seems reasonable to say that prematurity brings risks. 
But there’s a huge difference between saying that,  and stressing about the following statistic:  for every thousand children born at 39 weeks, 47 will have SEN. For those born at 40 weeks it’s 44 children.  By the way, overall in the school population, in 2008, 2.9% of children had SEN.
I just wonder – given all the other factors that can affect SEN, whether this is actually sufficiently clinically significant to change from planned caesareans taking place at 39 weeks to planned caesareans at 40 weeks?
In any case, the article itself makes clear at the end that respected medical opinion is divided on whether caesareans at 40 weeks would actually be any safer anyway!

But the thing we tend to forget in the developed world is that birth is not a safe thing. 
The truth is that birth is a process over which we have less control than we like to think. It’s raw and bloody and painful and a reminder that what we are doing has significance.
And we still have very little idea about how children develop their mental faculties at such an early stage.
But I’m pretty clear that stress is a Bad Thing – overall, and in pregnancy in particular.
So please Daily Mail, don’t run this sort of scare story.
It upsets parents on something over which a phenomenally high number of them have absolutely no choice or control at all.
It’s not as if we can all just cross our legs and keep the babies in a little bit longer.
Babies come when they want to.  And if they don’t – that’s why the caesarean help is available.

Why is my Maclaren pushchair safe here but not in the USA?

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maclaren

Yesterday evening, I heard that the lovely and relatively expensive pushchair I own may potentially amputate the tops of my toddler’s fingers if he plays with the folding mechanism.

The press coverage reported that in the USA, a special hinge-covering kit would be made available to all affected buggy owners.

I – along with probably every other Maclaren-owning parent in the EU – started trying to find out if:
i) the US buggies were differently constructed to ours;
ii) the hinge covers would be made avialable to us too.

Tonight we found out.  According to the BBC, Maclaren has decided that we consumers in the UK (and indeed the rest of the EU) will just get extra advice because they are compliant with existing EU safety standards.  We’ve no idea whether these safety standards are tougher than those in the USA, but either way, the buggies are the same but apparently require a physical amendment in the USA but nothing extra in the EU/UK.

Maclaren say that there have been many fewer cases in the EU than in the USA despite much higher sales.   
But there may be more to it than that. 
There’s a cultural issue here – are Europeans (and Brits in particular) more likely to assume that an accident is just an accident and not something to sue over?

A friend has put forward the following alternative theory for why there’s no action being taken here:
In the UK we have a claim limit so unlike in US where this company could be sued for millions, here you can only get few quid.
Thus since the financial risk is lower, there is no point in spending the money on correcting it, who cares about customers who have already paid their money. 
Actually, I want this to be untrue. I really don’t want to believe this of a reputable British company.  It’d be nice if they’d take action to prove that they do care about the children whose wellbeing we put into their hands whenever we use their products.

In the USA, consumer law appears to have been effectively privatised – if something goes wrong, you sue.
We seem to be heading that way here too – look at the rise of accident and personal injury law firms.  you can’t even do a quiz on facebook without an advert for them appearing these days! But we are not as far down the personal line as the USA.
Of course, in the UK we don’t really do class action lawsuits.  It’s not the way that our consumer law is set up.
In any case I’m under the impression that class action lawsuits are pretty much a bad thing – that they only benefit those that are able to jump on the bandwagon at the right time rather than all consumers affected overall.  But they are there in the USA because of this weakness of consumer law. 
It’d be sad indeed if we went for this approach rather than have more general consumer law that was able to helpeveryone affected, not just those able to take legal action.

So, am I a happy Maclaren mummy?
Well, in general I like my Maclaren techno XLR – I bought it because it was light for its size, easy to fold, fitted onto a London bus and easily down the aisle (unlike, say, a bugaboo) and formed part of a travel system with its Recaro car seat which was terribly useful when e.g. going for a dental check-up and needing the baby to stay asleep. 
However, I’m on my second XLR already - the first dropped apart in the snow in January this year leaving me to lug it home with my son strapped into a cloth baby carrier around my waist (I’d had it for more than the one year guarantee period and the cost to fix seemed disproportionate in comparison with the price of a new one in a colourway I liked more). 
So I was only on two cheers anyway.
Now I’m feeling a bit overlooked and as if the manufacturer takes my future custom for granted.

Finally, how do I know that my son’s going to be safe?
Short answer – as with much in the world of parenting – is that I don’t. 
No situation with a child is 100% safe (and even if it is physically safe, you’re probably stunting their emotional development by not allowing them life experiences).
So this is really tricky – he loves his pushchair, and climbs in and out, I’ve tried to stop him attempting to put it up by himself but that’s easier said than done unless you stand guard over the pushchair at all times. 
I’ll do my best, of course I will.
But if there’s a little plastic hinge cover that could give me just a little more reassurance and maximise his chances of retaining all his digits, I’d welcome it, please, Maclaren.

Update – apparently trading standards in the UK have said that, as the buggies pass the tests here, there’s nothing that they can do. My point is less that I want trading standards action but that I’d like the little bit of plastic as a matter of goodwill…
Update 2 – and we have it! According to the Times Alphamummy blog, hinge covers are now available…

Shared sleeping – scare stories and scary stuff

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There’s been a lot on the news today about how parents are “ignoring the warnings” about co-sleeping with babies, and that co-sleeping has found to be a factor in almost half of cot deaths. 

I should at this point declare an interest – there’s been a cot death in my family and I’ve seen the impact it’s had on everyone, even one decade on.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice on this – physical closeness to the baby when it’s happy and relaxed is thought to help stimulate a mother’s milk production and being able to breastfeed is thought to be clearly best (although perhaps why is not quite as clear cut as had been made out by some of the more militant campaigners).

But the argument put forward by those that co-sleep – that parents and children have co-slept successfully for millions of years – doesn’t quite carry the weight they think it does.  It was once pointed out that there is no word, no equivalent of widow/widower or orphan, for parents that lose a child becoause none of us can contemplate something so awful.  This is true – and false.  Until the late 20th century, losing a child was a common experience, heartrending, awful, but common.  My own grandmother was one of ten, but only six made it to adulthood.  We have absolutely no proof that co-sleeping was or was not a factor as records of that sort of thing were not kept.  But it is reasonable to assume that if it’s a factor now, it may well have been then.

I cannot say that we have never co-slept with my son.  He’s a toddler now, and often ended up in our bed.  Sometimes it’s the only way to get any of you a night’s sleep.
But mindful of the loss our family had experienced, we were so careful throughout the first six months of his life.  Despite his colic, despite the evidence from the hospital that he would only sleep if in physical contact with me, we perservered and he slept in a crib then a cot, feet to foot-of-the-bed, with a dummy.  I fought to stay awake in nightfeeds, always going downstairs to sit upright then returning him to his cot, me to my bed.  It appears the co-sleeping death figures include falling asleep on sofas.

And in the first six months we never co-slept.  It’s just not worth the risk.
We also never let him in if we’d had a drink, and kept him in a grobag on top of our covers – we’re very lucky to have a wide bed.

Would we co-sleep if there’s a next one?  Again, certainly not in the first 6 months and ideally not in the first year.  But sometimes it’s the only way to get some rest.

So making it illegal would be too much of an overreaction.  And the police investigations after a cot death are harrowing. But parents need to know about the risks, and make responsible choices.  Even if they are tired.