AS NEW PARENTS, my wife and I want and need plenty of advice. From time immemorial, that advice came from elders–parents and grandparents and other wise souls who were presumed to know better because of their life experience. No longer. We parents of the new millennium know better than to look to our elders for counsel.
They simply don’t have the latest information.
What do people over the age of 55 know about Ferberizing a baby? Have they even heard of Weissbluth? (You haven’t either? Both Drs. Ferber and Weissbluth give advice on getting babies to sleep through the night.) It surely comes as news to them that a Los Angeles pediatrician named Harvey Karp has convinced millions of parents to return to the ancient practice of swaddling an inconsolable baby–something that until 10 years ago was considered nearly barbaric.
Can those who gave us life discourse on the difference between the lenient Sears school of thought on comforting your baby and the more rigorous “cry it out” preachers? Of course they can’t. And let’s face it. Today’s grandparents have no choice but to be silent about “attachment parenting,” unaware as they are of the pioneering work of John Bowlby, the British psychoanalyst whose studies of war orphans revealed babies need affection as much as they need food.
Our parents just had kids, read Dr. Spock (or didn’t), and muddled through as best they could.
And it gets worse. We now know that our own parents, who we once thought took good care of us, were just shy of being our murderers. There we were, defenseless little creatures, and our parents were playing Russian roulette with our very lives!
It’s a wonder we survived to have children of our own. It’s a wonder we even got to our seventh birthdays. We were put to sleep on our stomachs, never strapped into car seats. We were sent out into the street to ride bikes without helmets. And we were fed a steady diet of juice and milk and other unnecessary, even poisonous, liquids, when all we needed was water and breast milk. Our parents–our heedless, danger-seeking, maniacal parents–fed us full of sugary, carbohydrate-laden foods, which began unhealthy eating habits that are harder to kick than heroin.
Who would take advice from such people? Free babysitting–anytime. But not advice.
And though we’ve learned all the theories in parenting class, we new parents still need counsel and guidance. Nobody told us that a newborn’s arms flail around like a marionette’s, that infants pull at their ears and eyes in their sleep and cause deep scratch marks to appear on their own faces. Nobody told us that their breathing sounds asthmatic, that sometimes their poop is as green as kryptonite, that they can remain asleep while they are thrashing about like the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
We need reassurance, but since our parents know nothing, where can we go? Well, now we’ve taken to getting advice from . . . each other. My wife and I are addicted to a website called urbanbaby.com. On one of its message boards, parents of newborns ask questions, which are then answered by other parents of newborns.
Here’s one typical message: “Exclusively breast-fed daughter is 41/2 months and hasn’t pooped in 5 days. I know this can be normal, but now this evening she seems really uncomfortable and is making some pretty stinky farts.”
One person replied: “This happened to me once and I took my daughter’s rectal temperature to make sure no fever–lo and behold it helped her make a BM.”
Someone else noted that her pediatrician recommended exactly this method to help her child.
The people on the board are approximately 99.99 percent female, and they function as a terrific support system for each other. They complain about their mothers-in-law–said to be obsessed with the waistlines of their daughters-in-law–and either complain about how little their husbands are doing or brag about how much their husbands are doing.
There’s another message board–for toddler parents. Here things get dark. People are having affairs, getting divorced, and indulging in vicious political fights (the Republican women are not shy about hitting back against the Bush-haters).
On the newborn board, everybody is very supportive. On the toddler board, people correct each other’s grammar and spelling. On the newborn board, parents huddle together for warmth in a world turned upside down, where they think they know more than their parents. On the toddler board, moms have decided it’s a cold, hard world out there, and it’s every know-it-all expert for herself.
Maybe they need a hug from their own moms.
–JOHN PODHORETZ
