Contradictions

Make sure to tire out the baby so that they will sleep.

Do not overtire the baby or they won’t sleep.

Never wake a sleeping baby.

Wake your newborn at regular intervals for feeds.

Do not let your baby feed-to-sleep, as it will create a sleep association, which is bad.

Sing to your baby before they fall asleep.

Do not sing your baby to sleep, as it will create a sleep association, which is bad.

Sleep associations help your baby sleep.

A dummy can be a great comfort for a baby.

Dummies cause problems and should never be used.

A small blanket or soft toy in the cot can act as a comforter and help a baby resettle themselves.

Never put toys in the cot as they will stop a child from realising the cot is for sleeping rather than playing.

Use a night light so the baby can see where they are. 

Babies must sleep in absolute darkness. 

Feed the baby whenever they wake up.

Never reward a baby for waking in the night by feeding it.

If the baby wakes up from its nap early, pick it up right away. 

Do not pick the baby up if they wake early, but just let them cry.

Never let a child cry themselves to sleep.

Leave the baby to cry for a set amount of time.

Let the baby cry as long as it is only protesting, not doing “emotional crying”.

The “controlled crying” method is terrible and harms babies.

There is no evidence that controlled crying harms babies.

Controlled crying is only recommended in infants over six months.

Change your baby if they wake up and have a wet or dirty nappy; that’s what will have woken them.

Never change  a baby in the night.

Only change them if they have done a huge poo.

Breast-fed babies sleep just as well as bottle-fed babies.

Bottle-fed babies sleep better.

Breast-fed babies sleep better once they start on solids.

Neither solids nor formula will help your baby sleep better.

Start your baby on solids after four months, once they seem ready.

Do not start your baby on solids before they are six months old.

Potato is a good first vegetable to start babies on.

Potato is hard for babies to digest.

“So, will you be having an abortion?”

Unless you are the father of the child, a medical professional treating a woman, or the close friend and genuine confidante of a woman who shares this sort of thing with you, the question “are you pregnant?” is simply not appropriate.

I have no idea why people don’t realise this.

I was thinking about this the other day after talking to my mothers group about the way that we all found out we were pregnant. After my first positive test, I went to the chemist to buy another test to be sure. That one turned out to be a dud so I had to go back again for another pack. I felt the need to explain this to the sales assistant, a 20-ish-year old bloke who looked confused to see me again, and he actually asked me, “So, do you want it to be positive or negative?”

This was the most phenomenally inappropriate question in the world. It was tantamount to asking, “So, will you be having an abortion some time in your near future?”

But it got me thinking about how inappropriate it is to ask women in general about whether they are pregnant or not — something I was asked a lot after I revealed to a select few that we were considering starting to try, but also in general after I hit my late 20s.

I was simply astonished that people seemed to think that this was something you could ask. Yet our culture seems to think that a woman’s reproductive health is everyone’s concern.

So let me break it down to you: the reasons why the question “Are you pregnant?” should be taboo:

1) It is none of your business.

This one’s pretty straight forward.

2) The question assumes all women want children. Under all circumstances.

They don’t. And nor should they.

3) If the woman is trying to get pregnant, and not having much luck, it is an incredibly upsetting topic.

Again, I don’t see why I need to spell this out. And since you may not know whether or not the woman in question is in this position, just assume this could be anyone you know, and move on.

4) If the woman can’t/would have difficulty getting pregnant due to a medical condition, it is probably a sensitive topic, if not an incredibly upsetting one.

Ditto.

5) If she is pregnant, and doesn’t wish to be, you are essentially asking her to reveal to you that she is planning to abort the fetus.

Sigh…

6) If she is pregnant, but hasn’t had her test results back regarding any abnormalities that may cause her to decide to terminate, you are also asking her to reveal to you that that she is planning to abort the fetus.

You are a jerk.

7) If she is pregnant, but hasn’t had her 12-week scan yet, you are essentially asking her to confide to you that she is pregnant before she’s “out of the woods”.

10-20 per cent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, with 80 per cent of those occurring before the 12-week mark. So you are asking the woman to let you know if she loses her fetus, something that she may prefer to keep to herself. Again, you are a jerk.

8) If you are her employer, the whole conversation is loaded.

Some bosses may ask about your plans to start a family as an idle question (again, because our culture seems to think women’s reproductive choices are everyone’s business).

Some ask because they’re fond of you.

And some ask because they’re discriminatory bastards.

Sometimes it’s all three — “unconscious bias” is a major problem in Australia and while the boss may just be making conversation during after-works drinks, with an employee they consider a friend, at the back of their mind they may be slotting the woman into a pigeonhole marked “don’t bother with any future training, she’ll be off soon” or “don’t promote interstate, she’ll want to stay put due to her kids”, etc.

Just don’t ask.

9) The question is sexist. It insinuates that you define the woman, at least in part, with her ability to bear children. 

It’s a bit like asking your Indian coworker if he’s eaten any good curries lately. Again, just don’t.

If I’ve missed any, let me know in the comments. But you get the idea.

Tangled is a Disney greatest hits

Warning: This post will probably be really boring unless you watch a lot of Disney movies. Also, spoiler alert if you haven’t seen most of the big ones.

I like kid’s movies. I like fairy tales. So, since being home with bub, I’ve watched a lot of Disney movies. Which got me thinking about their version of Repunzel, Tangled.

It was designated their 50th animated motion feature (I say “designated” because they don’t appear to have counted all their animated films in this official list) and I’ve decided that it’s a “greatest hits”.

Sure, it follows the usual Disney post-renaissance formula — you know, you start with a yearning musical number about the hopes and dreams of the main character, then have the boy meet the girl. Difficulties are overcome, dreams are achieved, then finish with a wedding (which we don’t necessarily see but know happened). But that’s not what I mean.

Very specific moments from Disney classics seem played out, with visual similarities that are waaaay too blatant to be a coincidence.

For instance:

The romantic musical number in the boat from The Little Mermaid? The one where the hero and heroine don’t quite manage to kiss?

In it:

Yes, I took photos of my television. I have no idea how to take screengrabs from a movie

The death in Snow White of the vain domineering false mother? Who has, by this point, transformed into a claw-fingered crone in a black hooded cape? Who falls to hear death from a great height?

Totally in it:

The near death in Beauty and the Beast of the hero, while the heroine kneels over his body, and the pair exchange a gut wrenching goodbye? Where a combination of love and magic regenerate him? And light shoots everywhere?

Done:

The heartfelt reunion in Sleeping Beauty of the princess with the parents she didn’t know she had, specifically by hugging her very similar-looking mother before her sumptuously dressed father steps in too?

Yep:

There’s more, but you get the point.

As for Tangled‘s main characters, the rooftop-running, vest-wearing, streetwise thief and orphan Flynn Rider is so an Anglo-Saxon Aladdin, while Repunzel is an EveryDisneyPrincess — sweet, accomplished, prone to breaking into song, supernaturally good with animals and completely devoid of human friends (thereby leaving the way open for an all-consuming heterosexual relationship that will put an end to the yearning she expressed at the start of the film, no matter what it was for).

I actually really liked the film. But I can’t decide if it was an exercise in cleverness or cynicism.

Letting men get on with it

There’s something that’s been bothering me for quite a while.

You see it in ads, in movies, in sit-coms. You see it in supermarkets and shopping centres and parks. You see it played out in the newspapers every day, and it’s simply this: we treat men in this culture as though they are incompetent and sometimes even untrustworthy when it comes to children.

For some men (read “jerks who don’t want the bother of looking after their kids”) this is a get-out-of-jail-free card (does anyone else remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer tells Marge “But I don’t want to take care of the kids. Um, how many cigars are they allowed to have? Bart sleeps in the microwave, right? How many magic beans should i sell the baby for, three?”) but for the rest, it’s often baffling and frustrating.

Clementine Ford did an interview recently with Anne Summers, where she suggested that we needed societal change in this area — that we ought to make men not being equally involved in parenting “shameful”. Summers replied that we need to remove the idea that women are only allowed to work if they don’t have children. I think they really are linked and that both genders are missing out here.

There are still plenty of men out there, of all ages, who believe that childcare is best left to the womenfolk. But there are also plenty who don’t, and who want to play an equal role, who get treated like freaks. Why don’t we just let men get on with it?

For instance — why do we praise men for doing things that we wouldn’t even think of congratulating a woman for achieving, like taking the kids for a walk or looking after them when they’re sick? Apparently if men do these things they deserve medals. If women do them, well, so they should; and also, that mother must have done something wrong if her kid is sick. Also, you aren’t giving them Panadol are you? Did you breastfeed enough when they were babies?

This undeserved praise is patronising and counter-productive (and it worries the men too — just read this blog post by DadKapital or this article they ran recently in The Age).

Worst of all is when we treat men like perverts when it comes to children. There was that appalling case recently where it was revealed that Virgin have a policy forbidding men from sitting next to children travelling alone. And just the other day Daily Life ran a story essentially saying that treating all men as though they’re pedophiles is “justified”.

The topic comes up in all sorts of places. The Punch ran a story after Julia Gillard’s “I am offended” speech, about how she’d hit a nerve, in which writer Jessica Irvine said that treating mothers as though they’re the only ones who can take care of their children, and fathers who request flexible working arrangements for family reasons as objects of scorn and derision is just as offensive, because these things are holding equality back; Daily Life had an article on the cost of childcare that put it really well:

“While sorting out the childcare industry is vital, so too is the need to change our society’s expectations of who will deliver this care, in particular this idea that a woman is ‘supposed to be the carer’… men are still largely regarded as ‘babysitters’, who step in and step out in order to ‘help out’ around the house …This gendered division of care is a disservice to men, who are capable of caring for children just as adequately as women. It also preserves this idea that kids need their mothers on tap; beyond the period of early infancy and breastfeeding, I would argue anyone with loving regard for that child could attend to their needs.”

As Catherine Deveny once said — and it stuck with me — when it’s your own kids, it’s not called babysitting. It’s called parenting.

They ran a story in The Age not long ago calling society’s low expectations and sabotaging of men “the other glass ceiling”. I hope this idea catches on because until we have equality in parenting, we can’t have equality in the workplace. And until we have equality in both those places, we aren’t going to have it anywhere else.

Unexpectedly feminist kid’s movies

I quite like children’s movies. I’ve been thinking about them, and which ones we should show our baby when she gets older; and I’ve been watching quite a few, as I sit feeding her on the couch for endless hours.

And just as Lego ads have gotten more sexist, and “girl’s” culture in general has gotten more “pink” over the years, children’s movies have done the same. So I’ll be careful to make sure bub sees at least some movies that don’t teach her sexist bullshit.

Specifically, she definitely needs to see two old movies that are surprisingly feminist: The Wizard of Oz, and Mary Poppins.

I’ve been pondering these two films for a while. The Wizard of Oz shows women in positions of power and leadership (in fact, it only shows women that way; the only male leader — the actual wizard — is, of course, a humbug); so much so that I wasn’t at all surprised to see it mentioned in this TED talk I found just the other day, about how movies teach children about gender.

Now, while you could completely overlook the positive gender messages in the Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins is a lot more overt — Mrs Banks is a suffragette who gets a magnificent song and dance number about her cause — but it’s a lot more covert as well — not only does Mary Poppins speak to Mr Banks like an equal, but the message she specifically has to teach the family is that his treatment of his children needs to change, and that he needs to spend some quality time with them.

I imagine in the 60s this would have been a rarity and even now, I think the message that “fathering is important” is a rare one.

Both these films also do two other very rare things that should be encouraged: they show men and women being friends; and they pass the Bechdel Test.

And they both are, of course, full of jokes, catchy tunes and nice costumes. So I hope she likes them.

I am not just the one thing (and you can’t make me be, nyah nyah)

I am going to premise this blog post with the fact that I love my baby. I think she’s awesome.

But frankly, bullshit like this sort of thing makes me want to puke my fucking guts out:

It’s the slogan that does it – in case you can’t read it (sorry, posting this using one hand on my mobile, couldn’t touch up the image), it says “You’re my whole world”.

My favourite version of this is when you go to push in the “handles” of the box and the woman’s eyes disappear. Just to, you know, efface her identity even more completely:

I find this sort of message disturbing, sexist and offensive. I now see it everywhere and I’m getting pretty sick of it.

I am not just the one thing. As much as I adore bub and, currently, being only nine weeks old, she is taking up quite nearly every second of my waking life, she is not my entire world. And nor should she be.

I am a person, not just a mother. I have interests and beliefs and goals. I have a partner. I have friends and colleagues and a job to get back to, once I’m confident that bub’s old enough to go into care. I am, as a friend once called me, multifaceted.

The idea that mothers lose all of that as soon as they gain their new name — “mum” — is just farcical. And annoying. Stop it, advertisers, you’re getting on my nerves.

When your best friend has a baby

One of my very best friends had her first baby a few years ago. She wasn’t the first of my friends to breed, but she was my oldest and it was a huge thing.

I was so excited. But I was also just the tiniest bit worried. It would change her. What if we grew apart and I lost my friend? What if she only wanted to hang around with other mothers? What if I just couldn’t relate to her trials and troubles any more? What if she became one of those Baby People who live and breathe their child to the detriment of themselves and their own identity, something I don’t think I could have supported?

None of those things happened, as it turned out. My friend is still my friend, just busier and more smeared with banana.

But something else happened that I hadn’t expected; I totally fell for her kid. I looked at her and I saw my friend, and her partner (who I should add I had a hand in her meeting). I saw their features and their expressions; but I also saw my friend’s dad, and her brother. I saw her partner’s sister. I saw two families in her little face.

I saw, essentially, things that only decades of friendship and familiarity could have made me see. And all my love for my friend extended to her little girl like water spilling into the next of a series of pools.

I don’t even mind when she screams in my ear.

Now my friend’s just had her second baby, just as I’ve had my first, and I found myself wondering if anyone I know was secretly afraid of losing me; and I hope instead that they, too, have found a new little person to love instead.