At Baby Sense®, we know a baby develops best when she is calm and rested and calming a baby is not always easy and sleep problems do occur. Parenting is the one vocation in life for which there is no training, feeling isolated or out of depth is a feeling most moms experience at some stage in baby’s first year.
Baby Sense® provides not only sleep, calming and development solutions in the best selling baby care book Baby Sense but calming baby care products and services for parents too.
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September 2010 newsletterTo register for the newsletter - click here
Dear Baby Sense Mums and Dads
I don’t know about you but I feel immense pressure to be an awesome mom. I even remember when I was pregnant with my third a few years ago, a mom emailed me and said “Your baby is so lucky – you will know exactly what to do – you wrote Baby Sense”. Boy, talk about pressure! Of course I do not always know what to do. In fact parenting for me is a daily learning curve with lots of mistakes! Each time I make a mistake, I wonder if I am destroying my child and being a bad mother. I am sure you have fleeting ‘bad mother’ thoughts too? If this is your story, then I want to put your mind at ease. The reality is that just being ‘Good-Enough’ is the best you can do! In the mid 1900’s, a paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Donald Winnicott, studied many babies and their moms and through these studies, developed theories on what type of parenting babies need to develop well. He found that we go through stages as parents that are vital to our baby’s self esteem and development. The first stage is the stage when our baby is very little and we try to be attuned to her needs and respond quickly. We carefully care for her basic needs and touch our babies a lot. In this stage our baby is absolutely dependant and we read her signals carefully and are trying hard to meet her needs as best we can. Of course in this stage, we do make mistakes – we all misread signals, feed our babies when they aren’t actually hungry and can’t get to them if they cry while we are in the shower. But these mistakes are healthy and appropriate for this age. As our little ones get older, we adapt to their needs less and less completely, in other words, we start to fail, leaving more time before responding, and sometimes making poor decisions on how to respond. This ‘failure’ is vital for little ones to develop well, as through your failings as a mum, your baby learns she is separate from you and that she can rely on herself too. So your baby moves from complete dependence to more independence and begins to rely on herself to self sooth. When moms become too stressed with doing it all perfectly – they in fact are doing their baby a disservice because their baby will never learn to wait or self sooth. These babies experience very high levels of frustration and battle to learn to rely on themselves or be happy when mom is not around. This is not great for self esteem. So when you have a ‘bad mummy’ moment, don’t berate yourself. Your baby loves you and learns about the world when you are great and when you fail. So pat yourself on the back and say out loud: “I am a good enough mummy”. We wish you all many Happy Days and Peaceful Nights. MEG FAURE
NEWS HAPPY DAYS PEACEFUL NIGHTS SHOPPING TALKS AND WORKSHOPS COMPETITION THE BABY SENSE DIRECTORY BABY SENSE BLOG FACEBOOK We are so close to having 4000 fans. Get everyone you know to sign up as a fan to our page. The day we reach 4000 fans we will pick a Facebook Fan at Random to win a copy of our latest book –Feeding Sense. We love your interaction and crave more. We have been known to reward our most active fans so join our online community and help each other. Our online poll this month is about how prepared you felt before your baby arrived BABY SENSE IN THE NEWS The JOHNSON'S® Baby Baby Sense Seminars received great exposure in the media. E-TV Great Expectations had all the speakers on in July in a dedicated seminars show. Radio interviews: interviews with Meg on Radio 2000 and SAFM. CCFM interviewed Kath Megaw. Newspapers articles: PE Express Mums Talk, The Herald, Die Burger, Beeld (all articles were written by Meg); Star – interview with Simon Strachan about Childhood Obesity; Daily News - interview with Meg.
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