Handsfree Revoultion

I came across Hands free Mama a couple of days ago while searching the internet for something else.

I read her post on How to miss a childhood  She talks about how technology distracts us so much that we end up missing things. I am guilty of some of these

Carry my phone around so much that when you happen to leave it in one room your child will come running with it proudly in hand—treating it more like a much needed breathing apparatus than a communication device.

Decide the app you’re playing is more important than throwing the ball in the yard with your kids. Even better, yell at them to leave you alone while you play your game.

Check your phone first thing in the morning … even before you kiss, hug, or greet the people in your family.

Don’t look up from your phone when your child speaks to you or just reply with an “uh huh” so she thinks you were listening.

Lose your temper with your child when he “bothers” you while you are interacting with your hand-held electronic device.

After reading it I felt sad! I am going to try and stop checking Twitter, Emails, Facebook,Pinterest so much during her waking hours.

Grasp a Childhood It requires only one thing: You must put down your phone. Whether it is for ten minutes, two hours, or an entire Saturday, beautiful human connection, memory making, and parent-child bonding can occur every single time you let go of distraction to grasp what really matters.

The beautiful, life-changing results of your “Hands Free” action can start today … right now … the moment you put down the phone.

I don't want mini me looking back and thinking every time I looked at my mum she had her phone attached to her hand and she ignored me because her phone and laptop were more important than playing or talking to me.

Thirty Mummy x

The great conspiracy of Silence..

The unwritten rule of parenthood is that you never let on to non-parents what its really like. This was described by a sleep-deprived friend as The Great Parental Conspiracy of Silence. It goes like this......

Your friend announces that she is pregnant, you are of course, delighted. You meet for coffee (yours is a double espresso because your child has been up all night) to talk about it. She wants to know everything or so she says.

Heres what you tell her..

* It doesn't matter if she gets fat, the weight will drop off afterwards, especially if she breastfeeds

* The birth itself isn't that bad, and anyway your body is biologically programmed to forget the pain.

* Breastfeeding can be a little tricky to start with, but in the end she'll get the hang of it.

* You get used to not having as much sleep as you used to.

* The experience of looking after a newborn can really bring two people together.


Heres what you actually mean...

* Her stomach will never be the same again, not even if she goes to the gym everyday (which she won't be able to because she won't have the time)

* The birth is quite terrifying, gas and air doesn't work like they say it does, having stitches is horrible, midwives don't always get it right, there will be more blood and bodily fluids than on a episode of CSI, and having half the world staring and your most intimate parts while you make noises like a demented pig is not, in any sense of the word empowering.

* Breastfeeding can be very hard indeed, you feel like a useless failure if you can't do it, breastfed babies do get colic, you will leak in public, your nipples will feel like they have been sandpapered and your breasts, like your stomach will never really recover.

* You will go insane with sleep deprivation, you really will. Even the hardiest of military men were reduced to wrecks after 3 days of no sleep in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and you were not trained for this. There will be days when the very act of putting clothes on your shattered body will feel like a major achievement.

* Once the initial euphoria has subsided, you and your partner will effectively become shift workers: when he's awake you will be dropping of to sleep, and vice versa. You will become resentful of his ability to leave the house in the morning, bound by the comparatively stressless world of work. In the back of your mind will be the sneaking suspicion that he is staying longer in the office because he would almost be anywhere than at home sterilising bottles and dealing with a frazzled you and a wailing baby. Sex will be implausible, not so much because of the physical changes wrought by giving birth, but because you will both be so exhausted, and no one feels like having much sex when they're tired and smelling slightly of sick.

That is one side of the story: the disruption and chaos and then somewhere around week three, quite possibly as you are dozing of at 4am, with this little milky person asleep beside you, It suddenly hits you with the force of an oncoming train: you love this little person more than life itself, It is in the true sense of the word unconditional.  It can on the other hand be frightening for the mother, whose happiness now depends on this highly unstable bundle, whose very sanity can feel as if it hinges on one tiny human continuing to breathe. but also for her partner Adjusting from being the centre of a person's universe to being a distance satellite is never easy, especially if the ego involved is male. All this is why you can't really tell your pregnant friend the truth. She doesn't yet understand the peculiar feeling of being hopelessly trapped and elated at the same time - nor will she until she has given birth. You have to let her experience it for herself, in her own way. Far better and easier to say that My child is a angel/genius/source of endless joy, I am deliriously happy being a mother, my partner and I have as much - If possibility not more sex than before and no, of course we do not miss the lie-ins/foreign holidays/actual freedom.

I found this in a book I bought today called Backwards in high heels.  I do think people tend to sugar coat information when your pregnant for the first time obviously not to scare the life out of you.

L x

Only one... Surely not

I have decided that for the foreseeable I am sticking with one child but somehow society makes me feel like a freak for making such a decision with such comments as "You can't have just one a only child is an lonely child" "oh you'll change your mind" or the conversation me and my MIL had yesterday, I was telling her I had bulk bought some pull ups a couple of weeks ago because we were still using them at night and were £2.79 in Tesco. We have a lot left over because S is dry both day and night now. Her response "you should just keep them for the next one" 


I am quite happy with one for a number of reasons. 


Yesterday I came across this study that has proved to be quite interesting in reagards to only children. 






A Stereotype Is Born

The image of the lonely only — or at least the legitimizing of that idea — was the work of one man, Granville Stanley Hall. About 120 years ago, Hall established one of the first American psychology-research labs and was a leader of the child-study movement. A national network of study groups called Hall Clubs existed to spread his teachings. But what he is most known for today is supervising the 1896 study "Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children," which described a series of only-child oddballs as permanent misfits. Hall — and every other fledgling psychologist — knew close to nothing about credible research practices. Yet for decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that children with siblings possessed. "Being an only child is a disease in itself," he claimed.

Later generations of scholars tried to correct the record, but their findings never filtered into popular parenting discourse. Meanwhile, the "peculiar" only children — "overprivileged, asocial, royally autonomous ... self-centered, aloof and overly intellectual," as sociologist Judith Blake describes them in her 1989 book Family Size and Achievement — permeated pop culture, from the demon children in horror films (The Omen, The Bad Seed) to the oddball sidekicks in '80s sitcoms (Growing Pains, Family Ties). Even on the new show Modern Family, the tween singleton is a cringingly precocious loner with a coddling mother. Such vehicles have evangelized Hall's teachings more than his clubs did. Of course we ask when someone is going to have "kids," not "a kid." Of course we think that one is the loneliest number.

No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. An only child herself and the mother of one, Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China (where the government's one-child policy, the world's biggest experiment in population control, went into effect in 1979), drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence. The studies, mainly from the U.S., cut across class and race.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. No one, Falbo says, has published research that can demonstrate any truth behind the stereotype of the only child as lonely, selfish and maladjusted. (She has spoken those three words so many times in the past 35 years that they run together as one: lonelyselfishmaladjusted.) Falbo and Polit later completed a second quantitative review of more than 200 personality studies. By and large, they found that the personalities of only children were indistinguishable from their peers with siblings.

Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid, who gets all the dance classes, piano lessons and prep courses, as well as all their parents' attention when it comes to helping work out an algebra problem. That attention, researchers have noticed, leads to not just higher SAT scores but also higher self-esteem.

And as Falbo tells her students, the cocktail of aptitude and confidence yields results: only children tend to do better in school and get more education — college, medical or law degrees — than other kids. Not that having siblings will necessarily thwart you; Einstein had a sister and did just fine.


The full article can be read here The only child: Debunking the myths




Who's to say that in a year or 2 I'll change my mind but for now I am happy to devote time and full attention to S.

Motherhood

Being a mother is quite possibly one of the most complex undertakings you will ever embark on.

Modern motherhood is riddled with contradictions, confusion and above all clichés, the have it all generation, the too posh to push, the ticking biological clock, the work life balance.

Women who have children can never be just mothers, there must always be a qualifier. Stay at home mums, working mums, full time mums (although show me a mother who is part time and I’ll show you a pig with wings) Earth mothers, alpha mothers, pushy mothers, single mothers, teenage mothers, geriatric mothers and of course the yummy mummies.

Society sees all these women going about the business of raising children and, instead of delighting in the continuation of the human race It seems to go out of its way to judge them. 

French children don't throw food!

An American married an English man and lived with him is Paris, where she had a baby. In England or America she would have found sympathy from other sleep deprived new mums. But motherhood in Paris was different.

Babies slept through the night from 2 months old they eat a varied and sophisticated diet and didn't throw their food around. The mums were not knackered and covered in sick. Thy looked sexy and had their own grown up lives.

Do the French make parenting look like a breeze?

As a mother of a 2 year old I am intrigued.

In a study done by Princeton discovered that mothers in America found parenting twice as unpleasant as mothers in France.

When a French baby cries at night the parents go in wait and observe for a few minutes. left alone it might self-sooth and go back to sleep. If you rush in your training it to wake-up properly.

French Babies wait. long stretches from one feed to the next and when they are older they wait until 4pm for treats. Toddlers will wait quietly for food in a restaurant. This waiting, according to the French is a early lesson in self-reliance and that your baby is capable of learning and cope with frustration.

There are no children's menus in restaurants, French children are trained to eat everything.

All in all French mothers are more detached they sit at the edge of the playground chatting to friends, while leaving their toddlers to get on with in.

I do exactly that when I'm out with S at a park or soft play or at a mums and tots group, I just let her get on with it rather than follow her about.