Sunday, February 23, 2014

On "artificial feeding" for your baby and being more than a bit useless

Mothercraft, like most modern publications, promotes breast feeding, especially in silence to enhance milk flow. It also sensibly notes that not all women can breast feed for various reasons, and includes a chapter on "artificial feeding". Given this was written in pre-formula days, I found this chapter quite interesting. And very pleased that I live in an era when preparing formula is as easy as it is. And slightly ashamed that I haven't used all that time freed up by formula's invention to do something noble and good. But I digress.

My toddler had formula from about seven months, and my baby has had it a few times now as a top-up. It's easy-peasy really, especially when you no longer need to sterilize. Open tin. Scoop powder. Put in bottle filled with water. Shake. Give to eager child. The only part with potential problems or effort for me is if the top isn't on properly before the shaking, resulting in extra mess, washing and swear words.

In 1945, though, it looks much harder. First, this is what you need:


Saturday, February 22, 2014

Epic fail at the ideal routine for toddlers

Today, I tried to follow Mothercraft's suggested routine for a toddler. Here's how I got on, with the book's recommendations in bold:

6 - 7.30: Wakens, goes to toilet, has drink of fruit juice or water. Given a shower, dresses, cleans teeth.

Wakens - check. Has drink of fruit juice or water - fail. I didn't give my son either. Especially juice. Recommendation leaves me wondering if 1945 children spent mornings bouncing off walls if given juice before breakfast. Shower - fail. Cleans teeth - fail. At this point I feel slightly disheartened that the only recommendation I've managed is that my toddler woke up, and I can hardly take credit for that myself. 

8am: Breakfast. Bowel evacuation. Washes hands.

Again, an epic fail on my part. My toddler had breakfast of course, but I didn't do the other two. I did have a scoff, though, at the phrase "bowel evacuation", and wonder when it became normal to say "poo". I also started to feel better about failing the first part of the day's recommendations when I realised it suggests that teeth be cleaned before breakfast. Huh. 

Friday, February 21, 2014

About me

I live in New Zealand with my husband, toddler boy and baby girl. 

A long-time history nerd, Modern Mothercraft is my way of getting my history-geek on in between doing all of the usual parenting malarkey. I have a Master's degree in history, but writing this blog is much more fun. Probably because I couldn't mention an infant's bodily functions in my Master's thesis, or complain about being tired. 



Monday, February 17, 2014

Is baby gear not made to last?

Modern Mothercraft includes a number of suggestions about what baby gear you should acquire, such as the fancy schmancy draft-preventing screen I added a photo of here, the enamel chamber pot, and this very heavy looking pram. It also has the following recommendations for a bassinet:


My first thought on reading this was how much the top picture looks like a cross between a laundry basket on wheels and a shopping trolley.  My second was realising that I actually own the bassinet in the bottom picture. Alas, it was not sitting in my children's bedroom behind one of those screens as per Plunket's 1945 recommendations. No, it was in my garage, on top of a pile of boxes and underneath a bizarre orange inflatable contraption filled with jingly beads. Thing is, the bassinet was mine when I was a baby. My parents kept it, then it sat in various garages until eventually coming into my possession a few years ago. I'd entertained vague notions of using it for my children, but was seduced by the marketing gods instead, in the form of a super-cute Moses basket with a giraffe on the side. When someone offered to buy me the Moses basket, I jumped for pregnancy-hormone filled joy.  So, in the garage the old bassinet sat. Until I retrieved it for a closer look last week.


Wednesday, February 12, 2014

On exposing children to the sun

Like any other child of the 80s, especially one that grew up in New Zealand, the 'slip slop slap' message regarding the sun is second nature to me. Before we go into the sun, I do my best* to get the kids to slip on a hat, slop on some sunscreen, and slap ... I can't remember what the slap was. Maybe it was slap on a hat and slip on something else.  Spilled sunscreen, perhaps?  Hmmmm. Well, details aside, it's the sentiment that counts - keep your kids out of the sun. The sun here is nasty. Melanoma rates are high, and being burnt is really sore. And if the random old lady that yelled at me from her car recently to tell me that part of my baby was in the sun is anything to go by, these ideas are fairly mainstream. Although I wouldn't recommend yelling the advice to a harried mother from a car as your communications medium unless you want a glare of doom, but that's a whole other rant. 

"Summer-time frolics"
The idea of sun awareness wasn't around in 1945. In fact, sunbathing is recommended for your children, every day. This sun bathing ought to proceed as follows: "commence by exposing the limbs to direct sunshine, then expose the chest for a few minutes, and finally expose the whole body." Mothercraft notes that children who stay in the sun all day may become "overheated", but sun bathing is "so good for us all." 

Now, I do get the benefit of Vitamin D, and don't want my children to be Vitamin D deficient. There is speculation that children aren't getting enough Vitamin D, and studies show that Vitamin D supplements don't work. So, the sun it is. But, I really don't want to un-slip slop slap either, let alone sun-bathing every day. As someone who grew up being made aware of the dangers of the sun, especially the risks of skin cancer, making my kids sunbathe feels counter-intuitive. My children's exposure to the sun is not in the middle of the day, and always under a layer of sun screen. Not to mention the fact that the weather here is pants at present to recently a sun-bath would be more akin to a nasty, cold shower, so not something to be done daily anyway. 

So, I think this is some advice I'm going to ignore. Like the advice on how to give an enema, some of the tidbits contained within Modern Mothercraft really are truly dated. 

*Sadly, a certain toddler likes to throw hats sometimes, rather than wear them. Not sure what the authors of Mothercraft would say about that one. 

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

How to give an enema

Stop the press! Mothercraft has advice on what you always desperately wanted to know: how to give an enema! Now I hope you can take the time to stop dancing for joy that this knowledge will soon also be yours and pay attention to how these are to be done.

To do this, you need a bulb syringe (for insertion), olive oil (for lubrication), and saline solution (for reasons I am still unclear on). Other helpful advice is to do it holding the baby over the "chamber", and it should be administered if baby hasn't gone in two days.

Now, it wasn't until I read this, that it occurred to me that giving my baby an enema was something that I'd ever do. And I've also decided that giving my baby an enema can join "dress her in a headband" and "let her eat rusty nails" in the long list of Things I Will Never Do With My Baby. I'm sure the advice was produced with the best of intentions, but like the other advice on toilet-related activities, I think I'll pass.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Will slippers help my children sleep? (And musings on the working week)

This evening I read in Modern Mothercraft that "most small children are wholesomely tired at the end of the busy day and quite ready for bed by the time six o'clock comes around." When I read that it was 9 pm, the baby was still awake and gazing adoringly at herself in the mirror, and the toddler had only been asleep 45 minutes. At this point I resisted the urge to throw the book across the room, and instead read about what I ought to have done instead. Apparently, I need to:
  • give my children an early bath, then "dress them in their nightclothes, gowns and slippers so that they will be ready for a quiet half-hour or so with father before they are tucked down for the night"; and 
  • avoid "wild romps and thrillers" before bedtime. 
This evening, I gave them a bath, and dressed them in their nightclothes. They also both had 'quiet' time with both me and their father,although in the case of my toddler, it was probably longer than half and hour due to his well-honed skills in delaying his bedtime. We avoided "wild romps and thrillers", unless you count the book Bears in the Night with its aptly-named Spook Hill. So, it must be the slippers! The slippers must be the key to settling both kids at a reasonable hour!
Unless the problem is the absence of a screen in my children's rooms?

On this advice about bedtime routines, I find it interesting that Mothercraft assumes that the father will be home by 5.30, in time for the quiet half hour before a 6 pm bedtime. This hints at either a shorter working day than today, or a much better commute. My husband works a thirty minute commute from home, and is rarely home before six. By today's standards, that doesn't constitute either a long working day, or a terrible commute. I've never had a job that has had me home by 5.30, unless I've made some sort of special arrangement.  I'm sure plenty of people could manage that, but not enough for the father being home by 5.30 being part of the Government's official recommendations. 

What about in 1945? From what I've gathered, more men worked in the manufacturing sector than any other, which would have included local factories.  So, these men would have had a much shorter distance between their home and place of work. That must have helped them get home by 5.30.  I do wonder: was the idea of a father being home in time for "quiet time" with his children at 5.30 was as unlikely as it is now? The working week had only been reduced to a forty hour week in 1936.  Many men would have been shift workers, and there were of course plenty of women who lost their husbands in World War Two. To these women, the advice about the father being integral to the children's routine would have been salt in an already raw wound. My Grandfather apparently worked away from home days on end, so my grandmother wouldn't have been able to follow this particular piece of advice.

Perhaps, then, this particular piece of advice is unreliable, even by 1945 standards. In that case, maybe I won't bother with the slippers after all. 

Friday, February 7, 2014

The size of my children

I've heard that people nowadays are much taller and heavier than they ever have been before. The fact we're taller than our ancestors was once made painfully aware to me when I bumped my head walking through the doorway of an old Italian church. And as for heavier, in all my study of Twentieth Century history I've never come across evidence of policy-makers wringing their hands about an 'obesity epidemic' in the 1940s.

Modern Motherhood is very matter of fact about how some children will be larger than others. "No reasonable person," it writes, "would expect the growth of a Shetland Pony to be the same as that of a Clydesdale." Nice. The question is: are my children Clydesdales compared to the Baby-Boomer Shetland Ponies? 



A weight chart in Modern Motherhood compiled from the records of 9,000 infants allows me to at least compare my son to the kids of 1945:

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

"Nursing" in silence

Modern Mothercraft has a lot to say about "nursing".  I'll blog more about that later, including the recommended diet for nursing mothers. Of interest to me today, though, was the advice about the importance of quiet while my baby girl feeds. It says we should be in a quiet room, and that she should have my complete attention. Why? Because "listening to a loud radio programme, or even the mere fact of talking or reading a book may alter the flow of mother's milk." My first thought on reading this was: I feed my baby so often, wouldn't that be a little boring? Mothercraft has an answer to that, too. In case I wasn't already feeling guilty about wanting to do other things while feeding, it gives me another whack with the guilt stick by saying that by nursing in silence "the world would be a happier place for both mothers and babies." Apparently, this is especially important when the mother is 'excitable'. If the authors of the book think a loud radio is a problem, I hate to think what they'd have to say about feeding in front to TV or while surfing the net. Or, doing both at once. Plus, in the early days of feeding when it was hard and sore, that line about making the world a happier place probably would have made me want to throw the book across the room.

After reading that section I decided to take the book's advice a few times. Unless it's the middle of the night I usually read or watch TV, but today I tried to feed her as per the recommendations. The first time, I noticed a giant spiderweb in the corner of the room. I also wondered if I am 'excitable', and whether that was just 1945 language for 'poor attention span'. The second time, I noticed that the roots of my baby girl's hair are getting blonder and enjoyed gazing adoringly at her for the duration of the feed. I even congratulated myself for having the most beautiful baby in the world, completely objectively speaking of course. 

The third time I remembered the advice Mum gave me when I was pregnant, that nursing is an excellent time to spend with your baby, and that it should be savored. Especially when you're surrounded by people and want some time out. I've decided I agree with this: this experiment was a nice reminder to stay still and enjoy those moments more. But, given I feed every three hours, I am sure that trying to sit still in silence only a few of those times will suffice. The last time I fed my baby, I was watching a movie. Given my baby's subsequent sleep, I'm pretty sure that the milk wasn't compromised by what I was doing with my eyes while nursing. Or maybe that's just my way of justifying doing other activities while nursing because I really am terribly 'excitable'. 

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

"That Lollie Curse"

"The perpetual sweet-eating habit practiced ... is so harmful to them that parents should adopt the 'out of sight out of mind' policy as far as lollies and chocolates are concerned." The book then goes on to say that a barleysugar or boiled sweet is fine occasionally, but toffees and other "sticky jawy" things should never be eaten.

My first thought when reading this (once my guilt at giving my son the odd sweet treat and enabling his current addiction to peanut butter and honey sandwiches subsided) was: where do gummy lollies sit in the hierarchy of evil sweets? You know the kind, the delicious lollies that are usually brightly coloured and shaped like non-sweet things. Like, fried eggs. Or worms. Or teeth, in some sort of perverse homage to the thing that the treats are rotting.

I've heard before that gummy lollies are worse than chocolate because the gummy bits stick between teeth. I tried to find out via Google, but was so overwhelmed by photos of the lollies I got distracted. Although I did find an interesting study claiming that Gummi Bears were good for tooth decay.

I suppose that like in 1945, it's better not to succumb to "that lollie curse" and give children any lollies at all, gummy or not. If I do though I'll certainly follow Modern Mothercraft's advice and stay away from "sticky jawy" things. Not only are they terrible for teeth, but you don't see them in shops much anyway. So, that's an easy win for doing what Plunket recommended in 1945!

Buggies

Modern Mothercraft says prams should be made of wood and wicker, lined with American cloth. And when children can sit, they should go in something like this:


This section of the book makes me respect my grandmothers. I don't imagine that buggy is terribly light to push, not like my Mountain Buggy. Even the double Mountain Buggy I spend my days trudging around the suburbs behind looks easier to push. And the tantrums! If the toddlers of today can get so upset about their comfy modern prams, I wonder how the toddlers of yesteryear coped. I know lots of people may look down their noses and comment that in their day that pram would have been a luxury that no toddler would have ever objected to as it was preferable to walking six miles in the snow with barbed wire for shoes, but I'm certain the odd baby boomer would still have cried blue murder at being put inside.

As an aside, does anyone know what American cloth is without Googling it? Although to be honest even Googling it myself I'm still not certain what it actually is. All I can say with certainty is that it's not in my buggy!

About this blog

During this blog I plan to read Modern Mothercraft, and apply it to my life as a stay-at-home Mum today.

Modern Mothercraft was published in 1945 by the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, otherwise known as Plunket. Mum gave it to me while I was pregnant with my son, and we read it out loud and had a chuckle at some of the dated ideas contained within. It then gathered dust, literally, until this week when I was looking for a book large enough to act as a temporary door stop, and found it again. Some of the advice contained within its 225 pages is painfully dated, but for a book published almost 70 years ago, it's also surprising how many of its recommendations remain the same today.

In many ways, 1945 was a different world to 2014. A terrible war had just ended, and rationing was still in place in Britain. There was no internet, cheap clothes, and far fewer gadgets to make things easier. Both of my grandmothers had either just started or were about to start large families. Gender roles were much more pronounced, as is evidenced by the title having 'mother' rather than 'parent' in the title. When most people learn about 1945, they tend to learn about VE and VJ days, the Marshall Plan, Yalta and Hiroshima. They don't learn about all these women raising the "baby boomers" and worrying about toilet training, how to cool milk, and what to dress their babies in.

Although things have changed, I imagine that many things were still the same for my grandmothers raising their children as they are for me raising mine. Women in 1945 will have still wanted the best for their children, and would have wanted sound advice on how to keep them safe and healthy. And the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women had the best of intentions in producing this booklet. Indeed, that part of what makes it such a fascinating read today.



And of course I'll be going on the odd random digression as well, because after all, who doesn't like a good ramble every now and again?