Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls. Steve Biddulph
their little neck for many months and it may flex to the point of injury or sprain. Always support their head and neck firmly as you move them about.)
There is something else even more important: setting an example of fun. Your daughter learns most by watching you. If you are happy, exuberant, silly and fun with her at those times that it is appropriate (i.e. not when driving the car), then her capacity for being happy will grow. If you are friendly to people you meet, enjoy getting your clothes on, sing while you shower, are kind to people in shops or in the street, speak well of people, get cross when you see something unjust or wrong, then your daughter will be taking in and making these attitudes her own, from a surprisingly young age.
It’s worth checking up on this – especially for mums, who are the number one role model for their daughter’s whole approach to life. Spend a day having a close look at yourself; do you frown, stress, grump and hurry your way through life? If that is so, being the mother of a newborn little girl might make you want to change that.
THE HORMONES OF LOVE
Many of us today feel unprepared for parenthood. A hundred years ago, most families had seven or eight children and their homes were noisy and crowded places, but often very happy ones. Everyone grew up with babies and toddlers around them and knew how to handle them. Today it’s very different. One study found that one-third of new parents have never held a baby before they get their own!
Luckily our hormones help with this inexperience. New mothers’ bodies flood with a hormone called prolactin. If you are lucky and can breastfeed your baby, then prolactin goes much higher in your bloodstream and makes you feel dreamy and slowed down. It helps you to focus and be there for your child. Other hormones help too; when you hug your baby, or your partner or a friend hugs you, the hormone oxytocin (the love hormone) makes you feel contented and settled.
Oxytocin is a remarkable hormone; it is released when we have an orgasm, it is released when we greet a friend, and when we eat food with someone, sitting together at a table, it increases in our bloodstream. At birth, if it’s a relaxed environment and we feel safe, it floods into us. You need all the oxytocin you can get! When people talk about bonding, it’s oxytocin at work. People who did not get enough love, and therefore enough oxytocin, often can be found seeking that satisfaction in other ways – through fame, doing drugs, compulsive sex, shopping, stuffing our face with unhealthy food. Or writing books!
Gabor Mate, famous for his work with drug addicts on Vancouver’s East Side, says that heroin, and the rush of wellbeing as the injected drug surges into your bloodstream, is a substitute, a mimic, of being loved – but with a much different result.
It’s all an attempt to get that oxytocin we didn’t get in our mother’s arms. So giving your baby lots of affection is a great liberator. It makes her strong and independent, and a people person who will love and be loved for the whole of her life.
HOW TO PLAY WITH A BABY
With your baby daughter, even from the very first weeks, playfulness can be at the heart of everything you do. This playful mood delights her, but it also makes ordinary tasks so much easier if she sees them as fun.
For instance, babies have to be bathed. Some parents just hurry through this briskly, but most mums and dads can’t resist the urge to make it a pleasure for their baby and themselves. They make sure the room is warm; they aren’t fussed about a bit of splashing; they swish the water around their baby, singing or chatting and making noises and, most, pleasurable of all, lift scoopfuls of water and pour it down her back or front, which she just loves. Many of us can still remember this from our childhood, the delight of warm soapy water on our skin, and a kindly person patting us dry with a soft towel.
At six months of age, when she can sit up, your daughter will tip water herself, squeeze a trickle from the washer, and pop soap bubbles. Bathtime can be a wonderland for her senses.
Even getting dressed, or having a nappy changed, goes better if done in a playful mood. Your daughter will fuss less because she associates this as a happy time. She will take all her cues from you; if you are stressed, she will fuss, because she is worried about you. If you are happy, she will be too.
When you play with a child you are starting something big. Child-development experts are now convinced that playing is what brings out our brain’s full potential.6 Play unleashes lifelong creativity. The greatest discoveries have been made by playful minds being inventive and different.
A girl raised with a sense of fun will not be shy or dull, she will ‘think outside the box’ and bring this ability to whatever career she chooses. She will be able to get along with others in a happy way, because play is all about collaboration. Playfulness makes you confident and light-hearted, willing to try new things, it dispels stress and boosts your immune system. It makes you more active, which then promotes fitness and health.
If you aren’t a naturally playful person, just have a go! Play is as infectious as a baby’s laugh. You will soon find your daughter’s delight and natural capacity for fun captivates you and you both have a ball.
OUR BABY WILL FIT RIGHT IN (LOL!)
Have you ever talked with a young couple who don’t have kids, but plan to?
Often couples in that first flush of confident planning, especially those who are very success driven, will proceed into parenthood full of goals and high aspirations. ‘We will never …’, and ‘our child will …’. There’s a lot of ‘will’ and ‘won’t’ in their vocabulary, because before you have children, life actually sometimes responds to your intentions. You still have the illusion of control – something that real parents have long abandoned!
When talking to parents-to-be, it’s important never to disillusion them (you should never discourage the young!). A common claim of the not-yet-but-soon-to-be-childed is that ‘our baby will fit in with our lifestyle’. ‘If it learns to fit in right from the start, it will be that way all along.’ Experienced parents listen to these plans and do their best to contain their mirth.
I had some friends who were talking this way. They were both nurses and had put off starting a family, then when it came time to make babies, it took a while for it to happen. Finally they had their baby, and I didn’t hear from them for a while.
At the time I belonged to a trauma team, helping emergency service workers after especially stressful incidents. This work sometimes happened very late at night. One night driving home through Hobart at about 2 am, I saw a strange hunchbacked figure, shambling along the waterfront near Salamanca. There was a large lump on its shoulder, and it was clutching it and walking unevenly but resolutely along the deserted street. I have an active imagination, and I immediately thought – ‘It lives beneath the wharf! Creeping out at night to feast on pizza crusts, shunning the human gaze’. But as I drew closer, I recognised my friend! The hump on his shoulder was a baby. He was walking the streets with his baby at 2 am! He saw me and gave me two fingers and a grin – and I pulled over to see if he was okay. He just laughed as he read my thoughts: ‘This baby is fitting in with our lifestyle!’ He was walking the baby to get it to sleep, it was the only thing that worked.
Take it from me, babies do not fit in with your life. Babies take the Kleenex of your life and roll it into a snotty ball! If you do parenthood even half well, it will re-arrange your world. Babies do this in one especially important way (I’m not sure whether to whisper this or shout it, but here goes): You won’t come first in your own life for at least 20 years. If you’ve spent 20 or 30 years being a self-centred so-and-so, you will find parenthood extremely challenging. But it will be good for you. Hopefully parenthood, and your child, will reward you with enough love that you won’t mind this, but it’s