Pressure Schmessure

I keep meaning to write about something other than parenting related things, but I can't help it. I keep finding myself on these themes. I've started to wonder, what will I write about when my children are grown? Is that when I'll finally settle down to write a short story collection?

In the meantime, today's theme? Parenting Pressure.

Inspired by two things: 1) Lisa Belkin's post on parenting by location and the idea that parenting differs not so much by choice or values, but by neighborhood and what your friends are doing. She refers to Claire Dederer's Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses in her post. I admit, I haven't read Dederer's book, if only because I heard the review and interview one Saturday morning on NPR and before it was finished I was yelling at Dederer (via yelling at the radio) for her complaining about all the "rules" she encountered in her Seattle moms' group. From the way she tells it, the rules were strict and if you violated any of them, you risked being exiled - but in reality, it sounded like she could use being exiled to find new friends who parented in a way similar to her own thinking. I mean, Seattle is not a small city; surely there's a different moms group to be found? That said, having done yoga for 7 years, I'm totally envious of her narrative structure and wished I thought of it.

2) The statistics for breastfeeding came out a few weeks ago, and while moms the world over, but especially in Western countries, love to complain about how much pressure there is to breast feed, it turns out that the number of breastfeeding mothers is going down. When my son was born in 2008, 20% of babies were breast fed after six months, while now, only 13% are breast fed after the first six months.

When I read the recent numbers on breast feeding, I was going to jump in and write a post about what seems to be the myth of pressure to breast feed. I've wondered about this a lot, when I hear women complain about how much pressure there is to breast feed. Generally I want to respond in two ways:

1) Breast feeding burns 1000 calories a day. How much pressure do you need? Spend a fun filled sweaty hour on a treadmill trying to burn a decent 500 calories or sit on your couch in your pajamas and nurse your adorable, soft and sweet smelling newborn while relishing in the blissful release of the hormone oxytocin and burning away that pregnancy weight? I mean really. In my first pregnancy, I gained 30 pounds and lost 42 thanks to breastfeeding. I weighed less than I did in high school. I can't think of a better weight loss plan, but that's just me.

2) 13% of babies are breast fed after the first six months. That means 87% of babies are getting formula from six months on. If there is indeed so much pressure, it clearly isn't working.

Yes, I understand there are women who can't stand breast feeding, have physical issues that limit their ability, encounter nothing but problems or whatever the case may be. Most women I suspect that encounter problems end up not simply because they don't get the support or education they need whether it's from doctors or lactation consultants or their own research. I've met lactation consultants who give out bad advice simply because they don't know any better. I've heard of doctors so worried about the supposed pressure to breast feed that when they encounter patients still breastfeeding at 6 or 8 months, they tell them that they don't have to continue if they don't want to (never mind that WHO recommendation to breast feed 1-2 years). I suspect most women don't continue because they don't get the support they need when they go back to work.

But 87% of babies on formula after the first six months? Really, only 13% of us women have fallen victim to the pressure to breast feed?

Huh.

Maybe I'm sensitive to this, because I did breast feed. My son didn't take a bottle. He didn't have much occasion to as I've been very fortunate in that I didn't have to go back to work (and I didn't find the work I did before my son satisfying enough to go back to). But when I've said that my son didn't take a bottle or even know what one was, what I encountered was not high fives from the breast feeding pressure police but stares and looks of disbelief that maybe I was from another planet or maybe I was one of those women who had no personal boundaries and let her baby manipulate the crap out of her or maybe I had no sense of self etc.

Or my son wanted a doll (this probably should go in the gender neutral parenting post), but the dolls I found for him mostly had those creepy mouths so they could feed from the bottles they came with. It took me a year to find a baby doll that didn't come with a bottle (granted, I was in Singapore and Bali where the selection was not at its best).

Or while my sister and sister-in-law on my side of my family do breastfeed their babies, on my husband's side of the family, my son is the fifth grandchild and the only one who breastfed past 12 weeks.

Or when we lived in Singapore, I was literally one of four women on the entire island who breast fed their baby into toddler hood. Once when I breast fed my son in public, the daughter of the friend we were eating with asked, "Mommy, what is she doing to her baby?" simply because she had never seen a woman breast feed her baby.

So pardon me if I declare the pressure to breast feed a myth. But stand up and question why do people in our culture assume that having a baby means you need bottles and pacifiers? Oh lordy.

But really, after reading Lisa Belikin's post, I think we should declare all parenting pressure a myth. Because, honestly, who does it serve? And what does it make us sound like? We're grown ups, but as parents, when we complain about whatever the pressure we think we're receiving (in our case, I got an insane amount of strangers and family telling me to swaddle my baby even though it gave him a fever or to not hold the baby so much) and we sound like teenagers, stuck in high school and surrounded by cliques of witchy teen- aged girls who only care about expensive name brand clothing.

David Elkind, in his book, The Power of Play discusses parent peer pressure, and suggests that when some parents engage in hyperparenting, overprotection, and overprogramming it is simply because they are concerned with how they look as parents to other parents. He further suggests that when we become parents, something happens in our brains that takes us back to adolescence when we were oh so concerned about what others thought of us. Part of this is because new parents are in a new social and emotional life situation. They are in unfamiliar territory, much like teenagers, and assume that others are judging and evaluating their parenting (to be fair, some people are) while they are also looking for clues they are doing things right or for ways that they should be doing things.

Elkind says the parents who don't fit this model, tend to be parents who move a lot from location to location whether they just traveled a lot or had jobs that took them overseas. These families, in his experience, were less likely to be influenced by peer pressure or media pressure about how to parent, and rather, the family grew closer and more secure in their values and beliefs about parenting and what was right for their family.

Reading through the comments on Lisa Belkin's post on parenting by location, I found this to be largely true. And it fits my husband and I. Though, I think we were on this path anyway. Even before we moved from Denver to LA then from LA to Singapore, we knew there were things we were going to do. We didn't want a bunch of baby things that we'd use for a week or two and then would have to pass along. We knew I'd breast feed, and that we'd co-sleep. But those things we chose not because we were following other's examples. We just did a lot of reading and out of the reading we did, those things lined up with who we are and our values. Just like we prefer organic half and half and fruits and vegetables, because we like knowing our food doesn't have a bunch of unknown ingredients in it, not because we think it makes us somehow better or superior people.

We have made choices when it comes to our parenting and we continue to whether it's about sending our son to pre-school and what we think about education in general or how much time we should let him watch television and movies. I do come from Portland, OR which, from what I observed and was told, is the most friendly place to nurse a toddler. And we do parent in very similar ways to my siblings who live in Portland, but we do a lot of things differently too. My husband's family is from Texas. We are on the opposite end of the parenting spectrum from how he was parented and how his siblings parent. Husband has said that some consider me a controversial mom. I find this baffling, because I think, we just do what works for us - how is that controversial? But sure - to his family and to others who think along the same lines - breastfeeding, co-sleeping, not punishing your child, whatever else we're doing, is controversial.

I don't know - maybe I'm lucky, because in traveling the world with my child, I did see a wide variety of parents, and while some did things radically different from how my husband and I do them, all of them were still good parents and the right parents for their children. Even in my mom's group in LA, where we all largely did mother in similar ways, we still did things differently - some used strollers, some didn't, some had cribs, some didn't, some vaccinated, some didn't, but the message in our mom's group was always to just do what works, different things work for different families, and parenting is about choices, and just like anything, you should be informed about the choice you're making, whatever they are. 

But parenting is too important (as is our peace of mind) and our children are too valuable to sacrifice our individual values and sense of self for the sake of some made up groupthink exercise. There are enough parents out there, that if for some reason, we do find ourselves in a situation where we do feel pressure or don't feel like we fit in because of our choices, then we can just find new friends - and the friends who are true friends love us and adore us no matter what we choose or what kind of parents we are. I mean, isn't that what we would tell our kids in a similar position?

So why all the whining and complaining?