Www.enable.org.uk/enabledirect/publications/Documents/FL tricky moments.pdf. Bedsharing & SIDS – Why We Have it All Wrong | Sarah Ockwell-Smith. So today Carpenter et al published a horribly unreliable and flawed analysis of bedsharing. This scaremongering piece of ‘science’ (I use that term loosely) does not add to public understanding of the safety of bedsharing – far from it, it shrouds it in more myth and mystery and, in my opinion, is incredibly dangerous. Why dangerous you ask? Their bold statement that bedsharing is 5 times more dangerous than a baby sleeping in it’s own sleep space may be incorrect (more later), but worse than being incorrect it is a claim that will doubtless scare thousands of tired and highly vulnerable new parents around the world.
Those very parents who through sheer exhaustion are liable to fall asleep on a sofa with their baby, or in bed at night after a long night feed, babe in arms surrounded by fluffy pillows and cushions, perhaps their systems full of the opiate based analgesic they are still taken to recover from their C-Section. Consider this scenario: Get where I’m going? Sarah Ockwell-Smith. Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood by Michael Chabon.
When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs, pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Harriet Tubman, Antietam. But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the Forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. Www.mediasmart.org.uk/pdf/Body_Image_Parent_Pack.pdf. How to be a calm parent. I’ve always been a dreamer. Oh yes .. I was going to change the world. I was going to raise the best children ever to walk the earth. I was never going to make the same mistakes OTHER parents made. Then I had children. My first lesson in patience happened immediately while sitting alone with two crying infants for months at a time. People always ask me how I managed twin infants and I always respond the same way … “With a lot of tears.”
Staying calm as a parent may come easier for some more than others. Yeah, where’s the handbook? I call it Parenting from the Heart. I’ve learned so many lessons on this topic in the last six years. In fact, it is my great wish that parents would read this blog and change the way they are parenting so that they, too, can be the change they wish to see in the world. Original Photo by Tanya_Little via Flickr. Aha! Parenting - Dr. Laura Markham > Welcome!