Zoe Williams: the madness of modern parenting

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/zoe-williams-the-madness-of-modern-parenting

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Plainly, something is up with the business of parenting, the way we parent, the things that are now perceived as minimum parenting standards. The fact that I’m conjugating the word at all, that it has become an activity rather than a relationship, indicates the extent to which it now amounts to a set of skills, techniques, rules; it has become something that one does well or badly, the judgment of which is determined by yardsticks that claim, via medicine or neuroscience, to be definitive, yet are one titchy study from the University of Utah away from refutation. The atmosphere is febrile with disapproval: all normal under–standing of acceptable risk, never mind the understanding that behaviour might reasonably differ from one individual to another, is suspended.

Before I became embroiled in reproduction myself, I just assumed this was something driven by expectant mothers: they seemed to enjoy all the rules, the cheese they weren’t allowed to eat, the alcohol they gleefully eschewed. “I’ve lost the taste for it anyway,” they would say of coffee, in a conversation about whether or not caffeine genuinely harmed the foetus or whether that was a myth, repeatedly disproven, but tenaciously maintained by yoga teachers and strangers. It seemed to me as if they were proving their maternal fitness, the essential righteousness of their reproduction, by pointing to these physiological markers: they would make a great mother because they were born to be one, and the fact that they could no longer abide espresso was proof of it.

There was an element of confirmation bias here: before I had children, I found pregnant women unbearably smug, and then afterwards, I found (and still do find) the sight of them achingly poignant. When I got pregnant myself, I realised that this drive towards obedience, the need to prove that you will create, instinctively, the healthiest possible womb-environment for your foetus, doesn’t come from you: it comes from outside.

Risks during pregnancy are so overstated now that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service reports women requesting abortions because they’re so anxious about their alcohol intake in the weeks before they realised they were pregnant. Self‑appointed, two-man-and-a-dog operations periodically issue new rules about how fat you can be, how much you can drink, how little you can breastfeed, before you irreparably harm your child and its life chances. The media light on these for all the obvious reasons; the strange part is that they are often incorporated into Department of Health literature without, apparently, any rudimentary fact-checking.

While I was pregnant, we were given £190 as a “health in pregnancy grant” to spend on vegetables. It was canned by the coalition which, unusually, I agreed with. I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t spend it on vegetables. There is some dispute about how close to starvation you can get while pregnant before your foetus is adversely affected; two studies of wartime famines in Russia and the Netherlands found, respectively, “almost no effect” and “some later-life effects”. These were babies born to mothers who were on the point of starvation. The idea that you can harm your baby by not eating enough carrots is just preposterous.

The prohibitions on food have a slightly more medical foundation, but only slightly. Raw egg, raw fish, raw meat, tuna (raw or not), and sometimes cheeses of any distinction – all forbidden. A lot of it just didn’t make scientific sense. If, for instance, any alcohol at all would be toxic for a foetus, how is it that people of my generation, during whose gestations our mothers drank freely, are not marred by foetal alcohol spectrum disorder?

If toxoplasmosis lived in the faeces of every cat, why did cat lovers who weren’t pregnant so rarely get it? I was told by a midwife: “You can get listeriosis and not even know it until your baby has been born with a birth defect.” This is way, way off. Listeriosis is an extremely serious illness, somewhere in the region of legionnaires’ disease; if I’d got it, I would have been one of six pregnant women to have it that year, one of four the next. Not only would I notice, but the Guinness Book of Incredibly Improbable Medical Events would be on the phone too.

That’s when I thought: something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and, I was soon to realise, early years – nought to three – have become minefields. Any misstep will cost you your healthy child. Stay alert, keep abreast, these missteps are everywhere. If you work hard enough, put your own needs aside assiduously enough, you will be rewarded with the ultimate prize: a healthy baby. But one false move …

Doctors will always privately dismiss these risks as possible but profoundly unlikely, and yet they will never come out and say so. In fairness, what’s in it for them? If you come out and say listeriosis is no big deal, you’re the callous medic who doesn’t care about babies. Professionals who break the code of extreme risk come in for needless, groundless attack. And for what? So some expectant mothers get to eat more cheese. It’s just not worth the aggro.The result of this silence is that our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan. Again, the approach was weird: they had no evidence of what environmental chemicals did to a baby’s development. “For most environmental chemicals we do not know whether or not they really affect a baby’s development, and obtaining definitive guidance will take many years,” the executive summary said. “This paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.”

There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is “concerned” – and offers her “practical tips” that actually aren’t practical at all. (How on earth would you check whether your food had been cooked in a new frying pan? What if your existing frying pan breaks during pregnancy?)

The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility. And all this, not just with the collusion, but at the active behest, of the most important obstetric body in the country. So, some pregnant women – probably most – ignore the advice and are cast as the less concerned, less responsible ones, whose babies’ birth defects, should they arise, could have been averted had they been more cautious.

Once the baby is out, the battles are just as fierce, the orthodoxies just as non-negotiable, but the drivers are more plainly economic. Breastfeeding is a prime example: there is good evidence that it prevents gastric bugs, through a specific and identifiable mechanism, the presence of the antibody SIgA. No other supposed result – improved IQ, better health in later life, reduction in other infections – has ever been separated from the confounding factors that, in the UK, breastfeeding mothers tend to be richer, and with that comes more maternity leave and better housing. An intelligent approach from social scientists was a longitudinal study, comparing breastfeeding outcomes from a country where there was a middle-class bias (the UK) to a country where breastfeeding mothers were more likely to be poor (Brazil); all the differences between the breastfed and the bottle-fed were reduced, most evaporated, some reversed.

I initially interpreted the new atmosphere around mothering especially as just a new kind of patriarchy: even if a topic were far from the point of consensus, we should all pretend to agree, in order not to make the ladies anxious. And while I remain assured that there is a lot of casual sexism underpinning all this, I have concluded that the driving impetus is political: adverse conditions that are related to poverty are recast as parenting failures. For instance, mothers in the bottom quintile go back to work soonest, presumably because they cannot afford to take their full entitlement of maternity leave. This makes breastfeeding for the “recommended” amount of time impossible: it also renders unrealistic the ideal childcare for the pre-toddler – one-to-one, round-the-clock care from the primary care-giver.

The modern conversation about parenting turns the healthy baby, and healthy child, into the proof of the parents’ excellent life choices. By turning it into a matter of the self, predominantly the maternal self, to create the successful or unsuccessful child, we let society completely off the hook. There is no broad responsibility to create a healthy environment for children (because mothers who were concerned would live in some other environment), and no social imperative to look after children who were born in ill-health or some other misfortune (because mothers who behaved responsibly would have prevented this outcome). We all know that is ridiculous: we all know that the business is riven with good and bad fortune. I’ve never encountered any parent who seriously thinks they can prevent every negative event with extra vigilance, nor any parent who isn’t moved to empathise with another’s misfortune, rather than judge what he or she may have done or eaten. The top-down, ersatz scientification isn’t really fooling anyone.

• Zoe Williams’s The Madness of Modern Parenting is published by Biteback.