Unlearning the stereotypes of pregnancy and parenthood
20% of the books I read in 2020 were on pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting. The first thing I learned was that labor and parenting are not the caricatured stereotypes you see on TV. The second thing I learned was that despite having a master’s degree in public health and a decade-long career in healthcare, most of my prior knowledge about childbirth and parenting came from watching TV. Pregnant woman barfing; water breaking in hilariously inconvenient situations; hospital gown-clad woman crying in pain laying in bed being told to push; skip over some messy stuff, then cut to a harried-looking woman with a loose ponytail in a house strewn with toys with a screaming baby. Some of this is true. At some point, I was convinced I would never be able to take a leisurely outdoor walk again without being tethered to a wailing koala.
But it’s those ineffable, intimate moments that are the best part about parenthood - and the hardest to describe. Feeling the graze of a tiny limb inside your belly. Staring at your newborn for hours and your newborn staring back, each in awe of the creature in front of them. The most desperate attempts to get your baby to smile or laugh, and the triumphant feeling you get when laughter bursts out of her tiny body like a glitter bomb.
As a home birth skeptic, it was also fascinating to finally understand the full range of experiences that informed the growing popularity of “natural” childbirth. It’s about pushing back against an overly medicalized, problem-oriented view of labor and delivery. It’s about viewing our bodies as being entirely capable of giving birth to a new life, rather than being vessels to be scrutinized, fixed, or hurried along to free up a hospital bed. It’s about tapping into the human part of this mundane yet magical experience. I was also surprised to learn about how little we know or seem to care about postpartum recovery - everything I learned came from other new moms who passed on secrets, stories, and giant padded underpants. And as I learned that recovery comes in weeks, not days, the fact that anything over 4-6 weeks of parental leave is considered “generous” became appalling.
I loved Lise Eliot’s book “What’s Going on in There?” which covers the science of fetal, infant, and child brain development. It starts with a chapter for each of the five senses, plus our sense of balance and motion (vestibular system) - then moves onto more advanced brain functions like memory, intelligence and emotional development. I loved understanding the “why” behind pediatric advice. Newsletters from the doctor tell you to hold and cuddle your baby because “you can’t spoil a newborn.” This is because touch is one of our most advanced abilities at birth, and our brain needs experience to activate neurons in our somatosensory cortex which helps grow the brain overall! It was also fun to learn that although vision seems simple, it’s remarkably complex. It takes time for us to develop different types of visual skills, including the ability to distinguish colors, perceive shapes (where does one object begin and the other end), binocularity and depth perception, and more. While this book was really fun to read as a new parent, it’s also fascinating as a human to learn about our tiny origins and amazing early growth.
Recommendations:
📚Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes
📚What’s Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot
📚Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
📺 Babies series on Netflix - if you’re too lazy/time-strapped to read Lise Eliot’s book, this Netflix series covers a lot of the latest science and research on babies
💻Lurking on r/babybumps and r/beyondthebump - a place on the internet mostly filled with normal, reasonable-seeming parents who go through similar experiences
💻Emily Oster’s books and newsletter
📄Parental Ethnotheories on Children’s Learning by Harkness et al - A very accessible anthropological perspective on parenting, comparing parents’ beliefs across cultures. http://www.celf.ucla.edu/2010_conference_articles/Harkness_et_al_2009.pdf
Do not recommend:
🙅🏻♀️ The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp - don’t bother reading the book, just find a blog post on the 5 S’s (which do work!)
🙅🏻♀️ Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman - for me, this was too anecdotal; would have loved this book if more research-based and compared other cultures
🙅🏻♀️ Wonder Weeks by Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt - the basic idea can be boiled down to “babies sometimes go through major developmental changes and can be fussy for reasons that are not your fault.” The book is highly repetitive and not specific enough about describing the evidence behind it.