Another Vote for Nurturing Mummies

I'm so tired of hearing "you need to let your baby cry at night"..."she needs to learn to comfort herself"..."she should be in her own bed now"..."you need to get her onto a regular schedule!". Here's my problem with all that: first, my little baby is so tiny, just 9 months old. Why should I let her cry, when my instincts say to comfort her when she cries? Why should I ignore my instincts, follow your advice, and make myself and my baby feel terrible? Why do I need to get her into a routine? To make life more convenient for me? Screw that. I'm a new mom, and nothing is supposed to be convenient. In my opinion, this period of my life is crazy. Insane. Exhausting. Rewarding. And very, very short. Before I know it, she'll be in college. Instead of analyzing all of the different phases that my baby goes through, I am enjoying every single minute. Even when she's up every 2 hours with sore gums, I just want to snuggle her and love her. I have no desire to trouble shoot and try to force her to be in her own cold bed when all she wants is to cuddle and be reassured. But as moms, we get bombarded with the advice of others. Sometimes other moms, who so easily forget that all babies are different (yes, I'm guilty of this. So is Kevin, but we try to remind ourselves all the time). What works for one will rarely work for the other, so kindly keep your advice to yourself (we try to do this too!).

And just when you start to feel that maybe everybody else knows more than you do about how to raise your baby, science boosts your confidence!! New research in rodents has shown, in short, that maternal instincts maybe more important than we've realized. Mice who are good, nurturing mothers - who nurse their young, lick them and comfort them - raise babies who are more healthy and less susceptible to disease than mice who are poor mothers. Specifically, neglected mice were more likely to develop diabetes and some forms of cancer than the nurtured mice. Even crazier, if you take the pups away from the bad mothers and let them live with the good mothers, they become less susceptible to those diseases! What this means is that genes don't tell the full story...the quality of mothering can have huge implications for disease susceptibility and life-long health. If you really want to know the term, it's called epigenetics. It's totally hot right now, and scientists are making amazing discoveries about how epigenetics influences heredity - without changing DNA.
What does this mean for us, as mothers? It means that we need to believe our instincts, cuddle our babies as much as we please, love them, hug them, comfort them, and trust your own motherly intuition, no matter what it is! Ignore everybody's advice. Only you know what to do - it's programmed in your physiology - and if you follow it, you'll have a better chance of raising happy and healthy babies.