Carrie Bickmore: ‘Where’s the baby manual?’
After stumbling upon hospital guidelines issued to new mums in the 1960s, television host Carrie Bickmore wonders if modern mums would be better off following their advice.
I recently came across an online post titled “Postpartum instructions from 1968”.
Your baby will be on display at nursery window from 2.30-3.30pm and 7.00-7.45pm.
Please do not ask to see your baby at any other time.
Baby will come to mother for feeding at allocated times and no visitors are allowed in the room during nursing periods, including father.
These were the strict hospital guidelines for new mums in the ’60s.
During first 24 hours, allow baby to nurse for five minutes only, and on the second and third days approximately seven minutes.
Don’t eat chocolate, candy, raw apple, cabbage, nuts, strawberries, cherries, onions or green coconut cake.
No coconut cake?! I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds like something a new mum would love.
My initial reaction reading this letter was one of dismay. How can they tell you when you are allowed to see your baby?
But as I reflected on the days following my own births, I started to see merit in some of their militaristic rules.
The postpartum instructions were apparently designed to “protect” the mother and the baby. Protect mums from what? Exhaustion? Confusion perhaps? And for bub? Maybe protecting them from their hot mess of a mother.
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If only the advice we got these days was so straightforward. It baffles me that, given how many babies are born around the world every day, there is still no instruction manual.
There’s a manual for my car, my TV, even for my bedside lamp... and that only has an on/off switch. How can there not be one for babies?
Depending on where you have the baby, which nurse is on duty and which baby bible you read, you’ll be following a different set of guidelines.
Feed on demand, follow a routine, swaddle the baby, don’t swaddle the baby. Oh, the confusions of early motherhood. Seems so unfair to expect a sleep-deprived novice to navigate that minefield.
Time to bond with bub is obviously paramount, but the idea of a nurse settling my baby and allowing me to catch up on sleep seems positively glorious.
It is virtually impossible to get visitors to stick to visiting hours. Throw in the complications of establishing breastfeeding with a surfboard pad between your legs and a nurse checking your uterus every few hours, and there is something to be said for a bit of quiet time without every Tom, Dick or Uncle Harry in the room.
A lot of mums are now kicked out 24 to 48 hours post-birth, often before your milk has come in or before the day-three baby blues have hit.
Perhaps 10 days laid up in a hospital bed like they used to do, without other kids to look after, time to heal and time to ask endless questions of the nurses is a great idea.
Yes, it would cost the health system more, but perhaps it would reduce the number of women who go on to suffer mental-health issues as a result of feeling unprepared and overwhelmed.
Carrie co-hosts The Project, 6.30pm weeknights on Network 10, and Carrie & Tommy, 3pm weekdays on the Hit Network.
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