Читать книгу Raising Girls in the 21st Century - Steve Biddulph - Страница 34

Feeling okay in the world is the first lesson you teach your baby girl. ‘You are loved and precious, I am here for you, and everything is okay’. A frightened or lonely baby won’t learn to calm herself if she is just left to cry – this is a common misunderstanding. She will go quiet eventually, but this is because of another survival pattern. ‘Nobody is going to come!’ A baby’s prolonged cries ‘in the wild’ might attract danger, so if her cries are not successful after a few minutes, the baby shuts down and becomes physiologically ‘depressed’. If parents are unresponsive – through suffering untreated postnatal depression, or being drunk or stoned, or just not caring – and if this happens often enough, the baby decides that ‘my efforts don’t have any effect on others’. This pattern will become part of how she responds to difficulty in life. It is called ‘learned helplessness’.2

It’s not a pattern you want your child to have, because she will lack a sense of mastery or hope in difficult situations. ‘Depression’ is often misunderstood – it is simply an ability of the human body to shut down, from ancient times when we had to sit out bad weather or endure long winters of cold and dark. At such times, with little food about and no energy to catch it, moving little, eating little and doing little was the best way to survive. But the depression response can easily become overdeveloped. Teaching depression to a child by ignoring her is not going to help her. She may lie still, but she is actually very unhappy.

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There is a middle road here; especially when getting babies to sleep, which can be an important part of parents’ survival. Sometimes a baby in her cot will make sounds, trying to bring the adults to play with her after she’s been put to bed. It’s fine to let her whinge and whine a little as part of her giving up on ‘game time’ and letting sleep take over (especially when mum or dad is totally knackered and just needs a rest), but if the whingeing turns into full-voiced distress, that’s not good. She needs calming and settling. The caring bond between you is endangered, and she needs to know you are there. (In the notes you will find some good reading suggestions on how to get more sleep for your baby, and for you, without using harsh methods to do so.)