Motherhood

I’ve lost count of the number of media reports involving new studies about motherhood and child rearing. What’s right. What’s wrong.

Not to mention the endless proclamations from celebrities and high-profile know-it-alls passing judgement at the rest of the parenting world.

But instead of helping the parenting public, all these conflicting reports simply contribute to the compounding guilt, increasingly felt by parents, boht new and old.

Continue reading "Mummywars - how mothers are our own worst enemies" »

This video does not make for happy viewing. It depicts a British Mum, who quite possibly is intoxicated, and her racist rant against just about everyone else in her tram carriage.

The video, taken this weekend, has sparked a nationwide debate about racism and immigration and has reportedly resulted in the woman being arrested. After this year’s London riots, it is hardly the video the English needed the world to see.

London’s Olympic organisers probably won’t be too chuffed either. But mostly, we feel sorry for the kid on her lap. What kind of life can he look forward to?

Without me even knowing it, I’ve become a member of a club. It’s a pretty exclusive society with celebs such as Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman among its patrons. Victoria Beckham was recently accepted after years of trying for membership. Beyoncé is on the waiting list.

Apparently I’m a SMOG – a Smug Mother of Girls. We’re quite the trending topic on the internet after doctors reported an increase in women wanting a girl. Add to that a dubious survey that claims two-daughter families are the most harmonious and I’m starting to look like a stuck-up cow. Especially when DMOBs (Defensive Mothers of Boys) reckon SMOGs are judgmental of their boys’ behaviour.

“I know too many mothers of girls,” sniffs one blogger, “who truly believe that boys are unpleasant, noisy, smelly creatures who take the look off the place and get in the way.”

Continue reading "Smug mums don’t overthink gender" »

Every woman hits a time in her life when she suddenly becomes invisible. I am at that age. 

Except yesterday. I was walking down the street, not looking like a mum for a change, and a young guy wearing too much aftershave stopped talking to his mate as he watched me approach and pass him by. 

It was sort of flattering: that I can still stop a conversation and even more flattering knowing that they weren’t drunk.

Continue reading "The benefits of being an invisible woman" »

Recently, I went back to school for a maths lesson. It was sold as an opportunity to understand the new methods on the curriculum – and wine was promised. But, really, it was detention for those of us guilty of confusing our kids with vertical algorithms.

If you still think the way to work out 81 x 26 is to stick one above the other, draw a line underneath, then multiply, well, sorry, it’s a big red cross for you. Because in this modern era of mental computation (fancy Gen Z term for guessing), it’s all “the jump method”, “the split method” and something called “counting on”.

Anyway, emboldened with my new maths and a couple of glasses of Shiraz (technically, three, if you’re applying the stumble, I mean, jump method), I came home and tried to solve my own equation.

Continue reading "The 80-20 rule for happy parents" »

How can a new, first-time parent feel any sort of confidence?  Seriously, after being told time and time again that exclusive breastfeeding until six months of age is the best thing for our babies’ health, we now hear that maybe those recommendations are putting children at risk of other health worries. Just maybe.  If you’ve recently had a baby, you know the pressure to breastfeed.

The stress placed on new mums to get their babies on the boob, and keep them there until they are at least six months of age, can be pretty overwhelming in those first few months.  Especially if breastfeeding is not going so well for you. In fact, the pressure is so great that most new mums either persevere, or give up and are wracked with guilt.

So when stories like these are released questioning the advice we are given in those early weeks of parenthood, we’re left wondering who and what are we meant to listen to? Especially when the official government response is they will review the national breastfeeding guidelines later this year. Great! What if your baby is past that stage by then? What if you have a seemingly hungry four-month-old baby now, and want to know what to do?

Continue reading "The best authority on breastfeeding is you" »

As a general rule, men and women know squat about babies. At least until they have to raise one.

Then it’s time to knuckle down and survive the crying and vegemite poo, striving for the same primal instinct that enabled our ancestors to find shelter without iPhones and run barefoot across rocky terrain, chasing the evening meal with only a large toothpick and loincloth for protection.

Giving birth, so we have been led to believe, was much the same thing. A labour, in all senses of the word, to be endured rather than enjoyed; a period of a couple of hours (if you were lucky) or a couple of days (if you were not) where all you could do was grit your teeth and hope for the best, as nature intended.

Continue reading "Giving birth really ain’t what it used to be" »

In the pantheon of lame annual days of celebration, Mother’s Day is right alongside Father’s Day, Festivus, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and Love Day (which was made famous by The Simpsons). 

Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the marketing departments of Hallmark, the Chrysanthemum Growers Association, Breville and whoever puts together Human Nature’s Mother’s Day albums, Mother’s Day would never have gotten off the ground.

That is my firm an unwavering view. Or, it was my firm and unwavering view up until I became a mother.

Continue reading "Mother’s Day: Ignore anything she said before giving birth" »

A few years ago, my wife suggested that we get a pet dog for the kids. The arguments were assembled: it is good for children to learn how to treat animals properly, it will get them outdoors and off the computer, they will get exercise by taking it around the block etc.

By the time we got the cute little thing air freighted to Sydney from the breeding kennel interstate, we had signed for it three times. Once when placing the order for the dog, once when booking it to be sent to Sydney and one more time when I picked it up at the airport. No signature, no puppy. Not once, but three times.

And the point of this story? Well at the moment the Tasmanian Parliament is debating a bill dealing with surrogacy. The bill in its current form permits two men, two women, a single man and even a heterosexual couple to enter into a surrogacy arrangement with a female person, to be known as the “birth mother”, who will seek to become pregnant and give birth to a child.

Continue reading "Tasmania’s surrogacy bill is a real dog’s breakfast" »

Dear Jackie O, what a bugger of a week!

Did you have time to read the Sunday newspaper between changing nappies, feeding your baby, changing another nappy, washing up bottles, having a shower, changing another nappy, eating some Weetbix, getting ready for work and cutting your baby’s fingernails?

I hope you did. The message was clear. Most women want you to know – you’re a good mother.

Continue reading "O, what a feeding frenzy over nothing" »

My daughter came home from her school camp on Friday and when I asked who was in her cabin, she said, ‘two really nice girls and some mean girls. We tried talking to them but they completely ignored us.’

Aaagh! Mean girls! Sugar and spice laced with arsenic.

Bullying of all descriptions is abhorrent. Last week’s viral footage of bullied Sydney boy, Casey Heynes, ground-slamming his young taunter in the playground, polarised those who saw it. Many were appalled at the potential lethality of the act and at the outpouring of support for Casey that followed it. They jousted with those for whom it seemed that watching Casey deliver brutal come-uppance to his bully was almost voyeuristically cathartic.

Continue reading "Girls or boys, young or old, karma gets bullies in the end" »

Gee, doesn’t Elle Macpherson look fabulous. Still so lean and tall, with her trademark tousled blonde-tipped locks falling all over her shoulders.

“She looks a woman half her age,” fawned a Daily Mail reporter over recent pictures of the supermodel, wearing a cowboy hat and swaggering through the streets of Rio.

You’ll not catch me disagreeing, Elle’s definitely still got it. But there’s a reason she has so much time to primp and preen.

Continue reading "Hey, Supermum. Spend a bit of real time with the kids!" »

We can vote, work and get an education. We can give birth or make the considered choice not to. We can marry, get divorced, have a public voice and write under our own names.

Compared with the lives of many women that marched through the streets of New York City in 1908, planting the seeds for the first ever International Women’s Day, we’re living in another dimension. 

So what are we celebrating more than one hundred years later? And what are the real issues affecting the majority of Australian women today? Here’s what you, our readers, said yesterday.

Continue reading "What women said about International Women’s Day" »

I don’t think Germaine Greer would like my friends.

The woman who personifies the feminist movement of the 70s and makes every wife willing to iron her husband’s shirts feel like a feminist-traitor would certainly frown on my little circle of Mummy-friends.

Especially on International Women’s Day.

Continue reading "Women’s rights mean the right to choose" »

It doesn’t matter if it’s making babies as a commercial surrogate or a10-year-old kid stitching together basketball shoes in Vietnam, exploitation in any commercial transaction is wrong and should be punished.

But you don’t ban basketball shoes. And I don’t understand why Australians have been banned from using commercial surrogates overseas.

Last year NSW passed its Surrogacy Act which, when it comes into effect, will make pursuing commercial surrogacy overseas a criminal act.

Continue reading "Are we creating a generation of “cash in hand” mums?" »

New York journalist Lenore Skenzay let her 9-year-old son Izzy ride the subway by himself. The result was nothing short of hysterical. The syndicated columnist and her travelling tot suddenly found themselves at the centre of a media storm that saw Skenazy tarred as a Bad Mother for audiences from Chile to China and even Malta.

If there had been a handy pond nearby I’m sure there would have been at least one conservative commentator willing to find out whether she floated.

Skenazy is the author of “Free Range Kids”: her thesis being that we should untangle parenting from irrational fear and bring a certain rationality to the business of kid raising.

Continue reading "A slightly sozzled toast to bad mothers everywhere" »

What is it about the fanaticism of the breastfeeding lobby? Why do they fixate so intently on this tiny aspect of childrearing?

Wouldn’t they do better to divert some of their energy to shouting about child protection? Housing for kids in low-income families? Water safety, perhaps?

Aren’t there dozens more pressing children’s issues where they could better channel their blusterings?

Continue reading "There’s nothing unhealthy about being bottle fed" »

In a tearful face-off with the media last month, the heavily tattooed and visibly distraught Kristi Abrahams denied her involvement in the disappearance of her six-year-old daughter Keisha, last seen by her mother when she tucked her into bed on the night of 31 July.

“It’s disgusting what they’re saying,” she said. “They (the public) need to stop judging me. They don’t know me.”

The latest in a long line of women who have been questioned in regard to the death of their own child Abrahams was clearly feeling the weight of public opinion. What she didn’t seem to realise, was that while her points may have been fair, raising them won’t make an ounce of difference.

Continue reading "Should we take this mother’s grief with a grain of salt?" »

“It’s just like feeding your baby McDonald’s.’’ This was the blunt, uncaring and highly inappropriate comment made by a breastfeeding advocate to a friend who dared to confess she was considering giving her baby a bottle of formula.

The new mum had been through weeks of torture, suffering several bouts of mastitis and dealing with a son whose gummy bite was more brutal than Jaws and whose insatiable hunger was not dissimilar to the killer shark.

She had given breastfeeding her very best shot, but it was not working and, after six weeks, she and her son spent most of their days, and nights, in tears.

Continue reading "Gisele’s being a boob with her breastfeeding zealotry" »

Update 11.30am: Julia Gillard has been tinkering again. Read about it here.

Back in June 2004 I interviewed the director of obstetrics at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred hospital, who said women due to have labor induced in the last week of June for medical reasons were begging their doctors to delay until at least July 1.

It’s a weird thing to do, but the tantalising prospect of the then-$3000 Baby Bonus stood on the other side of the end of the month. John Howard might have announced the Baby Bonus in the May Budget, but instead of starting it that day delayed until the beginning of the financial year, turning it into a biological lottery.

“We would always suggest that the baby comes first,” Dr Andrew Child warned prospective mothers. “It is not worth $3000 to put your baby’s whole life at risk.’’ Thus started a run of uncertainty, competitiveness and anxiety for women and their partners planning a family, as successive leaders have played financial politics with their reproductive systems. There’s no end in sight.

Continue reading "How women of child-bearing age became political footballs" »

In the dying days of the 2007 election campaign, when the Liberals were thrashing around helplessly awaiting inevitable defeat, Tony Abbott gave an interview which he quickly came to regret.

The then Health Minister sat down with News Limited press gallery journalist Steve Lewis and offered his account of what a Rudd Labor Government would look like. It included an unflattering appraisal of the personal attributes the would-be Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard would bring to the nation’s political leadership.

Abbott made the loaded, nudge-nudge-wink-wink observation that Ms Gillard was a “one-dimensional political animal” who would struggle to relate to ordinary mums and dads.

Continue reading "Our childless, fruitless PM" »

So our new Prime Minister is a working woman with no kids. What of it?

Just as Gillard’s de-facto status brings into the public forum discussions about the institution of marriage, (and if you missed Bettina Arndt’s extraordinary polemic yesterday, it’s here), so too her choice to be child-free shifts the focus to working mothers.

Unfortunately, the discourse surrounding the working mother/child-free woman debate has - as these kinds of discussions often do - the potential to degenerate into a polarised argument.

Continue reading "If Julia had kids would they be screwed up?" »

Elisabeth Badinter is variously described as a philosopher, an elite professor, “a doyenne of French intellectual thought”, and an archaeo-feminist (whatever that means). She’s sure to be called a lot worse as her new book, Conflit, is translated and sold around the world.

Badinter is a French woman who argues the following points:

• That women are losing the freedom they have gained in recent decades because of the pressure to be a perfect mother – because they are now enslaved to their “tyrant” children.
• That home births and breastfeeding and other natural processes are mistakenly portrayed as a wiser and more authentic way of mothering.
• That the ecological movement is part of the problem, because its disdain for disposable nappies, pre-packaged food, and other modern marvels are forcing women to again be chained to the house once they have children.

She says, in short, that babies have become “the best ally of masculine domination.”

Continue reading "There’s worse types of mothers than a “bad” mother" »

I’m sick and tired of women turning on each other. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I don’t expect all of us to sit around singing Kumbayah.But surely a little bit of support from the Sisterhood isn’t out of the question.

The latest example of sororicide is the story entitled ‘Breastfeeding, it’s not about choice’, written for The Punch by Rita Panahai. Ms. Panahai contends that Australia has deplorable rates of breastfeeding because mothers are selfish. (I’d always thought was an oxymoron.)

Continue reading "Breast form of attack: the stupid war between women" »

For me and my girlfriends growing up, having babies was definitely a “no-go” area. Going to university, travelling the world and starting a career were the three things drummed into our heads over and over by mothers who came from a generation that married early -  usually between the ages of 18 and 23 - quickly started a family and left their own careers to play second fiddle to that of their husbands.

Almost thirty years down the track and the results are starting to show. The average age of a pregnant woman in Australia is now 29 and 25 per cent of women having their first baby are over 35. There are also more women than ever completing post graduate degrees at university and forging ahead with successful careers.

Continue reading "What is the best age for women to have babies?" »

I have the overwhelming feeling that I should ‘put up my dukes’ and rstep outside with Carrie Mille, who seems to think mothers with prams and gym memberships are the collective Devil.

For the record, I do not have a *gym membership, but I do have a pram and a child. So in the words of Meatloaf, two outta three ain’t bad.

But I had 34 years of being single and childless. So I don’t want anyone to tell me I don’t know what it’s like to see my friends off at the church, picking rice out of their bodices, and lament the loss of yet another cocktail buddy.

Continue reading "Childless singletons - the grass is always greener" »

Life’s about film stars and less about mothers. It’s all about fast cars and cussing each other. But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic, and that’s what makes my life so f***ing fantastic.

And I am a weapon of massive consumption and it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function. I’ll look at the sun and I’ll look in the mirror I’m on the right track, yeah I’m on to a winner. - Lily Allen.

The body image issues that plague so many women in our society are very real and are, in their essence, rooted in fear.

Continue reading "The fear making mothers invisible" »

I have four children. That’s not an easy thing for me to admit in public. It’s not that I am ashamed of it, far from it, but it brings with it an expectation from people about how I should be/have that I don’t always live up to. Let’s just say it’s one of many well-worn-out stereotypes I don’t do well.

It bothers me though that I feel compelled to somewhat mask this side of my life, not out of privacy, but for fear that my own identity will be drowned out by the din of social constructs that requires one’s personality to drop out of your vagina when giving birth to your first child.

I can’t believe that “motherhood” is still in need of an image shake-up in 2009, or we at the very least we need to extend the parameters of how we expect mothers to behave.

Continue reading "Apprentice’s tale: mums don’t lose personality in birth" »

Look down- do you have a uterus?

Yes? Good luck with that, because no matter what choice you make concerning that particular piece of bodily real estate, you will be criticised, harangued and nagged by the media, the medical profession and friends. Whatever you choose to do with it, or the fates lump you with in terms of partners and fertility, you’re going to have to justify your decision with greater rigour and intellectual vim than if you were contemplating voting for the Democrats.

Dissenting opinions are fine and dandy, but when it comes to this particular topic, its not that everyone has something to say, they think they have every right to say it loudly and bang on about it in several thousand word essays.

Continue reading "Knocked up, knocked down" »

Yeah, I knew that breast feeding might be tough. I read that I might get post-natal depression. I knew not to expect a lot of sleep.

What I DIDN’T know about this whole motherhood thing? The details. There were many, many details everyone neglected to mention.

So after three children and many surprising discoveries here’s some fine print for the parents of the future…

Continue reading "Eleven things no one told me about being a parent" »