Pressures on pregnant women
PREGNANT women can’t win.
There’s always an expert ready to push the panic button and cause undue angst. Isn’t it time we allowed expecting mums to just relax and enjoy the experience?
It’s tough enough with raging hormones, forgetful brains and increasing discomfort without exacerbating anxiety. The latest newsflash is that if you have a caesarean section delivery your child is more likely to have autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than if you go a la natural.
A bunch of Swedish academics has concluded that kids have a 33 per cent higher chance of “being on the spectrum” and a 17 per cent greater risk of ADHD if they come out of their mother’s belly.
The Karolinska Institutet team reviewed data from more than 20 million births in previous global studies to come up with the findings that seem sensationalist at best.
Never mind that Australian medicos have slammed the results as “unreliable” — some researchers will do anything to get published and attract funding for further idiotic studies.
Meanwhile, women with a baby bump get yet another reason to fret.
Too posh to push. Breast is best. Drugs or no drugs. Public or private.
No booze or just a little. Midwife or obstetrician. Far out. The flak we cop over our choices is phenomenal.
A quick straw poll of three pregnant women in my office also throws up these inanities — don’t eat chocolate, avoid coffee, stop wearing high shoes, don’t dye your hair or get eyelash extensions, and why on earth would you want to find out the sex of your baby when it can be a surprise?
It doesn’t stop there. After the child arrives, the pressure compounds.
Stay-at-home or working mum. Part-time or full-time. Daycare or grandparents. Twelve months’ maternity leave or six weeks.
And it continues right through until that newborn is an adult — and then some. Public or private school. University or trade. How long should they live at home? Failure to launch — a la Matthew McConaughey’s 35-year-old layabout character in the 2006 film of the same name — equals failure to parent properly. Well, here’s some research that does make sense.
Feeling pressure to be a perfect mother leads to “parental burnout”.
It kills career ambitions too, according to Belgian findings published in the American Frontiers in Psychology journal in November.
Researchers Loes Meeussen and Colette Van Laar surveyed full-time working mothers in the United Kingdom and United States who had at least one child living at home.
They found that stressing about meeting imposed ideals of parenting perfection led women to continually focus on avoiding mistakes and to “higher maternal gatekeeping behaviours” or taking over family-related tasks from a partner.
It also negatively impacted their professional lives because doing the lion’s share of the family care lowered their career ambitions.
“Intensive mothering norms have severe costs for women’s family and work outcomes,” they concluded, “and might provide insights into where to direct efforts to reduce motherhood hardships and protect women’s career ambitions.” Reducing hardship surely starts with adjusting expectations and acknowledging that no two people are the same, that what works for one, might not jell with the other.
Certainly, there is sound medical advice around how much women should drink and what constitutes a healthy lifestyle, but to slam mothers on matters that are largely subjective is ridiculous.
On the issue of caesarean sections, only a small percentage is due to women asking for them, according to Stephen Robson, Professor of Obstetrics at Australian National University.
While the number of C-sections has doubled over the past 30 years, Professor Robson says a major reason for the increase is that “the younger generation of obstetric specialists have less experience in complex vaginal births, such as breech deliveries, the use of rotational forceps and the delivery of twins”.
Motherhood is a journey and you’re never quite done.
Most of us do the best we can. We make mistakes. There are things, in hindsight, that we might have done differently. But ultimately, we don’t need to feel the heat from people who should mind their own business.