Chucking Gina Ford’s bossy baby book in the bin was the best thing I ever did!
‘Like a sergeant screaming your boots aren’t shiny’ CLARE FOGES
As the parenting guru you either love or hate gives her first interview in 17 years, the mums who prove she hasn’t lost her power to divide
HeR bestselling book sold more than a million copies and, for at least a decade, she was the baby sleep guru, famous for the strictness of her feeding regime and popularity among exhausted mothers.
But what was her policy on crying? At the weekend Gina Ford gave her first interview in 17 years and surprised many of us by saying that she has ‘never advised parents to let their babies cry it out’. Instead, following her methods correctly means ‘there should not be a lot of crying’.
So what really happened to the generation of new mothers who followed Gina Ford’s methods? Here, four writers recall their bleary-eyed experience . . .
AH, THe halcyon days of early parenthood. So deliriously tired was I that I chucked my keys in the fridge, spread pesto on my toast and often fell asleep mid- conversation, mouth wide as the Blackwall Tunnel, dribbling.
Why didn’t my baby sleep properly? When would I ever shower? How could I reintroduce a modicum of control over my life?
Desperate for answers, 3am googling led me to a name revered and loathed by parents in equal measure: Gina Ford. Queen of routine, goddess of getting your child to sleep through the night.
When it comes to parenting a newborn, Ford is about as relaxed as one of those army sergeants who screams in the face of rookies because their boots aren’t shiny enough.
Baby has to be up and fed before
7am — sharp! Baby must never be cuddled to sleep! No — repeat — no eye contact with baby in the evening!
For some, this approach has been helpful. A friend of mine who got her twins into a clockwork routine says if she’d had a third child it would have been called Gina or Gino. For me, though, parenting the Ford way was miserable.
So desperate was I for shut-eye that, for a couple of weeks, I followed her approach to the letter. Maddeningly, my daughter wouldn’t play ball.
When Gina said she should be awake, her eyes were drooping, with me frantically blowing in her face to try to keep her conscious (‘No! This isn’t allowed for another 17 minutes!’).
When Gina said she should be feeding, her mouth would be clamped shut. Worst, when she was supposed to be napping, she would coo in her cot or cry.
I recall sitting in the dark sobbing, resisting those age- old instincts to pick up and cuddle my baby because Gina implied that if I did I’d be creating a rod for my own back.
Indeed, in recent days, Ford has scoffed at the need to comfort your child physically: ‘They tell you to rock your baby to sleep . . . They don’t tell you that you could face hell in seven months’ time when your baby can’t get to sleep without being rocked or given a dummy.’
‘Hell?’ You could see cuddling your child as hell, I suppose, or you could see it as closer to Heaven.
Another soul-destroying aspect of Gina Ford parenting is that it ties you to the house for large chunks of the day.
Since she insists that baby must nap in their cot in a darkened room, walks in the sun and coffee with friends are sacrificed to The Routine. In just a couple of weeks, this semiimprisonment sent me doolally and borderline depressed.
Ford’s popularity is down to the quick- fix age we live in. We pampered 21st-century creatures want offspring who will slot into a neat baby-shaped hole in our lives
and be as predictable as clockwork. But in my experience (I now have four children), the baby days are meant to be all- consuming, life-upending, unpredictable and messy. Anyone led to believe their baby should be in a routine by four weeks, sleeping through by six weeks and dancing the hornpipe by eight is in for a shock.
So after my brief brush with Ford parenting, I submitted to reality and became a slave to whatever my baby wanted. Now on my fourth, I feed her when she wants, let her nap when she wants, respond to her cries, cuddle her to sleep and co-sleep, all things that Ford no doubt disapproves of.
But you know what? Letting the baby lead the way isn’t just nicer for her; it’s rather more relaxing for me, too.
I FIRST ‘met’ Gina Ford when I had my second son, Leonard, in 2003.
At that point, her baby-training manual, The New Contented Little Baby Book, was required reading for every new mother.
All my friends ‘did’ the Gina Ford method, which basically involved putting your baby — your tiny little baby — on a very strict schedule with very precise deadlines to meet.
So many mothers swore by it, saying that their babies were
eating and sleeping like a dream and as my eldest, Raymond, had been a terrible sleeper and eater, I decided to give it a go with Leonard.
I have no idea what possessed me. As soon as I looked at the chapter headings, I should have thrown it out of the window.
Baby has to learn to wait to be fed. Baby must be put in his own room almost from Day One. Baby cannot be picked up.
Baby has to be trained like a labrador or a poodle to fit in with this schedule, which isn’t his schedule but yours. What it all seemed to add up to was a scenario in which, if you followed this draconian regime, you would have a life that felt as if you had never had a baby at all.
But here is the problem. Babies are disruptive little creatures. They are supposed to cry and wail. They don’t know what else to do to get your attention.
And they love being picked up and cuddled, and to snuggle up for a good warm feed.
What babies don’t like is being left for hours on end. They don’t like being put on schedules. I found the whole process unbelievably upsetting. It went against every single instinct I had as a mother.
As soon as little Lennie cried, every nerve ending in my body jangled. My desire to pick him up was overwhelming.
I couldn’t bear leaving him alone to wail and work himself up into a state of red-faced meltdown. I loathed not feeding him on demand.
Every time I read more of Ford — and I re-read her endlessly to bolster my resolve — I ended up hating both her, with her strict methods, and myself for not having the will of iron you would need to adhere to them.
In the end, I caved. I just threw the book in the bin and went back to the sort of warm, cuddly babycentric parenting my entire being longed to do.
However, others did stick with it and, yes, I know they thought I had failed.
We would sit in a cafe, Lennie would sniffle and I would get a bottle out or feed him myself and give him a cuddle, and the others would roll their eyes in frustration at my lack of discipline.
Surely I was spoiling him — and my own life at the same time — by giving in to his every irrational whim.
Then I would see how stressed they were trying to ignore their own hungry, unhappy babies. And I would know I was doing the right thing.
I WILL never forget sitting crying out of frustration in that first week after I brought my son home from hospital.
I looked from baby book to baby book, the words swimming in front of my eyes through exhaustion, for a clue about what to do about a newborn that would not sleep.
In my other world I was a success — I was the Mail’s showbusiness editor and my nights were spent partying with A-list celebrities.
But in this new world of motherhood, I had never felt such a failure. My son would be awake all night and I had no idea how to make him sleep.
And then my sister did possibly the best thing she has ever done. She slipped me Gina Ford’s baby manual and said ‘follow this’.
Within six weeks, my son Ben was sleeping through the night — a whole eight hours. The holy grail had been reached.
Gina was not for everyone. In my tofu-chomping breastfeeding until-they-are-four neck of the woods — I live in Muswell Hill, North London, which is nicknamed Muesli Hill — Gina Ford’s name was practically verboten.
But we Gina followers sought each other out. We didn’t have dark rings under our eyes — we were the ones with the sleeping babies and, more than that, a degree of control.
And it was the lack of control over this mewling, pooing, burping creature that I had brought home that had flummoxed me the most.
Why was he crying? Why wouldn’t he sleep?
Gina gave me not only a strict timetable to follow (a useful guide that I never managed to perfect), which meant I knew when to feed and when to put him to bed.
Crucially, it also meant that if he cried, I had a good idea why.
Gina spoke sense. She knows babies, she knows mothers and she knows that there are no easy answers when you bring home a newborn.
I’m so pleased young mothers still get the benefit of her advice, even if they have to whisper her name to each other. ‘REMEMBER Gina Ford?’ I say to my husband.
‘The crying baby woman?’ he replies — ‘Ugh. I get the logic — if you were working parents and couldn’t afford to be awake half the night. But it sends a pretty profound message to the child, doesn’t it?’
Quite. Nonetheless, 22 years ago, we were frightened novice parents. So we turned to the expert and The New Contented Little Baby Book.
My problem was not being able to produce much breast milk. Consequently, for the first fortnight my baby was half- starved, sucking away on nothing.
So when I tried to enforce a neat routine of precisely-timed naps, as she suggested, he would roar his head off.
He’s hungry, said my mother. Ford wasn’t so sure.
‘A well-meaning grandmother may try to convince you that your baby’s fretfulness is due to hunger, that you are probably not producing enough milk to satisfy him . . . Please be reassured . . . if your baby totally empties a breast . . . and is offered the other one, he will not go hungry.’
My baby lost over ten per cent of his body weight and the hospital maternity nurse shouted at me to supplement with formula (‘He needs it medically!’).
But I was wary. Mainly thanks to the National Childbirth Trust. But also Ford mentioned ‘nipple confusion’ caused by bottle feeding more than once a day, potentially putting him off the breast.
However,, the word ‘ medically’ penetrated my brain. So I fed my ravenous, wakeful baby formula when he needed it — ‘feeding on demand’ as the community midwife advised. I felt bad about it, however, and went half-mad trying to increase my own milk production. I paid for expensive breastfeeding advisers, drank stinking fennel tea, ate like a pig — all to no avail.
To Ford it was all fairly simple: ‘One of the reasons the majority of my mothers are so successful at breastfeeding is because I encourage the use of an electric expressing machine.’ But I pumped relentlessly, even getting up at 6am after a night of broken sleep to pump again, and still . . . not enough. I realise there is more nuance in her advice than she is given credit for. But it was easy to believe I was a faulty mother.
And then one day, reading the book again, wretched and redeyed with exhaustion, I came across the line: ‘It is much easier to bond with a happy, contented baby than an irritable, fretful one who needs constant feeding and rocking.’
Well, yes, can’t argue with that, Gina — but equally, quite an unsympathetic read of the entire essence of babyhood. I saw sense — it was my job to adapt to my newborn’s needs, not the other way round.
The day I ditched that book was a win for my mental health.
My baby and I bonded as I soothed his crying, fed him when he was hungry and rocked him to sleep. I felt good about that and I still do.