How to make time for the baby

Sarah Wheatley - 17 Feb 15

Reading Oliver Burkeman’s column on New Year’s resolutions in the Guardian a few weeks back, I was struck by the technique he suggested to help us abandon roles that take our energy away from our priorities. He said: “list your 10 most important roles in life, rank them, then resign from at least the bottom two.”

Talking with most people, let alone parents, there is a familiar refrain that there just isn’t enough time to do it all. And that’s absolutely correct. Working and playing harder, smarter, faster still won’t give us that time. For new parents, there is often the expectation that we will be able to do everything we did before, but with the baby. We will still be there for our friends the way we always were, we will still be as healthy, we will still make time for our relatives the way we did before, we will still keep abreast of current affairs, we will still cook as much, have sex as much, keep fit as much. On top of all of this we will take on one the most all-consuming, repetitive, messy, sleep-depriving roles of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking parenthood. But I think that if we’re better armed with ideas of what it’s going to cost us emotionally and physically, and how we might like to manage that, then we will enjoy it more. At a recent showing of the film, ‘ the Connected Baby’, it struck me how much time it takes to really observe a baby. The researcher, Suzanne Zeedyk, showed some amazing examples of what we can notice our babies doing, if we just take the time to do so. It was inspiring and beautiful to watch how intentional the babies were and how much they wanted to create a relationship with the people around them.

I must admit I found myself wondering how we as parents could manage to create that amount of space alongside all the other things that we do – sometimes getting through the daily chores can seem more important than spending time observing and interacting with our babies.

That is the reason why I thought of the Oliver Burkeman column. He talks about getting rid of roles, not tasks, and although he talks about giving up book groups and the idea of being a good cook, he doesn’t talk about the emotional costs of doing so. And there is a cost. It can be hard to accept that you will not be the person who can talk intelligently about current affairs, or that you will not be the person who others go to for their famous soup recipe, or that you will never join a book group or fitness bootcamp. As a new parent, the list of things to achieve becomes even longer, and you might not want to give up your idea of having a beautiful nursery, or a tidy house, or entirely home cooked food, or writing lovely, personal thank you letters.

And this is HARD. It’s easy to be flippant and pretend that these things don’t matter. But they do, which is why we wanted to do them in the first place – there is some reason why we feel we want (or should) be doing them, and there will be an emotional cost to not doing them.

However, this is why it’s important to prioritise. Because if we have limited resources, then we cannot do it all. We are finite.

Ironically, focusing on becoming a better parent might actually stop us from spending time with our babies, because quite often we can confuse being good at something with ‘doing’ all the right kinds of things. Some of us feel that being a good parent involves figuring out the most environmentally friendly way of using nappies, or making sure that our children have enough sensory stimulation, or making sure that our houses are kept clean and tidy, or that our families are eating nourishing, home-cooked food. None of these things are wrong in themselves, far from it, but in themselves they are not what our babies need.

When we are not very confident in other relationships in our lives, or we struggle to feel good enough in other areas such as work, it can be hard to accept that we, as parents, areexactly what our children needs. Babies are hardwired to make connections with us whilst in utero, and most healthy newborns will be able to recognise their mother’s and father’s voices from the second they are born. They are born not just able, but also wanting to interact with us. They don’t know all our worries and fears about not being good enough. They don’t care about any of that. They just want to be with us.

Which brings me back to the point of this post. How can we enjoy being with our babies more? I would suggest that it’s actually by making time to focus on our wee ones. Observing them and interacting with them. Not just carting them from one place to another, but by being present with them as you would be with anyone else whose company you value. It might seem so much more one-sided than most other relationships, which is why I think films such as ‘The Connected Baby’, initiatives like playtalkread and techniques such as newborn observations and Video Interaction Guidance can be so helpful, to give ideas and encouragement to folk who don’t know where to start learning about their baby

By reducing the number of other activities we do, by consciously giving up these other roles, we can make more time to slow things down: to smile at each other during nappy changing, to chat with our wee ones as we get things together to go out, or to sing songs to our baby in the car. These things might feel quite natural or they might take practice, just in the same way that some people find it easier to interact socially than others. But the more we interact with and observe our babies, the more we enjoy spending time with them. It’s a virtuous cycle. And the more rewarding we find it, the easier it will become to acknowledge that the disappointment of choosing to release ourselves from certain roles has made it possible for us to enjoy the role of being a parent more.

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Photo courtesy of Mattias under a Creative Commons License

Sarah Wheatley

Counsellor, wife, mother, bee lover. Lives beside the sea in Edinburgh. Works with pregnant and new parents to help them not just cope but thrive.

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