The ‘Inadequate Parent’ Badge

Carrie Freathy - 4 Jul 18

Inadequate. The word that I feel encapsulates how I have felt many times since becoming a mum. Don’t get me wrong, I have had many moments before parenting where I felt inadequate, but they were more showers of rain rather than a deluge of a tropical rain storm threatening to flood everything within it’s path!

If I was trying to pinpoint how, when and why this started I would say pregnancy. Suddenly your body and therefore your choices become a hot topic of conversation for everyone. I get it, they have an invested interest in you creating the greatest mini-being ever to walk this planet, but overnight you become unable to make a simple decision over which cheese on the cheeseboard you can eat – three pregnancy books, 1 pull-out magazine guide and a 2am google later, you are still none the wiser as to whether consuming a slice of blue-veined cheese will kill you and your unborn baby outright! You may think I’m jesting but before every meal I had out when pregnant with my firstborn I would try and memorise the ‘can eat’ and ‘can’t eat’ categories – I might as well have stuffed the 400-page, A4 sized book in my bag for nine months and be done with it! I am thankful that I can’t eat eggs as the information on that google search alone would have sent me into a tailspin! (NB: I refused to look at this book during subsequent pregnancies!)

Listening to Alison Perry’s recent podcast with Rebecca Schiller and the backlash she received when challenging pregnancy and alcohol and the current governments stance, which is that no alcohol is to be consumed when pregnant (click here to read the original column in The Pool) Rebecca refers to a piece of research which looked at a study of hated groups within our society. Pregnant women who drank when pregnant are more hated than fathers who abandon their children completely, they are more hated than various criminal groups and are more hated than drug addicts. I mean let that sink in for a moment – a father can abandon his child forever and still be seen in a better light than a pregnant woman having a drink or two!

Your pregnancy journey moves onto birth where your birth plan can often come across as something you don’t feel you can control and even in certain circumstances when you try to, sometimes the wheels fall off this particular rollercoaster and your voice ends up being drowned out by experts and you can be left potentially traumatised, wondering what on earth just happened.

Then you move onto parenting. The holy grail of feeling inadequate – mum guilt anyone?
How do you feed your baby? Breastfeed too long and you’re weird. Breastfeed too little and you don’t care about your baby’s health! (And what about the mum in all this? What about her physical and mental health?)
What nappies do you use? Are you killing or saving the environment?
Do you co-sleep? It’s dangerous. Leave them in their cot in their own room asleep? Uncaring. Cuddle them/feed them to sleep? Making a rod for your own back!
Baby-led weaning – won’t they choke? Purees – did you make your own purees with organic food?
I could go on and on and on with examples and answers parried back at you (all these questions and responses I have either experienced or a friend has).

Parenting seems to leave you in an avalanche of questions and with a minefield to carefully step through trying to strike the correct balance, if that is even possible! Advice is heaped on when it wasn’t asked for or wanted. How can we be expected to parent when we feel so inadequate and so unprepared for the task in hand and with so many so-called experts giving conflicting advice?

This is why I believe methods such as hypnobirthing, doulas, listening to parents talking on non-judgemental podcasts and being careful with the material you choose to read is so important. We need more books like Rebecca Schiller’s ‘Your No Guilt Pregnancy Plan’ and for attitudes towards pregnancy to change from the helpless, hapless parent to the intelligent, informed parent who can make decisions for themselves (there will always be exceptions to the rule, but the majority of us aren’t exceptions).

Before we were pregnant the majority of us worked, many continue to do so whilst parenting, and deal with or dealt with many tricky, difficult tasks all at the same time, so to suddenly treat women like they’re idiots just because they are pregnant is frankly condescending and really insulting.

The tide needs to change, and I believe it is changing, to allow women and parents to hold onto their voice, to learn, to be informed and to question, and that all a new parent or newly pregnant woman really needs is a listening ear, a sound-board, someone to help her to collate the information she wants/needs or is searching for – and you can rest assured that if she needs or wants your advice she’ll ask for it… just (politely and respectfully) button it until then!

Carrie Freathy

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