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From Bonding to Baby Talk
10 Baby Myths Revealed
By Lisa A. Goldstein
While you're deciding whether to listen to your mom, mother-in-law or your neighbor – all of whom are doling out advice about parenting – take a look at these 10 baby myths revealed. Perhaps it'll help enlighten you on whether to trust your sources.
1. If you don't hold/nurse your baby in the first few hours after delivery, you won't bond adequately.
According to Debra Gilbert Rosenberg, social worker, psychotherapist and author who is a motherhood and parenting expert, this is one of the many myths that suggest that there is only one chance to do things right as a mother. "Although research has shown that the first few hours of a baby's life are important, your relationship with your baby lasts a lifetime," Rosenberg says. She says that women who have had C-sections, have babies who are born needing immediate medical interventions or have adopted need not be so hard on themselves. A loving relationship over the child's lifetime will more than make up for those missing few hours or even days or weeks of separation.
2. Babies' cries are always distinguishable.
Rosenberg says this isn't the case every time. It doesn't make you a bad mom if you can't fix every problem. You and your baby need to get to know one another, and that takes time, she says. 3. Newborn babies just eat and sleep all the time.
OK, they do eat and sleep a lot, but in between the eating and sleeping, they have a lot to do, says Janet Doman, director of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, a nonprofit organization that serves children with brain injuries and well children. "Newborn babies are not the happy little bundles that we like to imagine that they are. Instead they are very intent human beings struggling against very difficult circumstances to overcome blindness, deafness and immobility. At birth, a baby is functionally blind, deaf, insensate and immobile. The sensory and motor pathways grow and develop based upon stimulation."
