Soapbox: Bringing Up Baby?

The makers of Channel 4's parenting programme Bringing Up Baby claim their programme addressed 'some of the age-old issues and conflicts of how to raise our children'. Raisingkids.co.uk's founder Dr Pat Spungin believes it went further than its remit.

I watched Channel 4's Bringing Up Baby in growing disbelief and genuine concern at the advice given by Claire Verity, based on the philosophy of Dr Truby King.

Dr King’s advice dates from the early 1900s (although it was still widely practised in the 1950s) and was based on his own notions about child rearing. Since then there has been seventy years of scientific research into child development. What we have learned about how babies develop and what is best for their physical emotional and psychological development, does not square with the advice given by Claire Verity.

In fact I would go so far as to say in the light of scientific evidence what she is recommending is potentially harmful to small babies and I question the ethics of making the programme. It is yet another programme where the interests of the baby and family are overlooked in the desire to grab headlines and make ‘good television’. I don't know if there was a consultant psychologist to the programme, but if so in my opinion it was remiss to allow this woman to persist in the face of the baby’s obvious distress.

There are four areas in which the scientific evidence goes against her recommendations;

Not holding or cuddling the baby – particularly when distressed
There's ample evidence for the importance to babies of physical warmth. Pioneering psychologist Henry Harlow did research with primates (to do the same with babies would have been unethical!), comparing different methods of feeding and nurturing. Harlow's research shows that feeding alone is not enough for a baby. The infant primates actively sought physical contact from their surrogate mothers, spending most of their time clinging to them. When upset scared or startled they scampered for comfort to the cuddly surrogate.

Harlow concluded that positive emotional development requires close physical contact between mother and baby. Subsequent research has shown that babies left to cry show high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which dissipates when the baby is soothed.

As for avoiding eye contact with your baby when feeding, this is just nonsense. A breastfeeding baby focuses about 6-10ins, a distance nicely matching that between mother’s face and baby’s face for a reason. It helps baby and mother bond.

Feeding
Babies have very small stomachs and need feeding little and often. You can't arbitrarily decide to feed them every three or four hours. Leaving a baby to 'cry it out' in order to enforce a strict regime when the baby is hungry is doubly harmful. The baby is deprived of the food it needs and at the same time is exhausting itself by strenuously crying.

A baby has one way to communicate its needs, it cries. This training approach aims to train the baby to suppress it needs to conform to the requirements of the household. Research into sleep also shows that you can't 'bulk up' the feed to get the baby to sleep, it just doesn’t work.

Sleep training
Up to the age of six weeks, a baby sleeps to an irregular schedule waking both day and night. At around six weeks circadian rhythms kick in and the body clock begins to respond to light and dark. The sleep/wake cycle then follows this and sleep gets longer at night (around five hours) and the baby is more awake in the day.

At three months the baby starts to produce melatonin which further regulates the body clock. Again it'll be the experience of many mothers that at three months they were able to ‘shape’ their babies' sleeping habits, having previously responded to the baby’s cues.

Evolutionary psychology
A baby only has one way to communicate – by crying – and that crying is adaptive in evolutionary terms. Crying elicits a nurturing response. The crying of a small baby causes breastfeeding mothers to lactate. Even mothers who are not related to the baby, feel distressed and want to soothe the child. Our reactions are instinctive.

In all species mothers respond to their babies cries and human beings are no exception.

Dr Pat Spungin is a child psychologist and founder of Raisingkids.co.uk. A parenting skills expert, she is the author of the Haynes Teenage Manual, published June 2007, The Parentalk Guide to Brothers and Sisters (2005) and is currently working on a book on children's sleep. Pat was the consultant editor to Understanding Your Family in the Time-Life MINDPOWER series and has written and broadcast extensively on all aspects of family life. Previously she was a University Lecturer in Child Psychology.

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