Mama Knows Best (Yet She Still Knows Nothing)!

First off, Happy New Year! I know it has been a little while. Although, I'm sure you're not surprised if you've had a newborn of your own!

One of the worst parts about being a first-time mom is having zero experience prior to meeting your little one. As someone with both a bachelor's and master's degree, I feel fairly confident in my expertise levels when it comes to music and education and/or therapy. I've taken several courses, had multiple internships and practicums, & have had countless amounts of hands-on experience to prepare me. With parenting, it's sooooo different.

Now, I will say that I have had experience in babysitting children ages 0-13 since I was young. So it's not like I was completely clueless. But being a babysitter is completely different from being the parent - regardless of how much practice you have. Why, you ask?

Every baby is different.

Mamas with multiple children will admit to this. I can't count the amount of times I've heard the stories of how the first child was the complete opposite of the second, or even the third. How one was a great eater and the other was as skinny as a rail. Or how their first child started sleeping through the night at 2 months old and the second was 2 years. Don’t even get me started on the hundreds of parenting books out there, all saying something different from the next.

Frustrating, right? Tell me about it.

If you're someone like me where you rely heavily on research to show evidence of success, I hate to tell you this but you're in for a long adventure. Parenting is 100% a fake it 'til you make it kinda deal, in my opinion. You don't know what you're doing until you do it, and when that doesn't work you try it another way. And then you ask for advice, try it that way, and when it doesn't work you ask someone else for their advice. And so on. It never ends!

The worst part is the professionals in this field - pediatricians. We expect them to know everything, do we not? How else are we supposed to know how to raise our little ones? Back to my educational background, I know a little bit about statistics and how professionals in the medical field determine what they believe is best for their patients. They're trained to follow textbook information, based off of research and experiments that have indicated results to be statistically significant (notice how I didn't say proves - thank you Dr. Madsen) using standard deviation... but that leaves out the outliers, or the abnormalities. Yes, using this method does cover a large majority of the population, however there are many who deviate from the norm.

For example, my son is 12 weeks old today (yay!) but is technically only 2.5 months old. I've noticed the past few days that he's been doing the following: gnawing on his fists, making bubbles nonstop with his saliva, not wanting to finish his bottles, not sleeping well, and just overall very fussy. What does that sound like to you experienced mamas? Teething. Yeah, for me too. So I called Benjamin's pediatrician's office after hours and spoke to a nurse, telling her that I believed him to be teething and asked for advice on the safety of giving him Tylenol to help with the pain, among others like teething rings and cold cloths. The first thing the nurse told me was that she highly doubted my son was teething and he might just be getting sick or going through a growth spurt.

Now, granted, he was a few days away from a growth spurt (it feels like they happen every other week at this age!) and he does tend to go into them early - more deviation from the norm, lol - but why would she say she highly doubts he's already teething? Research has shown that teething, while typically doesn't officially begin until 6 months, can start as early as 2 months old (Perlstein, D., 2019). So my son is considered to be an outlier. But that nurse made this mama feel ignorant, even though I've done all kinds of research on teething and babies' first year of life to know the signs and symptoms of teething. So frustrating.

That's a perfect example (and only one of many) of "mama knows best". Maternal instinct is so a thing. We know our babies, and we know when something isn't quite right.

One controversial topic I know all parents struggle with is this: Sleep training.

(I can almost hear all you mamas reading this laughing/crying/eye-rolling from behind my keyboard)

I cannot tell you the amount of times I have changed my little man's sleeping schedule due to advice from friends, family, pediatricians, social media support groups, or well-known baby experts - and he's not even three months old yet! As we speak, I've recently changed him from 4-hour feedings to 3-hour feedings, with an added feeding at 10:30pm in hopes that it'll eventually push the night feedings. And so far, it's made his sleep schedule so much worse. It had been 12 weeks of not sleeping for more than 3 hours at a time, lol. I had to give it a shot, right? But some mamas swear by this! Just yet just another example of that trial and error I was talking about, because every baby is different.

Long story short is this:

Take everything you know about babies, including advice from professionals, with a grain of salt. No one knows your little one better than you, because you are the individual spending the most time with them - you know what is really going on. Definitely ask the important questions (e.g. when can I feed my baby oatmeal) but also pay attention to what your little one is telling you. They may not be able to speak yet, but they give you so much information if you observe and take notes. Mama knows best, even when she feels completely clueless.

I know this post is pretty erratic and doesn't flow like it should, but hey that's what you get from someone who is extremely sleep deprived :)

Hang in there. Love on your precious little ones. And don't forget to ask for help.

References:

1. Baby Teething: Symptoms, Signs, Fever & Remedies. (2019, September 26). David Perlstein, MD, MBA, FAAP. Retrieved from https://www.emedicinehealth.com/teething/article_em.htm