Home birth unsafe or safer than hospital birth?

The topic of birthing is currently being featured in Australian newspapers because of a government decision to withhold medical insurance for home births. The government's argument is that home birthing is not safe, even though just about all international studies show it is in fact safer than hospital births for women with no serious complications. With debates in any other arena, if the majority of studies were to support a particular position in preference to another, then that position would usually be accepted by governments as the one on which to guide policy decisions. But regarding birthing, apparently this is not the case.

What is going on here? Well, birth is a hot topic. Everyone, whether they have birthed or not seems to have a strong opinion on what kind of birth is best. We can understand the vulnerablities surrounding birth as birth is something which on a very deep level represents our own future, our possibilities, and that of our whole species.

Those involved with birthing such as obstetritions are trained from within a paradigm which sees pregnancy and childbirth as medical conditions thereby requiring medical treatment. And many midwives also are educated from this position.

We could take a look at all the different opinions regarding birth and see which primary selves hold them and then it would show us the vulnerablities and prejudices of those selves, making the various perspectives on the debate all the more understandable.

But there is something deeper going on here. We can't escape the fact that our cultural identity is largely informed by the patriarchal system it has grown from. And the rules, judgments and concerns about birthing which have appropriated the birthing debate from those who actually give birth are those of the hugely powerful and influential archetype, the Inner Patriarch.

The Inner Patriarch is an energy or self which forms part of our personality and which holds patriarchal values. Most women even are unconscious of this energy within themselves, even if they identify with being feminists or at least supportive of their own equality with men.

Some women become Rebellious Daughters to the Inner Patriarch and many of those are the women who have been fighting for women's rights with their birth choices. But the problem is that the Patriarch's power is so insidious that it can subtely affect even the most conscious of us. Either it informs our feelings and thoughts or we maintain an ongoing and exhausting war with that energy and reject everying about it - often throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

You can see the Inner Patriarch in the stay-at-home mother who believes that being a mother is the proper role for a woman. This mother judges mothers who work yet from her Patriarchal voice she also places herself as a mother in an inferior position to her working husband. Her Inner Patriarch wants her to be a mother as that is his belief for her proper place but he doesn't respect her for it!

You can see the Patriarch in operation in the career woman - maybe a succesful obstetrician - who believes mothers don't know much about birth and need to be taken care of and instructed by a 'trained' and accredited (and therefore more knowledgeable about birth) medical authority. The intentions are certainly noble but you can tell it is the Patriarch operating because of the condescending attitude towards mothers and pregant women - even women who are professionals of some kind, for once they become pregnant the Patriarch can't help but throw them all under the label of 'mother' and thus somehow childlike.

For the Patriarch is a fathering type of guy - he truly sees women as girls needing taking care of. Even the Inner Patriarchs of women, when intereviewed though processes such as journalling or Voice Dialogue, say they respect the professionalism of the person of whose psyche they are a part of but still believe that because she is a woman she is, by definition, childlike. And that means that others - men or women who are identified with their own Inner Patriarch - need to work out what is best for her.

And so the homebirth debate continues, with our female politicians ruled by their Inner Patriarchs, making decisions for all the helpless women in 'his' care. And the Rebellious Daughters amongst us fighting agains his rules about how we should be cared for.

If we became more conscious of the interplay of these powerful inner forces, we could harness the power of the Patriarch for our own good and allow space for a truly woman/mother-centred decision on birthing options to take place.

Keep your relationship alive after you have children

All relationships change when a couple has children - this is unavoidable because you are now a family, with at least one other person living in your household, rather than just the two of you. Yet many people find the change problematic in some way - either one or both partners feels they are no longer the most important person in the other's life or the parents find it difficult to manage the change between how they relate to the children and how they relate with their partner.

The unwritten rules in our culture do little to help either, with subtle changes in how the broader community relates to you, such as suddenly being unwelcome in your usual restaurants once you have children, with the pressure to go only to 'family restaurants', as if you are now another species and have changed your taste in food. It is as if our whole culture places more importance now on your connection with your children rather than on your connection with each other. So it is easy to fall into being 'a family' and to lose connection with other parts of yourself.

Yet it is crucial for the happy continuation of your family for the two parents to maintain their 'coupledom' with each other. The relationship between the two parents sets the scene for the entire family experience, even teaching your children how they themselves will relate with other people and with their partners later. Without a good relationship between the parents in a family, the effects on the children and on the quality of the relationships between the parents and children are less than ideal.

One of the causes of couples so often losing their primary connection to each other is the dramatically reduced time you now have for each other. Everything else seems to be more important than spending time with each other: the children need feeding, bathing, cuddling with, talking to, reading to, driving to and from school, activities and friends houses; their laundry needs doing; toys need to be sorted and put away; shopping now takes twice as long; dinner takes twenty times as long; sorting out the more complex and strained finances takes forever, and by the end of the day you have just enough time and energy left to crawl into bed (to sleep!).

This lack of time spent with each and focusing on each other makes it easy to stay identified with the parts of your psyche you use the most when you become a parent, such as the Good Mother, the Responsible Father, the Nurturing Mother and even the Angry Mother and Punitive Father. Those aspects of your personality are not all that interested in your relationship with your partner - except in how you both parent together and take care of household matters. The reality of raising children, unless you have nannies or other regular help, is that they need your attention, either directly or indirectly, almost 100% of the time. And this means you will stay identified with those selves whose concern is raising children. This is particularly so for mothers, who, in most cases still, stay home for some time with children while they are young. It is no wonder that so many relationships fall apart after people have children!

Before we have children we also identify with only a small part of our personality, whether that be an organised and perfectionistic self, a more relaxed and go-with-the-flow self or a super workaholic self. But in my experience, it is easier to unhook from your primary self and gain some balance between opposite parts of your psyche when you are still childless and you do not have such an immediate and dependent attention-grabber always by your side. When you are a full-time mother you don't really have much opportunity to take your focus off your baby. When the baby sleeps and you think you have some time to yourself, suddenly it wakes, or makes a noise which brings your attention back to it. Even when you sleep, you have an awareness that the baby will be up in a few hours for its next feed. It is almost as if those early months (or years) of parenthood dissolve any self-awareness skills you might previously have built up and your Inner Mother is there to stay.

It is far easier for the father to maintain some sense of separation from his father self, for in most cases men still leave the home on a daily basis to work. This physical separation from the family home helps to balance out the family-oriented selves. There is still difficulty for fathers however, because once you step through the front door of your home, you either automatically fall into your 'father' role, and so now both of you are completely focused on the children, or you stay in your work role where you feel a little uncomfortable in the family setting and don't quite know what to do in this environment which your partner 'owns'. From here you can feel that the main connection or link is between your partner and the children and you might feel a little left out.

The most important thing you can do for your relationship's sake, which will also benefit your children, is to re-establish the connection between the two parents. It only requires one of you to begin this. You can start by simply paying attention to your partner. Stop to look at them when they arrive home rather than just say 'hello' and continue whatever you are doing. Listen to them. Tell the children they will have to wait if they interrupt while you both are talking and listening. I know of some parents who have a routine when the working partner arrives home, where they put the children in front of the television and go sit in another room and have time out together for ten minutes, maybe with a glass of wine or tea, to establish their connection with each other.

You need to see each other as adults again, who are people in their own right and not only parents in relationship to your children. It will help if you spend regular time together outside the home, so that it will be easier to not be pulled into the roles you play there. You can go out for a meal, go for a walk, sit in a park, go away for a night, go for a bushwalk, do a dance class together, or whatever you are interested in. It is important that you spend time together - do not make your date with each other only once a year.

When you are at home, try to become aware of which aspects of yourself you are identified with as you go about your day. When are you being responsible? When your child falls over, how do you feel? What part of yourself comes into play? This attention to becoming more aware will help you to separate more easily from those aspects later when the kids are in bed and you can get in touch with other parts of yourself.

Super Nanny Vs Super Mama

Here's an article I wrote some time ago in response to the popular television show Super Nanny.


Are you tired of hearing how mothers 'these days' do not discipline their children enough? It seems that whenever there is an opportunity in the media to comment on modern women's parenting abilities or to lay blame for something in our society not going quite as had been hoped, people from all walks of life readily point the finger at mothers. Modern mothers are told that we should be more authoritarian with our children, as was the style in the 'old days', and use the super nannies out there - who are making millions of dollars from their sage advice - as role models.

As an information-rich and self-help-book-consuming populace, with many of us being psychologically savvy enough to know that the mother/child bond is a far more complex one than the nanny/child bond, many of us still feel bad about how we parent our children when we are presented with an idealized super nanny as a role model for how it should be done. Yet talk to any parent who has ever babysat, nannied or cared for children as a child-care worker before having their own children and you'll find that they too could have easily played the super nanny role with other people's children.

This is partly because of the nature of the bond between a mother and her child, which is one of the strongest bonds possible between human beings, and also one of the most malleable ones. The mother-child bond is the blueprint for every type of human interaction and it is continually being tested. In our everyday language we even use phrases such as 'my child is pushing my buttons', 'testing my limits', 'exploring my boundaries' to describe how this bond is constantly being shaped. It is this bond that makes the process of disciplining or guiding your own children far more difficult than doing so with someone else's.

This bond, which is necessary for a child to thrive, is also the same process which occurs when any human being gives nurturing to another and receives nurturing from another. Most interactions we have with other people involve one person taking the receiving (child) role and the other the giving (parental) role. For example, if I cook dinner for someone, I am in the parental role and the person being cooked for is in the child role. I am taking care of them, being the caring/responsible parent, and they are receiving care from me, being the needy/appreciative child. The feelings flowing between the two of us are good in this example so it is called a 'positive bonding pattern'. If, however, I begin to feel resentment about always cooking dinner for someone, then I would take the role of the resentful/irritable parent, while the person being cooked for might feel annoyed that they always have to eat what I give them and take the role of the rebellious/angry child. The feelings flowing between us have now switched from positive to negative. This is called a 'negative bonding pattern'.

In our everyday relationships we flow between many such positive and negative bonding patterns, sometimes staying in a particular pattern with someone for years.

Neither are inherently good nor bad as they are simply the natural way that we give to and receive from others. But a positive bonding pattern, if it is never broken, can be stifling and restrictive for both parties as each person is stuck in one way of relating. While a negative bonding pattern, even though it might be painful as the feelings that result are unpleasant, can be liberating as it snaps people out of being stuck in one groove in their relationship and can lead to growth. In fact, being in a positive bonding pattern for too long is why so many people go through mid-life crisis - they need to break out of the role they have been playing for so long so that they can experience other facets of themselves and feel alive again.

So with the mother/child relationship, when the intitial and necessary positive bond is strong and the emotions expressed through it are positive, it benefits our children. But once a child has passed infancy and begins to experiment with different behaviours in the process of gaining independence from its mother and exploring its own personality, this bond is also restrictive. It keeps the child in the child role and the mother in the parental role in their interactions with each other.

You can always take the authoritative parental role in the bonding pattern with your child, and stay there, and quite easily discipline your children from that position - that is what authoritarian parents and the super nannies do. But this can lead to future problems. For a child to grow, it needs to break out of the child role or it will never mature. It needs to practice adult roles so that it does not always remain childlike. Likewise, the mother needs to step out of the parental role regularly to allow the child some space in it, and to experience life on the other side of the pattern so that she can understand how her child is feeling, so she can experience her child's perspective - so she can have empathy. If she never steps out, then there will be either a large, ongoing battle if her child becomes rebellious in relation to her authoritative parental self, or her child will be obedient and compliant - at least during childhood. Such a child, however, will at some point rebel, maybe as late as in adulthood, and could develop resentment towards, and/or fear of, its parents. Usually the relationship ends up being a distant one with little mutual understanding or intimacy. On the other hand, if the mother steps out of the parental role permanently, then her child will control her. The roles will reverse and the child will take the parental role and the mother the child role. The child will either be a 'controlling parent' to its own mother or, in some cases, often when the mother is needy in some way, a caring parent.

It is the more common scenario, where the child controls the mother, that is exploited in television shows such as Super Nanny, where the nanny is brought in to help the mother take the parental role again - but only an authoritarian one. If mothers, like most mothers naturally do, spend some time in each role, then their relationships with their children will be characterised by mostly little ups and downs, with some large ones from time to time, as they both navigate together, for share it they must, the rough road of parenting and a child's maturation into adulthood.

Throughout this process, the child will work out how far it can go with various behaviours before it senses either the subtlety of emotional withdrawal by its mother or the directness of a slap, or anywhere between the two - bribery, reasoning, pleading, demanding, and so on. Obviously all mothers are unique in their own psychological makeup so each will deal differently with their child, and even differently with each of their children as they respond to each child's unique way of relating to her and finding its place in the family system. In other words, the bonding pattern between each mother and child will be unique, because the type of parental and child roles each identifies with will depend on the psychological makeup of each person.

Most mothers these days have their children's best interests at heart and are more aware of their children's emotional lives than the older generations of mothers have been. This is simply a consequence of more public awareness of, and education about, our emotional lives generally, as a result of school curriculums, books, magazines and television shows such as Oprah. This emotional awareness means that mothers are more concerned about their children's emotional and psychological well-being than mothers might have been in the past. How many mothers today would remember their mother asking how they felt at school rather than how well they did? This constitutes a shift in how we measure parental/child-raising success. And, as with any shift, there are new rules and techniques to learn and many mistakes will be made. Thus some mothers will have a problem with discipline as they sit on the side of the bonding pattern of being more concerned with their child's emotions rather than behaviours. Some might reject the necessity for concern with emotion and follow the Super Nanny approach of a more impersonal and authoritative attitude. Neither of these options is inherently good or bad - they both have their place.

It seems obvious in the current climate that children need their parents to be both emotionally connected to them and also to have the ability to step back and create boundaries when they need to. Both ways of relating are required to raise a child without major problems with discipline or with their emotional well-being.

Yet this is not an easy mix to master. Most parents are more comfortable with one or the other approach, depending on their own personality and history, and their own awareness that this process is even going on. To harp on at modern mothers about their inability to discipline their children and the necessity of following the rules of a nanny who has never had any children of her own and therefore has never experienced the strong emotional bond between mother and child, nor the difficulty of parenting 24/7, is punishing mothers for moving forward, for evolving, for caring for their children enough to try something new, in the hope that they will have close relationships with their children throughout their whole lives, and that their children will benefit from having their inner life taken seriously.

Have the older generations of mothers and super nannies out there ever wondered why so many people are in therapy these days and why the self-help book market is one of the largest there is? You only have to ask any counsellor or psychologist about the extent of suffering people have experienced in their relationships with their parents. Has it occurred to those advocating a return to the old days of exclusively authoritarian parenting that the adults such an approach raised might need all this assistance because of how they were parented? It is entirely possible that the next generation of adults, those whose parents tried a different approach, will have fewer problems, and will be able to devote less time and money to healing their emotional wounds and therefore be more productive and happy adults, because they will have gained a strong sense of self-esteem and inner worth due to the attention their mothers paid to their emotional well-being.

School, bullying and your child's validation by their teacher

I was talking to a school teacher today while our children enjoyed a playdate together, and she said how she is amazed at how few teachers she knew acknowledged the importance of making a connection with each child in their class. We were discussing how when children are considered individually and their background, particular life challenges, personalities, and how they are regarded by their classmates is taken into account when dealing with any issues, then even so-called 'problematic' children seemingly miraculously transform.

One of my daughters was such a case. She was unhappy at school, started to become defensive with and distrustful of her classmates, and was doing very little work. She had a succession of teachers who basically told us that she was not an easy child to deal with, being stubborn and emotionally overly expressive. Her age during this time was from six to eight.

Naturally we listened to the teachers and we tried to help her ourselves by essentially listening to her but all we could ascertain was that she hated school, especially since her two best friends who had joined the class with her had since left the school, and she didn't like some of the boys in her class. She told us of how those boys would make faces at her, throw objects at her while she was trying to work, push and shove her whenever they had an opportunity, and so on. Once they even pulled her head backwards into a bucket of water - something she was only able to tell us in snippets over a week because she was so traumatised by the experience. Yet still, her teachers said she was provoking them by doing such things as choosing to do her work in places they would have to pass or by looking at them in an unfriendly way.

Because our daughter is our most loud and stubborn child, and also emotionally reactive, we could see how she might be contributing to some of the situations herself, and she would have been feeling lonely since the loss of her friends. She has also suffered from a brain tumour (benign) since infancy, for which she has had two operations in an attempt to remove it (they can't remove all of it because of its location and because the risks would be too great, considering she is so well), which has contributed to her feeling a little vulnerable and also, as is typical with children who suffer a major illness, has temporarily set back her level of emotional maturity. The kids in her class didn't know about her health history as she has no noticeable signs of her conditon, but for us parents, it made her situation a more heart-breaking one.

It took until her third teacher and a new school principal, both of who read my letters to the school about what was going on, for something to happen. The new teacher took the time to observe the class from the sidelines while another teacher took over the lessons, and she saw what was going on. She also considered my daughter as an individual, with feelings and thoughts affected by her history. She saw how my daughter was defensive in the class but she also saw that she had a good reason to be.

So, finally, the boys responsible for making the classroom unpleasant for her were asked why they were doing what they did, and the leader of the pack said that he simply took a disliking to my daughter the moment he saw her and decided he would bully her. Because he was the boy the other boys looked up to, they all followed suit. And even the girls saw that the culture of the class, in this case determined by the group of dominant boys, included an unwritten rule to be unkind to my daughter.

The new principal took action immediately upon hearing that the new teacher's observations backed up my complaints. She got the boys to acknowledge what they had done, to set a goal to turn their own behaviour around, and even to change the culture of the class as a whole. She appealed to the ring leader's leadership qualities to do this, and the process took a good part of a whole school day. But the results have been remarkable - for the whole class.

My daughter is now happy in the class, she works remarkably well and she is socialising beautifully. She is still distrustful at times, but that is understandable. And the class as a whole has changed to be a far happier one. The teacher has said that even other parents have expressed to her their gratitude for the changes, even one whose child was one of the boys bullying my daughter.

Now my daughter is a strong personality, she is bright, she is tall and physically robust, so she has come out of this relatively unscathed. I saddens me to imagine how another child, maybe someone more meek, might have suffered in similar circumstances. And my daughter now has a teacher who understands her and takes her seriously, and, importantly to me, genuinely likes her. But I have discovered that this sort of situation occurs in many classes, in many schools, and many children have terrible times during their school life because of bullying not being dealt with.

The teacher I was talking to today said that many teachers, when presented with a child who is difficult in some way, or even appears to have learning difficulties, do not look beyond that to try to discover why. I believe that if our children are to have the best chance of a successful school life, teachers need to start to look at situations more deeply than they do. There is so much damage that school experiences can have on your child, no matter how enlightened a parent you are. The fact is that children spend most of the day at school and so the school environment should at the very least be safe and supportive for each child in attendance, which means teachers need to get to know each child in depth. Parents know how difficult it is and how much attention is required to understand your own children and to give them the best kind of attention for their individual needs, so why do many teachers (and schools) presume to know how to treat our children when they do not take the time to get to know them and the dynamics in their classrooms?

I realise part of the problem is that in traditional schools teachers simply do not have the time to get to know each child. But my daughter's situation occurred in an alternative school, where the staff could have dealt with the problem in a better way.

Voice Dialogue could be of such use here, with teachers who understand even generally about bonding patterns between children and between themselves and the children. Imagine if teachers could identify the primary selves of a child and could therefore see where that child's vulnerabilities and strengths lay? They would be able to see beyond the immediate behaviours and look at what might be going underneath - both for children who behave in a destructive manner and those who bear the brunt of it.

And if teachers could see how they themselves might feel vulnerable in a class situation where they are meant to be the expert yet are unable to immediately see how to handle some situations, they would also give themselves permission to be able to learn from the children in their care. We all oscillate between vulnerability and power, and when we find ourselves in a situation where we are meant to know what to do but don't, then to avoid feeling the discomfort of vulnerability, we go further into our power side, which automatically disconnects us from the people we are with, which makes it even more difficult to sense what is going on and to find real solutions.

Dividing the personality pie

Every day I'm amazed to see the different personalities of my children, and how with mathematical precision their formation has followed some basic laws. The most general of those laws are from birth order theory, and many parents will agree that their children's personalities have developed in line with that theory. If you add some Voice Dialogue concepts to birth order theory, then the predictability of a child's personality formation becomes even greater. Of course we are all born with a kind of psychological fingerprint which distinguishes us from each other, and this essence can be seen in each person, but as far as the personalities/selves which form to adapt the child to their environment go, these theories can offer not only an explanation, but also guidance on how to deal with each child's personality effectively, so that the child is validated and nourished.

For example, my eldest daughter is not only a typical first-born child, but she also carries personality characteristics which I can see in myself, some that I wish she did not and others I am proud to share with her. Those parts of her personality I like are either similar to some of my own characteristics, or ones I wish I had.

I can learn about myself and her by observing my responses to her personality and then with that knowledge I can relate with her without projecting my own fears and dreams onto her. For instance, one talent she has is musical ability, to the extent that her tutor has told us that she comes across kids like that only once in a decade. I am obviously proud of my daughter but I can also see a desire in myself to have her pursue music, partly for my own satisfaction.

Now, she loves music too, and will quite likely become a musician (at least that's what she says she wants to do now), but when I look at myself honestly I have always loved music but never had the chance to pursue it. As a child I would fantasise about being in a band and would put on concerts for my family. Music is something I enjoy but playing, creating and performing it is an unrealised expression of myself. So when I realised my daughter was musical I began to project onto her all my own dreams about what I might have achieved in that arena if I had been given the opportunity.

What I have done to stop this projecion is indulge my interest in music for myself. I still support my daughter in her endeavours but I have let go so that it is up to her how far she goes in her musical career. By embracing my own inner musician and exploring my musical desires, I can see my daughter more clearly as an individual and honour how she chooses to express herself.

If I hadn't become aware that music was important to a particular part of me who hadn't been properly acknowledged, then I might have pushed my daughter with music too far, or in a direction she was not naturally interested in, creating all sorts of problems for her and for our relationship with each other.

We project all sorts of things onto our children, most of the time without knowing it, and by gaining even a little awareness of how this works can help both them and us to flourish.

More on this later - school holidays have just started and I have promised to take the kids to a gigantic craft and sewing store to stock up on crafty things. This interest of theirs I definitely don't share so it is either a deeply disowned self or just an aspect of humanity I am being forced to become aware of to become more whole! In any case, craft is important to my kids so I need to put aside my disinterest in it and honour this expression of their selves. And, I must admit, some of the things they have created, ranging from 3-D cards to unicorns made from various bits and pieces are amazing.

... Just got back and realised I hadn't posted this, so here goes. (Had a productive shop and will expect some brightly coloured felt animals and spangly princess crowns to appear in our household soon.)