Disqualifying Myself From The Natural Parenting Competition

While I was pregnant, I was dead-set on being a “crunchy granola” parent. I’ve always been interested in a healthy and sustainable lifestyle for myself and I thought passing it on to the next generation would help to stave off the guilt that went with having an unexpected baby at a young age. “I know I’m young but at least I only use wooden toys and two-ingredient shampoo and I’m dropping out of modern life to homeschool, correction, unschool, so we should keep in touch by snail mail,” I thought I would be able to say.

However, as I got closer to my due date, something inside me decided that this voice was not my own and so I opted to have anaesthesia. I tried to talk myself out of it, to think of it as “taking away the magic”, but my arguments continued to implode on themselves. It came across as churlish not to make the most of universal healthcare in a world where some people go bankrupt over fixing a broken arm. I acknowledged a desire for a “standard delivery” that turned out to be the complete opposite of the unsupervised unmedicated homebirths that thirtysomethings on Youtube brag about. My water broke and I needed antibiotics and the dreaded induction.

I had a complication that only affects 6 in 1000 people who give birth — and required medical treatment, not meditation. Could it have been a sign? My body telling me that my plan to do everything as primitively as possible was an unrealistic one? I’ve had many a flame-war on social media with faceless trolls popping off about how I could have avoided it if only I’d chosen to give birth at home. I was essentially getting victim-blamed by people who didn’t even know my name. The last time I expressed this much passion about something in virtual space was in 2015, when my countrymen were getting mown down by Isis. It felt like being sent photos of dead freedom fighters all over again.

I did what I could to recover, and sometimes that involved committing such sins as living in an urban area with poor air quality, not on a farm (though that would be nice), and bathing my child in a plastic tub with a bottle of Johnson’s. I may have let myself go somewhat, but I learned that not everyone has the time, energy and mental fortitude to do all the things, like going cloth and going to baby yoga. I learned that being alive with a healthy baby is the bottom tier of the new parent’s hierarchy of needs.

That is, until I learned about the Safe Sleep Seven, a guide to safe co-sleeping, and started to grieve my natural parenting journey all over again. I found out that I have to put my daughter to sleep on a separate surface because my husband needs to take drowsy medicine for chronic pain. My daughter sleeps, very well, but in a funky metal sidecar cot. The troll army derided me for denying my daughter her God-given right to the family bed, as well as judging him for managing his pain with medicine (which often doesn’t even help that much) rather than woo-woo homeopathy. The sanctification of the family bed is actually somewhat ableist.

It turns out that I haven’t found natural parenting helpful for mitigating mum-guilt at all. Besides, I have even more to feel guilty about — the knowledge that I’m excluded from its main demographic. Natural parenting advocates tend to be older, richer and whiter and I’ve often felt left out of their spaces. In the UK, the average age at which one has their first child is 30. Where I’m from, it’s 22, and I’m much closer to 22 than 30. I saw an older mother at the park recently, armed with everything-free wipes and organic cotton clothes, giving me a slightly scornful look as I held my daughter on my lap. It felt a lot like being asked “This is your first baby, right?” by an addled paediatrician who still uses the term “motorcar” and calls my daughter “him” for wearing a unisex vest. That’s a true story.

Another aspect of natural parenting that I dislike is the talk of “honouring your mammalian instincts” and “doing as other species do”. There was another article about this, in Forbes, claiming it dehumanises women, and I agree. I love someone who has spent most of his life being dehumanised. Both of us are often viewed as evolutionarily disadvantaged. In our home countries, we are confined to cages for the slightest of misdemeanours. So the animalistic comparisons make me somewhat uncomfortable. It’s insulting to him, to my daughter, and to me. We want to fight this dehumanisation, not make our haters think they’re right. We want to say no, we are human, we are one of you.

Additionally, I’ve seen that a lot of self-professed natural parents have a relationship with “other cultures” that I find awkward and reminiscent of my teenage blunder-years. I read another article in The Cut, citing how they justify their parenting decisions with “it’s what the Mayans did” or “that’s how they do it in India”. As a member of a culture considered vaguely “exotic” but not especially trendy, I wonder when they’re going to use mine the same way. “It’s what they do in the far-off mountains of the Middle East!” Imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery.

What I do appreciate about the natural parenting movement is how it emphasises centring family life around the child and responsiveness to one’s child’s needs, as that’s also heavily emphasised in my culture. That’s one of the things that drew me to it in the first place. It made me feel less worried about “spoiling” my daughter by picking her up and presented an alternative to the Western concepts of feeding schedules and sleep training. My husband and mother-in-law find these abhorrent, as do I. My daughter finds them oppressive. Though rather than seeing natural and artificial parenting as an either-or, I think it’s a matter of taking what you like and leaving the rest.

Generally speaking, I think there’s too much pressure to put a label on one’s parenting style, to join a tribe of like-minded parents, when I’m not sure mine has a label. My experiences when I gave birth don’t really fit into any group, except maternal mortality statistics. However I feel quite let down by the natural parenting tribe and that putting pressure on myself to do everything their way, as I’ve started saying, “doesn’t work for our family.”