Can You Help Me?

A Guide for Parents

A.H. Brafman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781855753112
• eBook ISBN: 9780429911675
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is based on common questions that parents have about their children and their relationships with the world at large. Drawing from his extensive experience as a child psychoanalyst (and as a father), Dr Brafman offers his thoughts on widespread problems faced by parents in an innovative way: he focuses on how the child perceives the situation and not on their resultant behaviour. He also steers away from providing clear-cut answers; there are no set rules for raising children. Instead Dr Brafman discusses each question, using real-life examples and providing insights that will help the parent decide what is best for their individual child.

The Child

1 Early days, early ways

Why are routines important for infants?

I remember once commenting to a paediatrician that a certain mother was not dealing properly with the crying of her very young infant. Smiling gently, he reassured me: “Don’t worry, the baby will teach her . . .”. What he meant was, however small and fragile they look, most infants are sturdy and quite determined to convey their needs to the world. But conveying needs is not enough: it is the parents who have to make the decisions that will ensure their infant’s survival and shape him into “their child”. Because they themselves are entitled to their private lives, this brings up the question of routines. At the end of the day, routines benefit both infant and parents.

It is through routines that infants acquire the learning necessary for their psychological and physical development. This development will, of course, be influenced by the individual infant’s inborn emotional and physical characteristics—and here we are in the dark: only with the passage of time can we discover the infant’s actual needs and abilities. We can, however, get a much clearer picture if we focus on the infant’s environment, as this is under the influence of the parents and they will be able to express their own ideas about how their child should be brought up. Some parents are quite methodical, others less so, working mothers have constraints they cannot shift, and some parents devote their entire time to their children. If only all mothers and fathers gave themselves the right to have a private life, they might find their parenting “duties” easier to handle!

Caring for infants—especially for a new baby—is always a formidable challenge, but it is made no easier by the myths, advice, and recommendations that bombard parents, especially the mother. These can leave a parent feeling that certain routines are imperative, or advisable, or cruel, depending on the expert who has made the pronouncement: “Infants should be fed every three hours and refused food in the night.” . . . “Never allow your baby to sleep in your bedroom.” . . . “Crying babies will soon learn that it is pointless to cry, if they are just left alone.” Early in the last century, a famous British doctor, Frederick Truby King, proposed a method of upbringing that was based on the assumption that babies were totally pliable: the parents were told that as long as they were sufficiently firm and determined, their infants would turn into well-tuned, organized, methodical children. A few decades later came precisely the opposite recommendation: mothers were urged to give babies the freedom to find their own rhythms: the “feeding-on-demand” notion. But as well as professionals, many mothers have their own mother (and that of their partner) in the picture. Of course, this is always a blessing, but one that has become rather rare these days because of greater mobility and migrations. At the same time, each grandmother will have her own set of preconceptions, and some mothers may experience considerable conflict when trying to reconcile words of (supposed) maternal wisdom with (supposedly well-founded, scientific) professional advice, not to mention their own ideas.

Focusing on the baby’s needs, I follow the idea that because of the way our bodies are neurologically “wired”, we have a tendency to form patterns that become self-perpetuating. I usually quote two examples to illustrate this: one is the way in which you will always wake up during the night at the precise time at which you had woken the previous night when, exceptionally, you needed to go to the toilet; another is the pattern that most people acquire of opening their bowels at the same time each day.

We know that normal babies will develop behaviour patterns that stem both from their inborn endowment—what they are born with—and from the environment to which they are exposed—the influences within and from outside the family. Perhaps it is impossible to ascertain the extent to which each of these factors determines how a particular child grows up. Babies will become hungry because their bodies require nourishment, but each baby will express this hunger in his own way. Crying is obviously taken as the typical means through which hunger is conveyed to the world. But the infant has a very limited repertoire of ways in which to express his sense of discomfort and/or need. In the scientific literature there are many arguments debating whether a baby’s crying is a communication, but I prefer to see it as the expression of a physical and/or emotional state. Indeed, if someone responds to the crying, the baby may (quickly or slowly) learn what response that crying produces: here, we can speak of a communication. If, however, we focus on some early, primitive point of development, then the baby’s crying has to be seen as a physiological manifestation, much as his moving his limbs has the same significance. This is relevant because there will be crying when hungry and there will be crying when there is pain, much as there will be crying when the baby cannot breathe freely.

From the parents’ perspective, the picture is dramatically different. Crying immediately produces the reaction: “What does he want? What can I do to soothe him?” We will find an immensely varied display of reactions to the baby’s crying. Some mothers claim that they can distinguish between crying that means hunger and crying that points to other needs the baby is trying to express. Most mothers will respond to an infant’s crying by giving him the breast. If the baby won’t stop crying, some mothers will try to pick him up and walk around the room, others will check the state of the nappy, and still others will experience an upsurge of anxiety. It can be disturbing for an observer to see the latter type of mother, since her anxiety tends to arouse further crying in the baby. The mother’s anxiety tends to appear when she feels that her attempt to help the baby has not worked, and she experiences this as a failure on her part. Helplessness and guilt are soul-destroying emotions, and they interfere with the mother’s capacity to take stock of the situation. Lucky, therefore, is the mother who takes the baby’s continuing to cry after being fed as no more than an indication that he needs or wants something else.

In the matter of routines, the crucial point is the capacity to take stock and have a second look at the situation if the infant is not responding according to the parents’ expectations. If, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the parents cannot find a way of coping with their infant’s demands, we can only hope that they will recognize that the child’s needs are not being met and, accordingly, look for help. It is extremely painful to find a parent who experiences an overwhelming sense of failure because the baby won’t stop crying—in most cases, it is the infant who has a problem, not the parent. Rather than struggling against guilt and a sense of failure, it is much better to turn to a good health visitor, the family doctor, or a paediatrician.

Is it possible to "baby" a child too much? Can affection become a hindrance?

I believe it is important first to establish who is evaluating a particular piece of behaviour as “babying”: the child? yourself? your partner?

Let me recount two stories that might be pertinent. Many years ago I saw a lady who complained of depression and a general sense of pointlessness about life. She had four children and was happily married. We talked about her personal history and the successful way in which she had brought up her children. She was 42 years old, which at the time we were meeting was considered far from a young age for a woman. She had felt depressed at several previous times in her life, and this occasion didn’t seem to point to any events that might have triggered off her feelings. However, I suddenly noticed that her four children had been born at five-year intervals, and the youngest was now nearly 5 years old. When I called her attention to this she began to cry, and we could then work out that, as each of her children started to attend primary school when they reached 5 years of age, she felt that there was no further purpose for her in life.

Some years later, I was involved in a piece of research on baby deliveries at home and in hospital. As we questioned a number of pregnant women, I found myself formulating a question that my co-workers thought was quite absurd: “When does the baby you are carrying first become a child?” We had all met women who knew they were pregnant but who only became convinced they were carrying a baby when they felt its first movements. But we were quite surprised at the number of different answers we received to this question! Some mothers stated very firmly that they had a baby from the moment the first period was missed, and we found some who claimed they knew they were carrying a new child from the morning after the significant intercourse. Yet others said that this sense of being the mother of a baby would only appear after the baby was born. Having discovered such variations, this question was put to other mothers seen in different contexts, and it became clear that many women have a precise awareness of what ages of their children they feel most comfortable with. However trivial this may appear, it can be quite amazing to observe how such sentiments can affect a woman’s mothering of her children.

Most parents—perhaps all parents—will argue that they do not differentiate between their children, that all of them are “treated equally”. This is unlikely, not in the sense of a deliberate lie, but rather because our feelings towards each of our children involve an enormous number of factors, most of which operate at an unconscious level. This is not a question of choosing which child to favour and which child to “ignore”. Perhaps I should mention a few examples. A woman whose father dies not long before her delivery may name her son after her father and see the child as a new version of the loved parent she has lost. Another child born after a miscarried pregnancy may be seen as a replacement. A child born prematurely may lead the parents to develop a pattern of intense protectiveness in spite of all reassurances the doctors may give them. The same may occur when a child requires serious surgery in the early months or years of life. Quite often, if one of the parents leaves or dies, the other parent may attempt to make up for that missing parent by treating the child in ways that may be seen and/or experienced as over-protective.

In practice, most parents would be unwilling—actually, unable—to put into words what each child means to them. But it is this private meaning that explains the word “babying”. Your partner may protest, quietly or loudly, and accuse you of letting your child “get away with murder”, of overprotecting and babying him or her, but the chances are that in each such situation you will say that it is your partner who is being unreasonable or rigid or with too-high expectations from the child. Similarly, your child may protest that you do not let him do things that all his peers are allowed to do, and, if you believe that your child is vulnerable or in some way brittle, you are most unlikely to take your child’s words as cues to judge his real abilities.

This pattern can be seen most clearly with children who develop an illness like asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, or some other kind of special sensitivity to internal or environmental agents. How can a parent be expected to “treat the child normally” when it is so difficult, if not impossible, to gauge how far to protect the child or to suspend this protection?

In other words, giving the child precisely that amount of affection that is completely age-appropriate and matches perfectly your partner’s view of what is “appropriate” caring is an ideal that is virtually impossible to achieve. And you can see how infinitely more complicated this issue becomes when we (at last!) bring into the equation your child’s personality. By the time you are hit by the quandary “am I babying him too much?” it is certain—whether you can recognize it or not—that you are involved in a pattern of relationships where it may be impossible to discern what is cause and what is effect. You may think the alleged “babying” is your fault, but it is an absolute certainty that someone else will tell you that it is your child who is “manipulating” you to obtain that “babying”. Theoretically, there is a precise moment when the pattern was established because of particular circumstances that justified it; in practice, by the time the issue comes to be considered, those reasons have long been lost in the hazy past.

I listed above a number of rather dramatic events and circumstances that can produce heightened distress and, consequently, one or more unusual responses in the parent–child pair. But even in more ordinary, unfolding normal life we can find situations that lead to the “babying” pattern. Sometimes a row between the parents will lead to the child being allowed to sleep in the parents’ bed, and this can turn into a habit. Or the child runs a high temperature, and a parent sleeps in the child’s bed, leading to colossal protests from the child when the parent wants to go back to sleeping in his or her own bed. You can find a child who refuses to eat some particular food unless it is mashed; then, without any specific decision being taken, you wake up one day to find that all that child’s food is being mashed before going to the table. A toilet-trained child may one day have an “accident” and, somehow, that one-off nappy may again become an obligatory piece of his clothing. Then there is the child who cannot give up his dummy, or the child who has a tummy-ache when it is time to go to nursery or school, and so on.

The impression I have formed in the course of my work is that there is a particular occasion when the child requires a special provision, something that departs from the ordinary, daily ritual that had come to be established in his life. The following day, the child may well be anxious that “the same thing” will happen again. It then seems to make all the difference in the world whether the parent feels equally anxious and decides to give the child “the benefit of the doubt” or whether, instead, the parent firmly reassures the child that his anxiety is unwarranted and demands the return to the previous habitual pattern. The explanation? I believe it is terribly simple: the parent’s reaction of “giving in” convinces the child that his anxiety is fully warranted. If this sequence is repeated, the child can even come to believe that his original behaviour—which was probably a reaction to his own fear and anxiety—is, in fact, what his parent expects from him.

You may think that this explanation is too far-fetched or contrived, but I have found it to be the case time and again when dealing with phobic children. If I can be forgiven for a bit of black humour: children exclusively given organic foods to eat may well feel desperately ill if they are suddenly fed ordinary foods at a friend’s house. The rationale behind this is that children do interpret the way they are treated and they behave accordingly—but they can only achieve this understanding on the basis of their capacity at each particular age.

In summary, “babying” or giving “normal” affection lies essentially in the eye of the beholder. Once you do come to formulate the present question, I suggest you ignore whoever it is who is levelling the criticism at you and try to pick up some instances of the “babying” and put these instances under the microscope. Get yourself to consider how you would treat another child under the same circumstances, and then try to remember how your parents treated you when you were in that position as a child. You—and only you— can achieve a convincing second look at the pattern and, hopefully, discover whether there is “babying” going on. If you conclude it is there, then the next challenge is to find why that “babying” ever came into being. At that point, it is worth remembering that it is a universal desire of parents that their children should “grow up” and give the parents more freedom, so “babying” would suggest that something has been taken out of proportion.

Should I let my child make mistakes— and then help pick up the pieces?

This is a rather ambiguous question. If a child “makes a mistake”, “picking up the pieces” might refer to dealing with any actual injuries or to his sense of shame or guilt at doing something that brought about an unwanted consequence. But you might also be referring to “picking up the pieces” of these consequences—for example, whether the child’s pocket money should be stopped to cover the costs of repairing some broken piece of furniture. Sometimes such situations are complicated by the possibility that the parent feels guilty for allowing the child to engage in an activity from which, because of his age, he should have been protected.

I would prefer to think about this question in terms of “learning from mistakes”, as this somehow allows us more room for manoeuvre and yet still, I hope, meets the point of the original formulation. The crucial point in either case lies in the difference between a mistake committed by a child through ignorance and another by a child who is familiar with the correct way of doing whatever is involved. Let us consider them separately.

By definition, a child is forever learning something new. There will be many times when adults are fully convinced that the child knew what to do in a particular situation, whereas the child may have been misled by some unexpected detail he thought was important. The way we deal with such situations is totally dependent on how we, the adults, feel at the time. If in a good mood, we will give the child the benefit of the doubt, while if it happens at a point when we are already tense and frustrated, all hell breaks loose. Of course, ideally, before throwing accusations at the child, we should explore why he behaved in that “wrong” fashion: a counsel of perfection.

In this chapter of “ignorance”, I have my own philosophy. Many children fail to learn a multitude of ordinary things because the parents want to protect them from harm. My favourite example is the question of plugs and sockets. In England, virtually every socket has a safety switch that has to be turned on before the socket becomes live, but this is not the case in most other countries. I believe it is important to teach every child how to deal with the electrical sockets in the house, with or without switches: knowing how to avoid danger is infinitely better than risking an accident due to ignorance. It is impossible to list all similar dangers, but, to my mind, the all-important factor in these lessons in practical, daily life lies in each parent’s conception of what constitutes danger. I see no point in simply urging a parent that he should teach his child how to deal with those funny holes in the wall where the Hoover gets plugged in. If the parents embark on this lesson in an anxious frame of mind, the child is bound to sense this anxiety, and, whatever words or gestures are employed, it is the anxiety that the child will react to.

Some years ago, psychologists conducted an extremely interesting piece of research. They built a table with a thick glass top, above a patterned floor. Part-way along, the pattern stopped, and, though the floor and the glass top continued, looking from above the impression created was that of a precipice. Babies a few months old were put on this surface, while their mothers stood at the other (“precipice”) end. The babies would crawl towards the mother, but as soon as they reached the end of the pattern, they would look up at her face. If the mother had a worried face, they would immediately stop and perhaps crawl backwards. But if she smiled encouragingly, they would continue to crawl forward!

I have always felt that this experiment is a wonderful example of how children learn to cope with the challenge of the unknown. This, I believe, refers to children of any age. We learn not only from words and/or gestures, but also from the emotional charge with which the lesson is conveyed. The child will always perceive and interpret new situations in line with his previous experiences, preconceptions, and abilities: the older the child, the wider the range and depth of these memory traces. And, of course, the relationship between the child and the adult concerned is a most important factor. Teaching a child how to cross a road might be an example. It is up to the adult to explain the importance of watching the traffic and waiting for a safe time to cross, but the degree of apprehension the child associates with the enterprise will depend much more on the nuances attached to the way the lesson is given. Nevertheless, no matter what an adult says or does, there will always be a child who wanders across the road blindly and another who decides to “dare” whatever dangers might exist and still another who becomes totally panic-stricken at the very thought of crossing a road.

Much mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Introduction
• THE CHILD
• THE PARENTS
• Index