26 Aug

Book review: (M)otherhood, by Pragya Agarwal

In a note at the end of the book, Pragya Agarwal accurately describes this work as “somewhere between a memoir and a scientific and historical disquisition of women’s reproductive choices and infertility.” (p343) Throughout the book she wanders, with intent, between her own reflections and experiences, and a huge breadth of culture, history, and contemporary research, to explore the massive topic of motherhood and choice, and to wrestle with the impossible definition of woman, and its relationship to motherhood.

This is a book that is unafraid, in that Agarwal writes candidly about her own past, discussing such taboo subjects as her abortion, her ambivalence about motherhood, and her infertility. She goes on to pick apart menstrual taboos, transgender parenting, and the impact of our white patriarchal medical system. There are whole chapters that open my eyes to other perspectives, and moments where I feel seen, where our experiences and feelings cross paths. I love to read a well-referenced book, and Agarwal writes as though all the research is at her fingertips, supporting her critical evaluation of motherhood in modern society.

This is so much more than a book about motherhood, and so much more than all the other books about motherhood. It is a painstaking search for identity that shines a harsh spotlight on the normally invisible forces that shape us as women, as mothers, as people who do mothering, and as women who aren’t mothers whether or not by choice, and mothers who aren’t women. Such an impressive and important work, that has changed the map of my world.

[Disclaimer: I am a massive fan of Pragya Agarwal, and was delighted to buy my copy of (M)otherhood at the Also Festival, where she signed it for me!]

02 Jul

Book review: Mama, you’ve got this, by Emma Bunton

Mama, you’ve got this is the latest celebrity parenting book, from the pen of Spice Girl Emma Bunton and her team of experts. Emma has her own range of eco-disposable nappies to sell, alongside her advice for the first 12 months of parenthood.

The book is divided into six main sections: life as a new mama, breastfeeding, sleep, nappies etc, growth and development, and self-care for the new mum. This seems entirely reasonable, and that first section has a lovely focus on the fourth trimester and settling in to the transition to motherhood. The ‘expert’ advice in the breastfeeding section comes from NCT’s own super-BFC Fran Bailey, so I can’t fault that. But as we move into talking about sleep, alarm bells begin to ring, as those tired old ‘how much sleep does a baby need’ tables are trotted out. Here we meet a US-based paediatric sleep consultant and author of such unpromising titles as It’s never too late to sleep train. With his connivance, Emma offers two sleep-training alternatives, as though those are the only options, and recommends that new parents shouldn’t feel guilty about using them. It’s quite a surprise given the fairly attachment-orientated nature of the rest of the book, and would put me off recommending it.

We then swerve back into baby care, carrying, and how to buy Emma’s special nappies, before finishing with a guide to the best healing crystals.

I wanted to love this book because my mate Fran is in it, and Fran’s bit is the highlight, but this is a classic example of a mum with a platform thinking that her experience – of which much is shared in this book – is universal and indeed useful. If you’re a fan and want to read the Adventures of Booby Spice, I say go for it; but there are far more recommendable books out there for new parents to read.

[Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book, courtesy of Penguin Books]

08 May

Book review: Mixed Up – Combination feeding by choice or necessity, by Lucy Ruddle

There is no doubt that a book on mixed feeding is very much needed, particularly here in the UK where we have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, and the most common way for babies under six months to be fed is to have a combination of breastmilk and formula.

If baby feeding is a subject area that often seems to parents to be mysterious and inaccessible, combination feeding is the most mysterious and inaccessible of all. It is often (mis)understood that breastfeeding is an all or nothing activity, an idea that certainly works out well for the formula manufacturers. We have plenty of books that include information on both breastfeeding and formula feeding, but few that address the question of doing both.

This is a good start, with some really excellent ideas such as the “quick glance alternatives” and “things to be aware of,” which are nicely phrased ways to help parents explore how things might work for them. It is written with kindness and an in-depth knowledge of feeding babies, and there are plenty of stories from real parents if you like that sort of thing.

I’m not a sleep-deprived new parent, and I did find it difficult to navigate the book. Headings are not very distinct from subheadings and the lack of an index made it difficult to find things that were referred to in early chapters such as paced bottle feeding, but not explained until much later in the book. It doesn’t feel logically organised to me; I really wanted to cut it up and put it back together in a different order. The information is solid and the tone is lovely, so it was frustrating that even with a good understanding of the subject, I couldn’t easily find my way around.

I would definitely use this book for my own reference, and given that there I don’t know of another book for parents that covers combination feeding to this extent I would also suggest it to parents, but my feeling is that this particular market niche is not yet saturated.

02 Dec

Book review: Biological Nurturing, by Suzanne Colson

On reading the second edition of Biological Nurturing, I am reminded of what a powerful influence the first edition has been on my work as a breastfeeding counsellor, both in terms of how I talk about positioning, skin to skin, and the transition from womb to world in antenatal sessions; and how I support mothers with breastfeeding after the birth.

Suzanne Colson has vast clinical experience and research experience of what is now widely known as her method: biological nurturing. Biological nurturing is far more than just laid-back breastfeeding; it is a deep understanding of the needs and abilities of the breastfeeding dyad, almost a philosophy of positioning. It is a mother-centred process, using gravity and both parties’ instinctive behaviour, to achieve comfortable and effective breastfeeding.

It could be argued that this is simply a rediscovery of ancient behaviour: the way women breastfed long before male experts took over all the thinking and management of it, to spare our pretty little heads. Colson describes some of the social and cultural movement away from instinctive breastfeeding, using her own science to show how wrong those 18th and 19th Century men of science were about what we do. As she tells us, “you cannot teach mothers to do this,” (p158) because it is instinctive behaviour, highly dependent on the hormonal environment. So the role of a breastfeeding supporter is to enable that environment to be right for the mother and the baby, and to have confidence that this innate behaviour works.

Colson has a great deal of research to support her work, presenting it here in detail, and yet with accessible language and even QR codes so that the reader can access video clips. She is critical of the deeply entrenched, prescriptive ways that some midwives manage early breastfeeding, and this might be a difficult – but essential – read for those who work in that way. It is a fascinating and useful book for anyone supporting breastfeeding, and for mothers who are interested in a much deeper level of knowledge than they will get from your average book on breastfeeding.

[Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of Biological Nurturing. You can obtain yours, with a 10% discount when you use the SPROGCAST code, from Pinter & Martin].

29 Nov

Book review: Informed is Best, by Amy Brown

This afternoon I opened the latest copy of MIDIRS, and a couple of inserts dropped out of it. They are training modules, one on infant skincare, and one on breastfeeding challenges. I browsed the latter for a moment, noticing a paragraph mentioning a Cochrane review on the treatment of nipple pain:

However, the latest Cochrane review (2014) found insufficient evidence to recommend breast milk or any other intervention for treating nipple pain.”

So I looked up the Cochrane review, and here’s what it actually says:

Currently, there is not enough evidence to recommend any specific type of treatment for painful nipples among breastfeeding women. These results suggest that applying nothing or expressed breast milk may be equally or more beneficial in the short-term experience of nipple pain than the application of an ointment such as lanolin.

The picture above shows who produced this document: Lansinoh. A company with a vested interest in selling an ointment such as lanolin.

With this in mind, I picked up my copy of Amy Brown’s latest book, Informed is Best, a book which purports to help the reader fight their way through the tangle of misinformation, opinion, and hidden agendas that gets deeper and deeper as you wade into pregnancy, birth and parenting. This is a very useful and important book, and is more important than ever in an era of fake news, limited attention spans, and a distrust of experts – as the book itself explains in glorious detail.

What I find amazing about Amy’s writing is her ability to gather so much information, and distil it into meaningful and accessible writing; in fact she quotes a study where a mother describes wanting “mom-level detail from an expert” (p226) and this is exactly what we have in this book. Amy sets the context, looking at how the media, social media, and the patriarchy shape our access to good quality information. She explains different types of research, and even gives us a quick blast of how to understand statistics in a way that didn’t actually make me want to poke my own eyes out. The text is wonderfully seasoned with examples, including unpicking many twisted media reports of research; and presented in her marvellously offhand-but-serious-really style. For a book about research, it’s just such an enjoyable read.

One thing I especially love about this book is her exploration of her own bias, along with sections that really should make the reader reflect on their personal biases. The Dunning-Kruger effect really gave me pause for thought. How often do I dismiss someone’s work because of a connection with something I didn’t like reading or hearing? It definitely happens.

Each chapter ends with a practical list of ways to keep informed, summarising the detail within. My favourite is: “To any female expert reading this, I urge you to have the confidence of a mediocre White man.” (p124). Oh yes indeed.

If you want more, I interview Amy about the book in episode 56 of Sprogcast. To get your copy of the book, use our 10% discount code SPROGCAST at the Pinter & Martin checkout here.

27 Nov

Book Review: Inspired Parenting, by Dorka Herner

Dorka Herner is a Hungarian psychologist and mother of five, and this is her book of reflections on motherhood. Divided into six chapters, such as “Reshaping the patterns that shape us,” it seems to be intended as a tool for learning or developing the reader’s own parenting; however it really is just a series of daily writings, from funny little aphorisms about saying a nursery rhyme and realising it is intended as a tool of mind control; to longer vignettes about her twins getting into a good school. Nothing in the book asks the reader to consider how it relates to them, or to reflect on its meaning. It doesn’t advocate a particular style of parenting, or offer advice on any of the many challenges described – just tells you about them.

Inspired Parenting may offer some insight into someone else’s parenting, and it’s always useful to try to understand how other people live. It’s a pleasant book to dip into now and then.

[Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of Inspired Parenting by the publisher. You can get a copy here, with a 10% discount using the code SPROGCAST at the checkout.]

11 Oct

Book Review: Give Birth Like A Feminist, by Milli Hill

I tried to narrow down who I thought should read this book. Expectant mothers? Their partners? Midwives? Doctors? All humans? Pretty much the only people who don’t really need it, are those of us already actively calling for recognition that birth is a feminist issue, within our working community. I fervently hope that the latter are not the only people who read it.

Milli Hill has a strong history of writing well about childbirth, rooted in her own experiences and capitalising on her work as an established journalist. She is able to talk to more mainstream audiences than many of us, and her writing style is passionate, informed and accessible. A strong tenet of this book is that the truly feminist perspective is to support and respect all birth choices, even if they would not be our own.

In case that isn’t a persuasive enough argument, Give Birth Like A Feminist provides a feminist historical and cultural context of birth, looking at why certain things are done just as they have been done for centuries, with no real evidence base. From induction to lithotomy, she examines the assumption behind birthing protocols, which is essentially that women’s bodies are badly designed and ineffective when it comes to reproducing the species. It’s astonishing that we have survived so long. And can I just say, the Husband Stitch? WTF.

From this context, Milli develops the argument that societal attitudes to women’s bodies and behaviour pressure us to conform to a stereotype of being weak, helpless and incapable. In fact, images and stories that represent women as capable and powerful are often repressed; take for example Facebook’s banning of certain images of birth and breastfeeding, that are no more revealing than apparently acceptable images of underdressed celebrities. Women are both infantilised, and expected to be available for sex/pleasing to men in particular and society in general. A good woman, like a good baby, is quiet, undemanding, and has no leg or armpit hair.

Give Birth Like A Feminist furthers a new narrative of childbirth and women’s bodies, elevating women above the mere vessel for and caretaker of the next generation. Milli Hill is constantly kickstarting this conversation, and challenging the way birth is presented in the media and in the world. Just carrying this book into a room last week gave me an insight into attitudes to both birth and feminism, when people around me raised eyebrows and chuckled at the very idea.

This is a well-referenced book, and Hill supports her points with case law and evidence. She has a tendency to write about her own experience, and I find this a distraction from her important argument that this happens to most women, in one way or another. She also fills the book with other women’s voices, and points out that she does not have to ask around for long to find stories where women felt their choices were shut down, belittled, or never discussed at all; where women are abused and coerced, where midwives are unable to work, where we’re all either baby brain or birthzilla, not human beings at all.

There are also some small practical sections describing actions to take or ways to look at evidence, and the BRAIN decision-making tool used widely by NCT is shared again, which can be no bad thing. This is not a practical manual like the Positive Birth Book, but very much a book I would give to a pregnant friend.

Thanks to Milli for the review copy of Give Birth Like A Feminist, and also for sparing time in the summer holidays to chat with me for Episode 54 of Sprogcast.

18 Jul

Book review: Why Breastfeeding Matters, by Charlotte Young

You may be familiar with Charlotte Young, the sometimes-ranty but always well-informed blogger known as The Analytical Armadillo, one of the few reliably evidence-based information sources to be found online. Her wealth of knowledge is collected here into 16 neat chapters on the how and why of breastfeeding.

Like other books in the Why It Matters series, this is small but dense, covering how breastfeeding works; the wide range of normal baby behaviour and parental strategies for coping with it; expressing, formula and mixed feeding; and a couple of good chapters on the socio-cultural context of breastfeeding, and the impact of the formula milk industry.

Young is very aware of being a passionate supporter of breastfeeding mothers, in a bottle-feeding society, so much of her work is around myth-busting, whether she’s addressing the nonsense idea that breastfeeding mothers must eat a bland diet, or the notion that Mommy Wars is a feminist advert. She is careful to reference everything; perhaps a little less careful not to sometimes come across as sarcastic.

If you’re looking for an accurate breastfeeding text that pulls no punches, gives both the practical side of things and the context, and explains all of this logically and clearly, then this book is highly recommended.

[Disclosure: I obtained a free review copy of Why Breastfeeding Matters from the publishers. You can order a copy and get 10% discount using the code SPROGCAST, from their website here]

20 Dec

Book Review: Why the Politics of Breastfeeding Matter, by Gabrielle Palmer

This small book in the Why It Matter series from Pinter & Martin is a distillation of Palmer’s earlier, bigger book with a similar title: a good starting point from which to explore this huge and frankly upsetting subject.

Palmer begins with the well-established health case for supporting and protecting breastfeeding: more than 2,000 baby deaths per day worldwide, as a broad headline; and many far-reaching consequences that affect families every day, in the developed world and beyond. The history of commercial baby milk substitutes going back over 100 years is clearly explained, showing how the creation of a market, rather than the health and wellbeing of infants, has always been the industry’s main motivator. The book explores the ethics of testing the product on the market – also known as giving untested formula milk to babies; as well as the growth of the close relationship between health professionals and manufacturers. This relationship has led to the complete undermining and misunderstanding of normal breastfeeding, to the point at which breastfeeding failure is now framed as a “flaw of women’s bodies” (p45); meanwhile historical practices at the time of birth, and social pressures to parent in certain ways, sabotage the breastfeeding relationship and contribute to this vicious circle of ignorance.

Palmer explains why the ongoing Nestle boycott matters, why the WHO developed the International Code for the Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes in 1981, and how the milk manufacturers created unnecessary products like follow-on milk in order to exploit its loopholes. One unanticipated side effect of this was to present breastmilk purely as a food product, erasing the importance of the breastmilk relationship, and making it harder for society to value this fundamental aspect of motherhood.

The huge implications of all of this for global issues like poverty and climate change are introduced towards the end, leaving the reader potentially feeling angry and cheated by big business; and hopefully ready to fight for change.

Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of Why The Politics of Breastfeeding Matter by the publisher; you can order it here, with a 10% discount at the checkout, using the code SPROGCAST.

23 Nov

Book Review: Beautiful Birth, by Suzanne Yates

This is a nice book, a keeper for sure. Beautiful Birth is an attractive, slim volume with an immediate appeal to anyone looking for practical techniques for coping with childbirth.

It has two main sections. The first section covers breathing and visualisation, positions for labour, and massage. It gives an uncomplicated rationale for why these things are helpful, and a step by step approach to practicing them during pregnancy, and using them during labour. It does include a little more chinese medicine and shiatsu than I would normally be comfortable with, but actually the book is so useful that for once I’m not going to make snarky comments about that.

The second section is on preparing for birth, and is a straightforward explanation of what happens and how a woman can use the coping techniques from the first section, to help herself have a positive experience. Its approach to planning the birth is about connecting with yourself and reflecting on what kind of environment and support feels best. It touches on decision making when things don’t go to plan, and very briefly on the “fourth stage” of labour, meeting the baby.

I think most pregnant women could find something useful in Beautiful Birth, whatever kind of birth they are expecting; it’s never unhelpful to have some strategies for bringing calm. It’s a shame the pictures are not more ethnically diverse, but I would generally recommend this book.

[Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy by the publishers. You can get hold of it here, with a 10% discount at the checkout using the code SPROGCAST]