This is the full transcript of Diana Eidelman’s TEDx Talk titled ‘What Every New Parent Should Know’ at TEDxBGU conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Diana Eidelman – Family Counselor
This cute little baby you see in the background is my first-born son, O. When O was born, I was 32 years old. I was a career woman. I had had 10 years working in educational tourism in this country. I was successful. I loved my job. I felt sure of myself. I was married. I had a nice house. I had a car. And I felt ready to be a mommy.
And then O was born. And when O was born, I realized within weeks that I had been ready for my imaginary baby. My imaginary baby would cuddle, snuggle, and sleep through the night. While my real baby was what we term a high-need baby. High-need babies are babies that are very healthy. They’re very alert. They’re wired for survival. They notice any change in their surroundings.
And so every time I put O to sleep in bed and he seemed sound asleep, and I would tiptoe away, O would wake up screaming. Every time I was on the other side of the house and I moved the plastic bag from the table to the chair, somehow he heard it and he woke up screaming. Car rides were horrible for him in the car seat and, of course, for his parents.
And well, 22 years later, you can see that O turned out to be a very calm, relaxed individual. He’s in the audience right now. And I think he can even sleep through heavy metal music. But what I’m here to talk about is not so much what happened to him, because he ended up great, but about what happened to me and what happens to many new parents in developed countries.
You see, every time he cried, on a sensory level, I heard like five ambulances roaring in my brain.
And on a cognitive level, there was an internal voice or an internal prosecutor, really, that was telling me that I wasn’t a good mom, that good moms have babies that don’t cry, and that other women probably know how to do this so much better than I do. And that confident woman I used to be dissipated and disappeared, and I couldn’t recognize myself.
So obviously the next course of action was to become a group facilitator, a family therapist, a couple’s therapist, and to open a service for the support of new parents. And I spent the next 15 years talking to new parents, trying to understand what had happened to me. And of course, quickly I realized that I was not alone, that my experience was the experience of many new parents, career-oriented individuals who were used to doing things well.
And the other thing I discovered through my investigation was that there’s a lot of talk about postpartum depression, which we see in developing countries between 20 to 40 percent, and we also see it in developed countries between 10 to 20 percent. And we’re also hearing a lot about postpartum stress, postpartum anxiety, disorders, syndromes. We’re talking more about how difficult it is for us in countries where technology is advanced, medicine is advanced, the survival rate of our children is high. Why is it so hard for us?
And I really spent many years trying to figure this out, and I came up with many reasons. I’d like to share some of them with you.
First of all, I don’t know about you, but the decade before I had children, I spent going to university, working in different jobs, trying to make a living, and every once in a while I saw a baby on the street in motion, and babies in motion are happy.
Or I went to visit my friends who had babies, and I would play with their babies and smile at them until they started to cry. And when they started to cry, the baby went back to its mother. And that’s what most of us do, right? Yes? So we have no experience. We’re ignorant in babies. We know nothing about babies’ cries.
Secondly, we’re at war with our babies over their lifestyles. You see, we have a complete conflict of interest. When we come home, home means plopping down on the sofa, turning on the TV, going to the computer, ordering take-away, maybe controlling the weather with a little remote. We want to come home and rest and sit down, while our babies want to come home to explore. Home is the womb, and in the womb, they were doing somersaults, and they had rippling water.
So for them, coming home is about movement and experimenting in the environment and getting their brains wired through this motion. So with babies, we adore, but we are at war.
And another thing that became very clear to me the more I studied psychology was that the more you study psychology, the more frightening parenting becomes because we all become painfully aware of the fact that we can really screw up our kids.
And last but not least, in the dichotomy between the adult world and the baby world, when we have a new baby, we have to make a choice between staying in the adult world or staying at home with our baby. And when we stay at home with our baby, we actually are working harder than we’ve ever worked in our entire life, 24-7, no breaks, no days off, no pay, no evaluations, nobody’s telling us what we’re doing right or wrong and how to fix it. So we’re completely with ourselves, and we have no sense of quantitative, measurable achievement.
Because let’s say your big project for the day is to make a salad. So you start cutting your salad, your baby is asleep, and yet, of course, your baby wakes up, you leave your salad, you go to your baby, you pick up your baby, you look at the diaper, you change the diaper, you feed the baby, you make the baby laugh.
Twenty-eight minutes later, you come back to continue cutting your salad with the baby in hand and one hand with the knife, and your lettuce is already wilted. So you really have no sense of achievement. Almost anything you do is interrupted. And for career people, that’s really hard because we’re used to studying something, knowing how to do it, and feeling our accomplishments. And here, there’s nothing to measure.
Let’s say you really got a hand of changing diapers, and within one week of parenting, you’ve changed between 70 to 80 diapers. So you’re an expert by now, but when your spouse comes home, that’s not really something you’re going to brag about. Or write on Facebook, “Today I managed to quickly change a diaper.”
So understanding all of this, there was one more point that was important. You’re living with a beautiful baby. Really. I have three; I had three; they were beautiful. But your babies are non-verbal. And when we are with non-verbal creatures, we talk to ourselves. We spend 60,000 to 90,000 thoughts a day thinking to ourselves.
And so if you’re a Westerner woman, chances are that into your thoughts will seep in, “Oh, I got fat. Oh, the house is a mess. I’m dying to pluck my eyebrows. You know, I haven’t gotten anything done in weeks.” And you feel, maybe not suppressed, but you don’t feel like yourself.
And I needed an idea to share with the parents that I worked with in my service for the support of new parents. And I started telling new parents that what I understood and what I would have liked to have known when I was 32 was that I had gotten it all wrong. When my baby cried, my focus was on the baby, on the stress my baby was feeling. What I really should have focused on was on what was going on in me, what was happening in my body.
And so I came up with a little acronym for new parents that works well in a few languages. And the acronym that I made up is called THE GIFT. And you’re supposed to do one or all four of the aspects of THE GIFT. So when your baby is crying, go. Get going. Get moving. Dance with your baby. Move around. Your baby expects movement. Your baby’s brain architecture depends on your movement with the baby. Move around. And you will release endorphins, and you will feel happier.
Secondly, Inhale. If you’re holding a baby, and your baby is stressed out and crying, inhale. And exhale. And calm your own body down. Because you are the nest in which your baby’s roots are being created.
Thirdly, if your baby is waking up a lot, even in the middle of the night, chances are your baby will be very hungry. You need to feed your baby. A baby’s tummy is about the size of its fist. It’s about this size. So babies can’t ingest a lot of food and spend a lot of time digesting it. They’ll eat often.
But just as importantly, Feed Yourself. You will be working harder than you’ve ever worked in your entire life. You’ll have need for nutritious food to carry you on for the first few months. So when people ask what it is they should bring you after the baby’s born, don’t ask for another baby’s pretty clothing. Ask for nutritious food for yourself and your partner.
And last but not least, Touch. Our hands are what teach our babies about the contour of their body, about who they are. Our hands touch their nerve endings, which send messages to their brains about their place in the world. So touch your baby a lot. Touch your baby as if your baby is the most precious thing in the world.
And on a cellular level, your baby will learn that he or she is precious. And hopefully, they will treat their own body the same way for the rest of their life. So when you touch your baby, you will also feel oxytocin levels rising, and you’ll feel so much more love.
So to sum it all up, what I think all new parents need to know is that our bodies are the nests in which our babies’ brains get wired and in which their bodies develop. Our bodies are their interactive bridge into the environment, into their exploration of the world. And through our bodies, our babies learn about their own until they can ultimately crawl away, walk away, and fly away.
