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.