The New Parenting Club

IS YOUR OBSTETRICIAN TAKING AWAY YOUR RIGHTS TO A HEALTHY CHILD BIRTH?
This blog is about the many adverse childbirth and child-rearing practices that have become the norm in our society—about the artificial disruption of essentially innate and self-guiding mammalian parenting processes. This blog is also about the way certain high-tech obstetric and educational practices are not only medically unnecessary but dangerous to the physical development and mental stability of our children. Also exposed here is the lack of awareness that many suffer from concerning the ways in which our inherent parental and biological rights have been stripped away from us by the very healing authorities we most trust and how today, these rights are denied parent and child routinely by a corporate-based, overly automated, and personally dehumanized technocratic system of obstetrics and child education. [More about ‘How Children Learn’ in later Blogs]
This modern system, as many people are now coming to realize, ignores the first and most abiding of all medical principles: Do no harm. In the process, this system provokes fear and pain in parents, subjects mothers to unnecessary and sometimes dangerous medical and social practices, and in the end turns the delights of bearing and raising children into a science fiction¬¬–style nightmare. Yet so persuaded are we today that the modern birthing model is the best model and, perhaps, the only model that we give this system our whole-hearted confidence, approval, and gratitude.
But there’s good news here too: This blog is mostly about the methods that will remedy this situation by informing readers of a new body of remarkable scientific evidence that will help mothers avoid these dangers and, in the process, reestablish their faith in the million-year-old creative and healing powers of their own biological heritage.
Over the past several decades, this body of knowledge has been discovered or, more accurately, rediscovered by scientists and health-care professionals working in a number of different medical, psychiatric, and therapeutic fields. These validated rediscoveries are being used to reeducate people concerning the real facts about childbirth and infant education. In the process, they are helping restore a fundamental human legacy to a society of parents that knows unconsciously that it has lost something dear—a society that cries out silently for a bodily wisdom it once so willingly gave away and now so desperately needs to find again.
Both the theoretical and practical content of this new knowledge are not based on New Age theories or anecdotal stories. Instead, they are derived from impeccable medical and cross-anthropological studies; from pediatric observation, academic study, and clinical practice; from double-blind trials and long-term surveys; from years of research mined in rarified scientific fields such as linguistics, neurobiology, and medical anthropology; and from the enormous volume of pooled experiential knowledge amassed by grassroots health-care experts.
I call this combination of old and new wisdom the new parenting. Ironically, the massive amount of scientific data that has appeared in the past decades to support the growing movement of new parenting (sometimes referred to as conscious parenting or attachment parenting) is as old as the human race. It is “new” only to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century who have been so mesmerized by technology that we have given up the biological practices that, for thousands of years, have activated normal intuition in parenthood and child-raising. The new parenting is new, yes—but only to the contemporary Western world.
Even when its most obvious and rudimentary principles are brought to the public’s attention—when parents-to-be ask pediatricians about breastfeeding or water births, when subjects such as the dangers of birth-inducing chemicals or the premature cutting of the umbilical cord are brought up in the medical classroom, when psychiatric experts are questioned on TV talk shows concerning traditional child-rearing notions such as a child sleeping in the parents’ bed or the importance of immediate eye contact between mother and newborn child, these ideas are usually dismissed with a raise of a professional eyebrow.
Indeed, it is not entirely paranoid to say that there is a silent conspiracy against many of the scientific principles, both stated and implicit, in the new parenting. Part of this conspiracy stems from simple prejudice, false information, and entrenched habits; but part is also based on more sinister reasons. Many of these new scientific findings, after all, are bad for profits. They do not sell enough artificial milk formula or Caesarian sections to make them cost effective.
Yet in the process of sweeping aside the overwhelming amount of new evidence on the benefits of such practices as in utero learning, natural birthing techniques, keeping mother and child together from the moment of birth onward, and much more, society is denied access to information that can dramatically lower the curve of childhood disease, childhood learning disabilities, juvenile violence, and willful self-destructiveness.
The aim and purpose of this Blog is to show the simple and natural ways to birth, bond with and raise healthy children. But before one can learn the new one needs to remove the old that which is accepted as gospel.
Blog Post from Jeffrey Fine, Ph.D. Co-author with Dalit Fine, MS. of the book: -
“The Art of Conscious Parenting” Release Date: – November 2009

A BATTLE CRY

Among the Laguna Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest, parents bathe just-emerged newborns in a potion of yucca weed while prayers are chanted and songs of jubilation are sung. Just before the sun goes down, tribal elders paint the child’s body with white clay. Believing that human beings are never more attuned to understanding the critical lessons of life than during the moments immediately following birth, the elders recite tribal wisdom into the little one’s ear, simultaneously sprinkling ashes on the child’s body as a reminder that we must all someday return to dust.

Compare this birth experience to that in a society we know quite well: Mothers who are about to give birth are drugged then wired to a bank of beeping, high-tech monitoring and hydrating equipment. Supine and with her legs spread before a group of strangers (most of them male professionals), the expectant mother finds herself in a bare, noisy delivery room beneath a heaven starred with blinding halogen lights. Technicians garbed in green scrubs mill around in obstetric masks, checking settings, tightening straps, watching as a male physician often pulls the newborn child out of the womb with an adjustable metal forceps or suction device. The child is then spanked smartly on the rear end to induce breathing, and the umbilical cord is cut and discarded without ceremony. After being scrubbed down with antiseptic detergent and after fluids are vacuumed out of his or her nose and mouth with a suctioning tube, the child has a brief visit with the mother before being whisked away from the mother’s arms and breasts in order to be banded, vaccinated, fed artificially , and deposited in an isolated crib inside a room full of hundreds of other similarly birthed children.

Sound familiar? More than likely you and I were born in some version of this modern, industrial birthing ritual—not in a warm, dark, comfortable bedchamber surrounded by loving family and friends, but in a steel-framed hospital unit that smelled of antiseptic. This is the birth rite our particular society chooses for introducing newborns to the world. “Every society,” anthropologist Gregory Bateson once remarked, “practices the birthing ceremonies that best mirror its values, norms, and philosophy.”
But some people might ask: Isn’t this as it should be? Don’t we believe, from centuries of trial and experience, that modern hospital delivery is the safest, fastest, and most hygienic form of childbirth?
Many people think so, certainly. Yet many others—a rapidly growing number, in fact—are beginning to realize that despite its sophisticated chemical and surgical procedures, modern obstetrics, with its uncompromising emphasis on technology over nature, comes up gravely lacking in the human arts. As many people are coming to understand, all children born under hospital lights and raised in a daycare-like environment end up being denied essential physical and emotional tools they need so profoundly to reach their full potential as human beings.

Regarding this lack of human arts in birth, neuropsychologist James Prescott, reminds us of a fact that so many doctors and patients have forgotten, but that serves as a kind of battle cry for those who clearly see what is being done to both parents and children today. “No mammal on the planet separates the newborn from its mother at birth except the human animal,” Prescott warns us. “No mammal on this planet denies the breast of the mother to the newborn except the human

Of course, in some instances where the health and well-being of the mother and/or child are greatly compromised because of physiological disease, diabetes, genetic difficulties, or other genuinely high risks, technological intervention can often save the life of both mother and child.
There’s genuine trouble and the kind that is “manufactured.”

But for you moms who have genuine medical problems and need medical supervision by all means get it. There still many ways that you can naturally bond with your newborn and consciously parent him. We will be dealing with bonding in depth and in detail in a series called Blogs-on-Bonding.

Blog Posted 5/31/09 by Jeffrey Fine, Ph.D. Co-author with Dalit Fine, MS of the book
“The Art of Conscious Parenting” Release Date: – November 2009
C0mments & Questions

WARNING
Don’t throw your baby out with the birth water.

American women today are facing a tragic loss. With the dominance of technological birth practices in the United States today, the American mother and child are being robbed of the simple and natural process of birth and bonding. Nature’s organic program, built into the hard wiring of humans for millennia, has been disrupted and almost lost during the past seventy-five years.
A mother’s ability to bond with her offspring during and after the process of birth is the most significant and essential characteristic of all mammalian females—especially human females—on this planet. This innate ability and the mother’s knowledge that accompanies it have been so exploited, distorted, and trivialized by commercial thinking and conditioning that we no longer even see our loss.
But the result is seen in the increasing inability to connect in relationships at all levels in
our society; the skyrocketing violence; the breakdown of order in the classroom; rising rates of juvenile crime, childhood depression, despair and suicide.
Scientific evidence clearly points to the destruction of the very fabric of society if we do not restore birthing and bonding to the feminine.

‘The history of Western obstetrics is the history of technologies of separation. We’ve separated milk from breasts, mothers from babies, fetuses from pregnancies, sexuality from procreation, pregnancy from motherhood. And finally we’re left with the image of the fetus as a free-floating being alone, analogous to man in space with the umbilical cord tethering the placental ship, and the mother reduced to the empty space that surrounds it.
. . . It is very hard to conceptually put back together that which medicine has rendered asunder. . . . As I speak to different groups, from social scientists to birth practitioners, what I find is that I have a harder and harder time trying to make the meaning of connection, let alone the value of connection, understood.’
Barbara Katz Rothman, Quoted in Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie Floyd-Davis

But take heart there is a movement for Change,

‘Imagine what might happen if the majority of women emerged from their labor beds with a renewed sense of the strength and power of their bodies, and of their capacity for ecstasy through giving birth. When enough women realize that birth is a time of great opportunity to get in touch with their true power, and when they are willing to assume responsibility for this, we will reclaim the power of birth and help move technology where it belongs—in the service of birthing women, not as their master’
Christiana Northrup, M.D., Quoted in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

Blog Post from Jeffrey Fine, Ph.D. Co-author with Dalit Fine, MS of the book
“The Art of Conscious Parenting” Release Date: – November 2009