When I had my first child, in 2002, I struggled to follow the mainstream parenting advice of the time, particularly when it came to sleep. My son was easily the worst sleeper of all the babies I came across in the baby groups we attended. The other parents were able to put their babies down awake in their cots in their blacked-out nurseries, give them a quick kiss on the cheek, then walk out and close the door. Their babies were capable of the miraculous skill of ‘self-soothing’, while mine would cling to me desperately. He wailed when I put him down, his arms reaching up for me, big brown, teary eyes pleading with me to pick him up again. My baby’s sleep and feeding schedules were erratic and unpredictable, while theirs would sleep and feed to the clock, with military predictability.
Desperate to ‘fix’ my baby, I turned to books and online advice that urged me to leave him to cry for a few minutes, while I waited, physically unresponsive, nearby. Apparently, in my quest to soothe my son, I had created bad habits that we now had to break. We lasted for one horrible, heartbreaking night. I couldn’t bear to put him through any more trauma. Reluctantly, I continued to meet his needs for physical contact throughout the day and night, all the while feeling that I was somehow a worse parent than those with the perfect sleeping babies because I had failed to do what was best for him.
My son quickly grew into a toddler and my worries moved on from sleep to be replaced by concerns about his tantrums. Here, the books, television experts and online chat groups told me to reward him when he was well behaved with stickers on a chart displayed on our fridge door, and to punish him by sending him for time out when he was ‘naughty’.
I struggled to make him stay in one place when we attempted time out, so one day, in desperation, I learned that if I shut him in our small entrance porch, he could not open the door handle and escape. For a week, I faithfully took him to the porch and closed the door every time he misbehaved. I would stand the other side of the door, while he howled and pleaded with me to let him out, timing two minutes – a minute for each year of his age, as advised. This seemed even worse than the sleep training we’d attempted. It physically hurt my heart to hear him begging me to open the door, and when his time was up, he once again clung to me, heaving big sobs for what felt like hours.
Once again, I abandoned the technique advocated by so many and decided that I just wasn’t strong enough to follow the advice. I had failed to sleep train my son and now I was failing to discipline him. I felt like a social pariah at baby and toddler groups, with the placid, good-sleeper babies and compliant toddlers. Eventually, I stopped going to them. Instead, I stayed at home, where I didn’t feel pressure to follow the popular childcare methods that produced such ‘easy’, ‘well-behaved’ children.
As the months and years went by, I learned that the best way to help my son (and his three siblings who followed) to sleep and to regulate his emotions, was through connection, meeting his needs and helping him to feel safe and secure. I began to learn his triggers and how to avoid them, and how to de-escalate him when his big feelings threatened to boil over. We were both so much happier. Slowly, I learned to trust my instincts to nurture my son and to place his needs above the opinions of others. And the more I did so, the more I resented the advice I had received – not just from books, strangers on the internet and the television parenting experts of the time, but from healthcare professionals, too.
Talk of ‘ignore, punish, praise and reward’ and teaching self-soothing was everywhere. Finally, I began to question the commonly held wisdom more than I questioned my own instincts and my son’s behaviour. I realised that the advice felt wrong because it was wrong. It was all about ignoring a child’s needs, not meeting them. It was all about disconnecting, rather than connecting. It was about compliance over compassion and forcing independence before meeting the primal need for dependence. The advice didn’t work for me. But perhaps most importantly, it didn’t work for my son.
I grew angry at the messages so prevalent in society which led me to try to raise my son in a way that felt instinctively wrong to both me and him. However, these experiences also planted a seed – one that would take a further five years to begin to sprout and another two decades to come to fruition. They became the fuel behind my desire to raise awareness of the way society discriminates against children and their needs in an attempt to prioritise the wants and wishes of adults. While I would dearly love to relive those early years free of self-doubt, to enjoy every precious snuggle with my son and to treat him with the full respect he truly deserved from the moment he was born, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today without them. The realisation of the terrible childism that exists in our society today, from the very moment a baby is born, is the inspiration for everything I have done in my professional life since.
In 2007, I started to run classes in my home, supporting parents to use what I called ‘gentle-parenting’ methods. We spoke about the importance of nurturance, empathy and meeting the needs of our children. We spoke of respecting babies and children as we would respect adults. Through word of mouth, these small classes quickly grew and I developed gentle-parenting workshops that I delivered, and still do to this day, to thousands of parents. I spoke of tackling sleep and tricky behaviour with a mindset of placing the child at the heart of the conversation, removing the discrimination towards children that features so heavily in most parenting advice.
In 2011, I began to write my first parenting book, with the aim of producing the book that I wished I had read myself as a new parent – one that honoured my baby’s needs and my instincts. That first book focused on gentle parenting from the very beginning of life, because that is where childism begins, and this is the reason why you will find two whole chapters devoted to the discriminatory treatment of children under three here. One book quickly led to another, and another, and now fourteen books on, I have become known as ‘the inventor of gentle parenting’. While the label is flattering, it isn’t true. I simply put into words what parents did for centuries naturally before the so-called experts came along and told them that they were doing everything wrong.
As I reflect on my personal and professional past, I realise that everything I have done and experienced to date has led me to writing this book. My passion for battling injustice and empowering parents to trust their instincts and treat children with the same respect we would show an adult is, ultimately, a calling to make as many people as possible aware of childism and how we can change it. This anti-childism message is the ‘why’ behind the ‘how to’ of the gentle-parenting messages I am so well known for, and which we will discuss later in this book.
This is an excerpt from my new book ‘Because I Said So! Why Society is Childist and How Breaking the Cycle of Discrimination Towards Children Can Change the World’.
You can get a copy of the book HERE.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith 
You must be logged in to post a comment.