Fifteen years ago, Portia and Guy Kennaway were struggling to cope with a
two-year-old and a hungry five-month-old baby, who screamed incessantly for
food and would not sleep. At their wits’ end, they called on Gina Ford, a
maternity nurse little known outside parenting circles, for help.
“She saved my life. I’d gone down to 7st and was on the point of complete
collapse,” says Portia, shuddering at the memory. “I couldn’t get him to
sleep. He used to wake up every 45 minutes and just wanted to eat all the
time, and would get absolutely hysterical.
“She’s like the Red Adair of motherhood. She came to cap that oil well and she
certainly did. Whether it’s marked my son for life only time will tell, but
she saved me.”
Within three days the younger child was sleeping like the proverbial baby.
Over the next three weeks, she gossiped indiscreetly, distracted Portia from
her unhealthy self-criticism and jollied the couple along. During those
weeks Ford asked Guy, a published author, whether she should follow other
clients’ advice and write a book on her methods of dealing with babies.
Having struggled to find a publisher himself, Guy cautioned against it.
Five years later Ford, a childless farmer’s daughter from Scotland whose only
qualification is to have looked after more than 300 babies belonging to
other people, produced The Contented Little Baby Book, which has sold
more than half a million copies and placed her among Britain’s most popular
parenting gurus.
Her methods require adhering to a strict routine that has mothers feeding,
expressing and putting their baby down for naps at regular intervals. It is
unforgiving and goes head to head with the idea of a parent following their
baby’s agenda. It’s no exaggeration to say that her advice divides the
nation. Whether they are mothers who have hurled her book across the room at
4am when their baby has screamed incessantly for hours, or those who have
found that their darling settled into a feeding routine within moments of
starting Ford’s programme, every new mother has an opinion. As Ford prepares
this week to mark the tenth anniversary of her original work with the
publication of The Contented Baby with Toddler Book, arguments over
her parenting advice remain as noisy as ever.
Unlike ten years ago, though, when the notion of regimenting a baby’s routine
felt alien in Britain, the debate today is somewhat less hysterical, with
other parenting experts admitting that even if they find Ford’s approach
extreme, they understand why her contribution to the whole issue was
important.
When my daughter was born 18 months ago, Ford’s book drove me to tears within
days of giving birth. Her routine apparently allowed me out for only 45
minutes a day, in between feeding my daughter, changing her and expressing.
No account was taken for going shopping, washing or cleaning the house. I
remember weeping over the fact that I did not have a sofa in Martha’s room,
as advised by Ford. Her latest work is more forgiving: it tells mothers that
if they don’t succeed immediately with the routines they’re not a failure,
and allows them to go shopping and prepare lunch for themselves and their
toddler.
Fiona Barlow, who trains postnatal teachers for the National Childbirth Trust,
is no stranger to the visceral response that mentioning Gina Ford’s name can
provoke. While Ford’s prescriptive advice is a source of sanity for some,
she says, others may be pitched into the depths of despair when they fail to
meet her exacting demands to be dressed and breakfasted by 8am after the
latest night of no sleep and expressing within days of giving birth.
“In France or Ireland, you may be kept in hospital for up to a week after
giving birth, and in Holland everyone is entitled to a maternity nurse, but
here women are abandoned into motherhood,” Barlow says. “Mothers are asked
to parent on their own, and it’s that isolation and need for something
familiar that she’s tapped into. Also a book that promises a ‘contented
little baby’ is such a huge carrot, because that’s what we’re all striving
for.”
While the principles of getting a baby into a routine are not new and it is
generally accepted that children who have regular hours are, yes, more
contented, Barlow says that in the early days mothers do need to be
responsive to their baby’s needs. She fears that sometimes Ford’s rigid
advice on feeding a baby could make a child insecure.
But Ford’s no-nonsense approach has made her a household name not just in
Britain. Her guide, or CLB as it is known, is published in the United
States, and translated into Spanish, Hebrew, Dutch and Chinese. Of course,
in the pantheon of parenting gurus, Ford is the latest in a long line,
starting with Mrs Panton’s book The Way They Should Go in 1896,
to Truby King’s “Breast-fed is best fed” campaign in the 1920s and Dr
Spock’s revolution in 1946, when he threw out the strict routines that had
reigned in nurseries for years and championed the cuddly mum.
Since then mothers have sworn by Sheila Kitzinger, Penelope Leach and Tracy
Hogg, but according to Linda Blair, the clinical psychologist and mother of
six (including three stepsons), Ford simply struck it lucky. Venturing into
the parenting field herself with a new book called The Happy Child,
out in August, she believes that many of today’s parents brought up by hippy
parents are keen to accept the strict rules they were seeking as children.
“A lot of these people felt at sea, so turned to Gina Ford. But just as the
laissez-faire parenting was extreme in one sense, this is extreme in the
other,” she says. “Their only common ground is that both systems were
focused on the needs of the parent, but I don’t think that raising a child
with any universal rulebook will work, because we’re all different.”
Doctors, parenting counsellors and grandmothers despair at the vast amount of
shrill information screamed at mothers today. Instead of being able to
“trust yourself” as commanded by Dr Spock, mothers often feel they cannot
trust themselves in the early stages to do the right thing at all — partly
because they are having babies later, relatives live farther away and the
sense of a community sharing the care of a newborn baby is long gone.
And it is this change in culture, where women work and have to rely on their
own resources more than ever — which Ford has not only permitted but
encouraged — that is the real reason she is so reviled, insists Frank
Furedi, the sociologist and author of Paranoid Parenting.
“If you are a professional woman and you have to get up at 6.30am, you don’t
want to stay up all night and practise feeding on demand. So a substantial
group of women’s realities contradict the received wisdom about responsible
mothers having to be with their child 24/7,” Professor Furedi says. “Gina
provided a strategy for women to continue their career and follow their
instincts. She gave them permission and a structure how to do it.”
By questioning the dominant wisdom of parenting, she has provoked lasting
acrimony. Although Furedi insists that Ford is not the “Einstein of the
parenting world”, he has talked to enough “secret followers” who adopt her
advice to know that she appeals to a wide constituency.
“The problem now is that we have a more pluralised parenting culture where
more parents do things differently, so the way we look after our children is
as much a statement about ourselves as it is about our child. It kicked in
in the mid-1980s but has become more and more powerful ever since,” he says.
“We have been forced to develop our own identity through our parenting
style, so if someone has a different approach we see it as an annihilation
of our identity and a calling into question of who we are.”
Louise Silverton, the deputy general secretary of the Royal College of
Midwives, agrees that Ford has come into her own with the breakdown of
community and the swiftness with which many mothers are sent home after
giving birth — which in London can be as little as six hours — and hardly
enough time to learn how to feed your baby. “We joke that you’re lucky if
you stay long enough to deliver the placenta. But with the shortage of
midwives, the concentration is now on care in labour, and postnatal care has
been pared down to the barest minimum,” she says.
Ford was not the only person to step into this void. Since the publication of
her first book, interactive mothering websites have become increasingly
popular as free forums for swapping tips on all the anxiety-inducing
milestones that come with newborn babies. They are also sources of comfort
to sleep-deprived, often lonely mothers, so much so that some are even
asking whether the days of the parenting guru could be numbered.
In 2007 Ford successfully sued Mumsnet for libel, after site members posted
allegedly defamatory comments about her. Although her book was at the time
one of the best-rated on the parenting site, Mumsnet was forced to pay a
five-figure sum in an out-of-court settlement.
Since then, the website has gone from strength to strength, as have advice
sites such as Babycentre and Netmums, which recently received hundreds of
thousands of pounds of public money, as the Government recognised mothers’
needs for a 24-hour advice forum.
“The reason why sites like ours have grown exponentially is because of the
lack of professional help and advice and the lack of a real life community,”
says Justine Roberts, the founder of Mumsnet,
which has 850,000 monthly users and 20,000 internet conversations a day.
“People are isolated and we fill that hole. They are not judged in a way
they could be in real life and it is free.”
Some believe that the ideal would be a blend of the two, where mothers could
seek expert advice online, in real time. Ford answers questions on her
website, but at £60 for a year’s membership it is an expensive service.
Roberts does not think that sites such as hers will replace the gurus, but
instead they will coexist.
“There’s still a need for experts. We’ve had people diagnosing pre-eclampsia
but the first thing they’ll say is get down to A&E now. And while
silly remarks can be made, with so many well-informed mothers — 75 per cent
are degree educated — nothing silly or dangerous goes unnoticed for long.
Ours is a community, though, and what no parenting guru can offer is the
chance to make friends or empathise when your two-year-old bites another.”
The case for, by Anjana Ahuja
All babies are individuals with different needs, right? Er, no. Babies, I'm
afraid to say, are much of a muchness. They have a set of needs that must be
met to prevent them from lapsing into default unhappy mode: bawling their
tiny eyes out. And those basic needs are simple: to be fed, to sleep and not
to be bored.
No, I haven't forgotten that they also need to be loved. But it was out of
maternal love (and sleep deprivation) that I quickly put my two children
into routines. Gina was my companion and, while I didn't follow the military
timing to the second, it was to her book that I turned most often. When my
daughter woke at night, when my son refused his daytime nap, Gina had been
there, done that, got the poo-covered sleepsuit. I did what she advised
because a) it worked, and b) I could see no reason to reinvent the wheel.
And they thrived. My daughter slept through the night at six weeks, my son at
ten weeks. And once they slept, I slept. I was no longer a shouty, exhausted
harridan barely able to shake a rattle before bursting into tears. And a
baby who sleeps well, eats well and plays well. When my mother-in-law, who
has six xhildren, commented on how "easy" our children were, it
was hard not to feel smug (and relieved that relatives would be happy to
babysit). My routine-hating friends ended up knackered, with screaming tots
bolted to their bosoms, moving slowly and painfully towards a Ford-like
routine anyway.
Why does GIna Ford attract such opprobrium? There is a bizarre belief that
babies are fully formed human beings that can know their own minds (it's the
flip side to the growing infantilisation of adults). But they are not
mini-adults. Isn't that what parenting is all about?
The case against, by Carole Midgley
Write a piece explaining why you hate Gina Ford’s methods, says my editor.
What — in only 300 words? I could write an opus on the reasons why I believe
them to be brutal, weird and about as natural as Botox. But since we must be
brief let’s cut to the chase. Gina Ford’s methods are wrong because they
treat the baby almost as if it were the enemy. “Controlled crying” I can’t
see as anything other than an attempt to break the infant’s spirit telling
it: “Don’t waste your breath crying because Mummy ain’t coming.” Rather than
accepting the truth that having a baby is a momentous life event in which
nothing will be the same again Ford’s approach seems to think that what’s
paramount is ensuring the parents return to their prepartum lifestyles asap.
Let’s be clear: a great many parents say Ford “saved their life”. That’s great
for them. Pity we can’t ask the babies what they think about being woken
every 2-3 hours to be fed because The Routine says so. Sounds like torture
to me.
But the most mystifying thing is that this approach defies all human instinct.
Parents abandon what their hearts and centuries of genetic development tell
them and instead follow a stranger’s cold plan like Ikea instructions for a
bookcase.
Cuddling your baby to sleep is the loveliest thing; going to it when it cries
seems pretty fundamental to how the species survived down the ages. Yet Gina
doesn’t even want us to make eye contact with them during the night. How odd
is that?
And now for the thing we’re not supposed to throw at Gina — that she’s
childless. Obviously you don’t need to have had your own kids to be a loving
carer. But the fact is I can harden myself to the sound of someone else’s
crying baby but never could to my own. That’s nature’s way of ensuring that
you don’t ignore your dependent offspring when it needs you. And babies
aren’t scheming manipulators trying to ruin your life: they cry for a
reason.
I believe books such as Ford’s focus mainly not on the needs of the child, but
the convenience of the parents. In fact let’s call it The Contented Parents
Book.
