Other parents judged my children’s lack of strict routine – 20 years on, I was right

In the Noughties, when my eldest children were young, I felt like a failure because I couldn’t stick to Gina Ford’s The Contented Little Baby Book routine. It was a rigid sleep and feed regime that stuck to strict timings throughout the day. We hired a maternity nurse (a nanny who helps look after small babies) and she said something that shocked me to the core. She told me when my son was a few days old that I needed to wake him up by 7am for a feed so that he’d get into the right routine for school. He was four days old! He had fallen asleep around 5am after an unsettled night with reflux, so I refused. Twenty years on, I wish I had been able to tell my 26-year-old self that no one “needs” a maternity nurse or Gina Ford’s routine, and if controlled crying feels wrong, you should stop. The maternity nurse would have been a fan (like Gina) of a “cry down” for babies from birth, which is a gentler version of controlled crying when you leave an overtired baby to self-soothe for 5-12 minutes. Controlled crying includes longer periods of self-soothing and starts in earnest from the age of five or six months. I would tell my younger self to always trust your maternal instinct because it’s the one thing in child-rearing that will never let you down. Shorts Gina’s routine was never a feature in our fairly happy but haphazard life. I had friends who would leave birthday parties early because they had to get back for naps – the look on their panic-stricken faces when they realised they’d be late for their strict routine was one of horror. I felt sorry for them and their children, who were having a nice time playing pass the parcel and rushed out the door as if it was an emergency – it wasn’t. I took an alternative view – call it the Mediterranean way – and tried to ensure that all my babies got their daily nap quota but rarely at the right time. It usually happened after they had been breastfed or pushed around endlessly in a pram. My youngest used to fall asleep at 5pm when we were driving home after picking his siblings up on the school run, the danger nap meant that no one got an early night. In Gina’s heyday, if you were a mother, you had to also be a follower of her routines. If not, you were either a hippy, a bad parent or possibly of reduced intelligence. It all felt quite judgemental. People thought I was “lax” or soft, and I suffered quite a lot of judgement bringing kids up in the Noughties as a result, particularly from older mothers (I was in my twenties when I had my first two kids). They thought I was too young, indulgent and irresponsible to have children – it really knocked my confidence. If you didn’t follow Gina’s cookery book suggestions, they would get frustrated when your child wouldn’t eat their exotic concoctions such as salmon teriyaki, aged three. One tiger mum once said my son “only eats sausages because it’s the only thing he is fed”. The vibe in the Noughties was: carry on with how your life was before you had kids and make the babies slot around you – but that never sat quite right with me. ‘I was in my twenties when I became a mother. I felt older mum’s judged me,’ says Sybilla On one occasion, when I was at my wits’ end, I tried controlled crying – letting him cry out until he stopped – with my eldest child when he was nine months. The result? He was sick all over his cot. The parenting experts told me to change the cot sheets, avoid eye contact and put him back dehydrated and upset, which seemed like madness to me. I binned control crying with the whole Gina Ford approach and trusted my instincts. If my babies were crying and unable to walk or talk, they likely needed me. My five kids are not “velcro children”. By this I mean they aren’t clingy and they are confident with other adults. I would say they can hold their own. They are able to navigate life without my constant input and thank goodness for that. I have often wondered if this might be because they stayed with me at home until they were two or three. Psychotherapist Kelly McDaniel says: “In the early months and years, babies need the first two essential maternal elements for secure attachment to form. Secure attachment comes from early nurturing and protection that requires the emotional and physical presence of a primary caregiver. A mother simply can’t meet these primitive needs when she’s gone.” McDaniel believes the first 1,000 days are critical and infants should be with their mothers – needless to say, I agree with this stance and will tell anyone who will listen. But this form of parenting, called attachment parenting, is not for the faint-hearted. It involves a lot of reading, sitting on the floor with bricks and toys, singing and soothing. Above all, attachment parenting requires time – something that the modern parent has in short supply, with many mothers being forced to return to work sooner than they’d like. Controversial psychoanalyst Erica Komisar also agrees. She says that in their first year, children’s comfort has to come before parents’ comfort. “If not, we risk raising a baby’s cortisol levels past the point of them being able to ever process any of that stress.” Komisar is keen to point out that parents should expect to be inconvenienced when they have a baby. She asks parents to have more compassion for crying children. As society, we wouldn’t shut the door in an adult’s face who was crying hysterically, she argues, so why would we do this to an infant? I sent two of my children to nursery when they were two years old, for a few hours a week, and have since lived to regret it. When I dropped them off, they just looked sad and lost. Various experts talk about the circle of security that widens with age – you have to start small if you want a well-adjusted child. The circle of security is a framework whereby children start exploring the world with their parent nearby and this expands naturally with age. Think of it like a widening leash that expands as the child gets older. A baby aged six months has a much smaller circle of security than a five-year-old, for example. Now that they’re older, I would say that my children are fairly resilient – they tend to bounce back after life’s inevitable setbacks and criticisms. “For a child, or indeed an adult, being resilient means they’re better able to withstand the difficulties life inevitably will throw at them from time to time,” says parenting expert Liat Hughes Joshi. “They’ll learn they can cope, they can adapt and that often (not always, of course) they can make things better themselves. And that even when they can’t fix a situation, they will recover sooner or later.” I am far from a perfect parent and have made many mistakes along the way – I have shouted and lost my temper. But when things go wrong, my children don’t fall apart and stay in their room all day and sulk. They might go off in a huff, but they usually appear soon (ish) afterwards with a change of disposition. They are pretty bullish and confident and when they were babies, I always picked them up when they were crying. Looking back, I think this was the secret to bringing secure, confident children, and I don’t regret that for a second.