4. Grandparents. Remember, grandparents are not just for Christmas, they are for the whole year round. Unfortunately, many young people are so desperate to get away from their parents that when they come to have children themselves they find they have moved 400 miles or more from free babysitting.
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| Understanding Your Crying Baby |
This is a waste of a valuable resource. Few grandparents have anything much to do, and quite a few have enough money to enable them not to do it. So they might as well be taking your baby off your hands for a few hours, and perhaps 'lending' you a tenner so you can go to the cinema. If they start droning on about your spoiling the baby or teaching it bad habits, threaten to put them in a home. (Your parents will always be much better with your children than they were with you. They will give them millions of treats, the same treats in fact that they used to deny you, just as your grandparents gave you the same treats they denied your parents. This pattern can never be broken.)
5. Dummy. The 'D' word. Vast hairy stigmas have attached themselves to this harmless implement. Just as people who know nothing about language are vaguely aware that a split infinitive is A Bad Thing, so everyone knows that dummies are the tool of the devil. Serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Dr Harold Shipman both sucked dummies well into their teenage years. Possibly because we have all seen them being shoved into toddlers' mouths by fishwives in supermarkets, we may associate dummies with a more primitive level of parenthood than that to which we aspire.
It's pure snobbery. Most childcare experts cannot bring themselves to recommend their use without a string of caveats (such as 'Don't use them at all'). But dummies - or pacifiers as Americans call them, with their matchless gift for euphemism - have been around for centuries.
You can see fifteenth-century dummies in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Only around a third of babies find a use for dummies, and it may only be a brief phase before baby finds and starts sucking its thumb. For some babies, though, dummies do the trick, and that has to be better than endless crying. The main thing is not to sweeten the dummy with fruit juice or honey (unless you don't mind having fat children with no teeth). Also, according to many books, you should sterilize the dummy before every use. Oh yes, you've definitely going to do that.
6. The cranial osteopath. This is not something your GP would necessary recommend, especially if he or she is the type who would rather put you on a course of antibiotics than work out what's wrong with you. But cranial osteopathy helped our youngest with his colic, and may do the job for you. The bones of the skull are not completely fused, even in adults. A cranial osteopath, by placing hands on the patient's head, claims to be able to feel minute rhythmic pulsations of the cranial hones and membranes. And if you remember how compressed a baby's skull is during birth, it makes sense that a little rudimentary connection of the head bones could improve matters.
As one practitioner has put it, 'The natural tendency of the body is to heal itself. The cranial osteopath facilitates this process by helping to balance tissue tensions between his hands. The body then makes its own correction to a more tuned state.' I have watched one in action: they barely seem to do anything, and you begin to wonder whether you haven't been ripped off by the new age equivalent of a fairground charlatan. But babies love it. Cranial osteopathy did not cure our boy of his colic; it eased it. At the time, though, that was more than enough. To find out more, you can check out Understanding Your Crying Baby.