Chez Spud

Once upon a time, when Bertie was a baby, my mother-in-law was reminiscing with me about her own children as babies and how ‘everything is different these days’. She wasn’t being snooty or draconian, simply passing comment on how recommended practices change from generation to generation. She mentioned that MrSpud was fed on Carnation Milk as a baby in the early 1970s, because that’s what was recommended (although she was slightly horrified in retrospect). To be honest, it seemed so unlikely that I thought she’d misremembered. I had no idea until very recently that, for generations, condensed milk was used as an alternative to breast milk until infant formula was invented. It seemed unthinkable that that sweet milk, a treat for Sunday tea with tinned fruit as a child, would ever have been considered an appropriate baby milk feed!

A few months ago, while looking through old papers, my mother-in-law came across the leaflet her health visitor had given her with information about how to feed Carnation Milk to your baby (produced by, er, the Carnation Milk Food Company Ltd) and sent it on to me. It’s a pretty hard sell as to why Carnation Milk is very similar to breast milk and is the Best Thing for Baby, not least because it induces ‘Restful nights for Mother and Father because Baby sleeps through’. Ah, the Holy Grail of early parenting…the relentless pursuit of ’sleeping through’…good to see some things haven’t changed.

Fascinatingly, the health visitor has written a ‘prescription’ for making up a bottle:

Carnation milk – 2/3 oz

Boiled water – 1 1/3 oz

Sugar – 1 teaspoon

OH MY GOD! So 2 oz (50ml) of fluid and 1 teaspoon of sugar? Like giving newborn babies crack or something. I bet MrSpud was lapping it up like a little kitten, no wonder he’s got a sweet tooth…it was hard wired in to his brain from birth.

In the envelope with the Carnation Milk leaflet was MrSpud’s uncle’s baby weight record card, from the early 1950s.  No mention of Carnation Milk, sugar, or crack this time…it’s all pro breastfeeding as you would expect given that there was little alternative:

Breast Milk is Baby’s Perfect Food. If Mother continues a healthy life with a well-planned day – exercise, fresh air, proper meals, plenty of fluids and avoids rushing before feeds – breast feeding should be satisfactory. Sponge nipples before and after feeds. Attend to daily action of bowels.

Not much mention of slobbing around on the sofa in front of trashy daytime telly in your PJs, I think they must have forgotten to include that vital step in establishing successful breast feeding. Along with a drip feed of cake, biscuits and PG Tips. Very puzzling about attending to the ‘daily action of bowels’. What does that have to do with breast feeding? I’m putting that down to a hangover from Victorian times and a general obsession with all things bowel related.

It’s a very helpful leaflet with lots of practical advise about sterilising, how to wash nappies, naps etc and some Dos and Don’ts. Including this delight:

Do hold baby out at regular intervals after feeding time

How fabulous. What on earth does it mean? Wind them? Dangle them out of a window by their legs? Take them out of a swaddle? Dunno.

Then it moves on to weaning, again with lots of practical help including advising that milk should be ‘boiled on delivery and kept covered in a cool place’ (no mention of getting a couple of tins of Carnation in). Apparently weaning was to begin at 4.5 months, at which point a couple of teaspoons of vegetable broth or egg yolk should be shoveled in before the midday feed. No mention of organic baby rice, baby led weaning, or Annabel Karmel and her bloody impossible to find ‘mouli’.

But the best bit is this cracking bit of advice:-

Rubber knickers are unhealthy. They should be used only on special occasions.

Well, yes. We can all learn something from that little gem.

But what I’m getting at, apart from a few cheap laughs about rubber knickers, is that times change so fast and so dramatically. MrSpud’s mum thought she was doing the right thing feeding Carnation Milk to her precious baby, with added sugar, because that’s what she was advised to do. Her mother, according to the weight card, was feeding MrSpud’s uncle cod liver oil and orange juice from birth back in the 50s. And was feeding him raw egg at 4.5 months, ‘holding him out at regular intervals’ and keeping those unhealthy rubbers knickers for high days and holy days only.

I have played it by the book, more or less, with my boys and have stuck to all the current advise in terms of exclusive breast feeding for 6 months, sharing a room with us until 6 months but in their own cot etc etc, no solid food until 6 months. But no doubt this will all be laughable in 30 years time. But, here’s the thing, I DON’T CARE. If it turns out they should have been weaned at 3 months and I was, in fact, starving them by holding out until 6 then so be it. If research shows there is no benefit to exclusive breast feeding beyond 6 weeks, or that it should be continued until the age of 5, or whatever…I couldn’t give a stuff. Because I did the right thing based on the evidence and advice I was given at the time, as he did my mother-in-law, as did her mother…and all the generations before.

As a parent, in the end, we are just doing our best because that’s all we can do. We’re not perfect, we don’t get it right all the time and some days we get it all wrong and we beat ourselves about it. But, hopefully, when we look back we’ll be able to laugh at the stuff we did which later proved to be ill-advised/daft/unnecessary and know that it didn’t much matter anyway because our children turned out just fine despite that. And, much more importantly, we’ll know that we did our very best and, at the time, we believed we were doing the right thing.

Now, I’ll step off my soapbox, fix myself a nice cocktail of Carnation Milk and sugar and pull on a pair of rubber knickers. For old time’s sake…

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