Dear all,

After reading Julia's and Heather's post, I started thinking about the guilt-issue again.
I do not fully agree with Julia's statement that Heather's reasons are mainly about guilt; I think they are about many different kinds of feelings.
Julia writes: "A mother who exclusively breastfeeds for 6 months and countinues to breastfeed past 2 years is NO BETTER than the mother who supplements with ABM from day one."
Is this indeed true...? What is the general idea... that all parents are equally good, no matter how they raise their kids?
What constitutes 'raising a child': feeding it? Cherishing it? Offering the child opportunities to reach the top of Maslow's pyramid?
How will a child achieve that? What needs need to be fulfilled for a child to develop its full potential in every sense, physical as well as psychological?
And if all parenting is equally good... why would any parent try to learn any additional parenting skill or invest in whatever you can think of? Does the way we act make no difference...?
Even if you cannot judge parents by one issue with regard to their way of upbringing their child, the way they do it is of course made up of many habits.
I think we can see a gradual difference: one who does *all things right* (admitted: impossible! hahaha) will bring forth a different kind of person than one who does * all things wrong* (impossible also).
There are a thousand shades of grey in between these extremes and some issues in raising a child are more important for its personal development than others.

An few analogies:
Is a parent who does not scold a child a better parent than one who does?
Is a parent who feeds a child healthy foods a better parent than one who regularly offers fastfood?
Is a parent who does not hit a child better than one who does?
Is a parent who leaves a child room for its own thoughts and wishes a better parent than one who does not?

I've said it before and I want to say it again: guilt only arises when you know you could have made a better choice.
Other feelings should not be called guilt, but sorrow, sadness, grief. "If only I had known... then I would have... and now I cannot make things undone..."
You cannot chose to do something you don't know anything about; you cannot chose one option over the other if you don't know the difference.
Pursuing certain routines, knowing they have a better, attainable alternative, however, rightly causes guilt, in my opinion.
That is how humanity progresses; that is why many/most countries don't have a death penalty anymore and don't burn witches or own slaves.
Knowledge is the problem: many people *do* know there is a better alternative and yet they continue with whatever they were used to (not only with regard to infant feeding).
Lacking certain knowledge may cause guilt and/or grief to stay away: you can't regret or mourn something you didn't know existed or didn't know was wrong.
Of course, many of us do the wrong thing because we were raised like that and did not develop capabilities to act differently.
That is why we always have to keep learning and why self reflection is so important.
Just the other day I had to settle a difference between our two youngest daughters (16 and 14) on the one side and a shop owner on the other.
There was a communication problem and Miss 16 did not want to pay the amount the shop owner charged her.
I felt she had a point, but settling differences is not going to really work if I start screaming or getting angry.
I went to the shop and set out to stay calm and exceed myself. I wanted to respect her ánd the shop owner.
I know that I can get nasty and impatient in situations like that and know that has something to do with my past, my childhood, my mother.
I don't want to hand that trait down to my girls, though! I have to and want to set them an exemple I did not always have myself.
Do I feel guilty about past situations in which I failed...? No. I feel sad that I wasn't able to do then what I try to achieve now.
We need to learn to forgive ourselves in order to improve the way we deal with things. We desperately need a well working conscience to do that!
Guilt is valuable guide, showing us the other one's pain; it shows us the exact point where we could act differently the next time around.
This is something completely different than feeling sad or lonely or unheard.
I think guilt and sorrow are often showing up together: if we would not have caused pain or suffering and felt sad about it, we would not feel guilty.
This last weekend, I started reading 'Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves', written by Naomi Aldort. Very interesting.
Part of it is about active listening (about which I read a lot years ago, following the books by Thomas Gordon), but part of it is specifically about our own feelings.
They often get in the way of doing the right thing, for all sorts of reasons, partly mentioned in Heather's little list.
I think most of what Heather said, was about the outer appearance of underlying feelings of shame, of fear, of loneliness, of hopelessness, of lack of trust... but not about guilt!
I agree with Julia that as lc's, we have to do the hand-holding and address those *underlying* feelings. Guilt usually has an underlying feeling as well, I think.
We may not always be the parent we want to be, but in many circumstances, when we try our very best, we are good enough parents.
That doesn't take away the fact that other parents may be better parents. I'd rather not see that truth denied, even though it hurts me too, every now and then.
I would even go as far as saying that stating that all parents are equally good is one of the Gordon-communication hinderances (praising, soothing, diminishing feelings).
Denying someone his/her feelings of regret, remorse, grief, guilt, sadness is not taking the intensity seriously and robs that person of a chance to a process of exploring those feelings, of letting go after the tears.
Don't we all want to prevent making mistakes and hope to give our children all that they deserve because we love them so much? Don't we need to constantly learn to get as close to that ideal as possible?
And isn't that what our whole profession is about... explaining to parents why closeness is better than separation, why frequent feeding is better than long intervals, why attending to a crying baby is better than leaving it to cry it out with extremely high cortisol levels... and why not breastfeeding is less good than breastfeeding...? If all that were not true... what the heck are we spending so much time on...? :-s

As for the nazi-qualification... it is sad that people feel that they need to qualify us like that in certain situations. This may partly be due to societal views on the (lack of) importance of breastfeeding.
If a government institutes a non-smoking culture in public buildings... is that a non-smoking-nazi-government...? Or is it a government that actively accommodates those who healthily chose not to smoke...?
I don't remember who it was, but recently I read a post from a Lactnetter who let the audience rage first, before going on with her lesson (Nikki, was it you...?).
That raging makes all kinds of feelings surface, most of them probably with an element of grief. Not being able to deal with grief can disfigure that feeling into very different things, even into overt hatred ("You nazi!").
Maybe we should not let that label stick to us. Maybe we should remain calm and try to investigate where that feeling comes from, really comes from.
If we use our counselling expertise, we might come across all kinds of sociocultural issues and we might be surprised...
I think unmasking guilt for what it often is (sadness about what has been lost, about opportunities missed) and affirming guilt when parents righteously express it (in order to cooperatively find where the problem is and work on solving it), could be one of our major achievements in helping parents.

Warmly,

Marianne Vanderveen IBCLC, Netherlands

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