A major theme of the early weeks is feeding. Indeed, for months the mother's concern for the baby tends to be focused on what, how muck and how often it eats. A baby that is feeding and growing ‘well’ is a prize for the mother's efforts, a tangible token of her love and work. Conversely, a baby who gains weight more slowly than it ‘should’, and who perhaps cries a lot and seems unsatisfied, is a thorn in the mother's flesh, a sign of maternal failure. Of course such an attitude is fanned by the professional advisers of baby feeding - paediatricians, health visitors and so forth - who take it as axiomatic that the baby's growth and happiness must depend on a mother's care.

A new mother listens to these advisers, but she also listens to those who have reared babies without the benefits of professional training: mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters, friends. And she listens to her baby, who may have ideas of its own. What goes into the mouths of babies is a mix of all these ingredients, a compromise between the different messages. The baby (its size, sleeping habits, contentment, bowel movements) becomes the only valid arbiter of success.

Breast is Best?

Before a first baby is born, breast versus bottle is a theoretical question only. Classes may be attended, books read, friends and relations talked to, but any decision made is apt to be challenged by the reality of a screaming infant with gums like an iron clamp, a bottomless stomach and a rage of quite unimaginable proportions. Similarly, notions about when ‘solid’ food should become part of the infant's diet may be thrown out with the baby's bathwater once a real baby's real appetite becomes a factor to be reckoned with; the way to a baby's heart is, after all, through its stomach. One result of this conflict is that nearly a third of mothers do not feed their babies on the kind of milk (human, cows’) they intended, and more than half introduce solids earlier than they planned to.