How often did you stare into the screwed up, screaming face of your baby and think despairingly, ‘what on earth am I doing? I can’t do this – I am a terrible parent’? I thought that roughly once every three minutes during the first few weeks of my daughter’s life. I’d had a horrible birth – 48 hours of labour culminating in an emergency C-section, alarms clanging, a room full of doctors with panic in their eyes.
A consent form thrust at me as I lay paralysed from the waist down on a narrow hospital bed and the words, “You have one minute to decide, but in our opinion this baby is not fit for labour” spoken low and urgently. Fluorescent lights, the stench of hospital antiseptic and the bizarre sensation of having seven layers of tissue sliced open and a human being tugged out from deep inside her warm, dark home. Feeling so out of it that I briefly considered whether I’d somehow slid into a new dimension.
Little wonder, then, that I struggled to bond with my daughter. I became a statistic that I’d never expected to be: one of the third of new mums (32%, according to the National Childbirth Trust) who experience difficulties in bonding with their babies.
I spent more time sobbing in those first six weeks than I had in 36 years of life before her: visitors who dared to leave had to do so while I was distracted, otherwise they’d risk me practically clinging on to their ankles, begging them not to abandon me.
My poor daughter got handed to anyone who even looked in her direction while I busied myself (in tears, naturally) sorting laundry or staring at my pale, hollowed out face in the mirror, wondering what my baby had done to deserve such an awful mother. Hundreds of thousands of women experience exactly the same as me, every year. And yet we rarely talk about it. Childbirth is natural, we’re told.
You’ll fall in love with your baby the second you set eyes on them, and all the bad stuff – the agonising pain, the blood loss, the feeling out of control and pooing in front of your partner – all of that gets swept away in a wave of oxytocin and newborn milky head smells. Except when it doesn’t.
That’s why child psychotherapist Marie Derome wanted to address the myths we carry as parents – and use as sticks with which to beat ourselves. Her new book, What Your Baby Wants You To Know: The Art And Science Of Bonding With Your Child, looks at all the factors that go into bonding and what happens when our minds don’t do what they’re instinctively supposed to do.
“When you come out of hospital, or wherever you’ve had your baby, it’s like you’re given a pair of glasses,” she tells me. “The lenses are more or less blurry depending on a lot of things: your experience as a child, the way you were parented. If you had a good experience growing up then the lenses are going to be clear, you’ll be able to see your baby for who it is.
“But if your childhood’s been quite traumatic – let’s say you weren’t parented in an optimal way, it’s going to be more blurry. Your own difficulties and anxieties are going to stop you from seeing the baby for who the baby is.”
More than 200,000 mothers a year experience birth difficulties when push comes to shove. “It’s such a big problem – that’s one in three women in the UK,” Marie points out. “And that tends to be the same pattern across industrialised countries. Not every one of them will have PTSD, but still, it can have an impact on those next few steps.”
With one in four mothers developing a mental health problem as a result of their pregnancy or childbirth, the situation is critical. An investigation in 2023 found almost 20,000 women a year are being denied support by the NHS, in what Labour’s Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, formerly shadow minister for mental health, described as “an absolute scandal”. Between 4 and 5 percent of mums will go on to develop PTSD, which can have lifelong implications.
The effects of a poor parental bond on a child have been long studied: humans raised with inconsistent or neglectful parenting can become unhappy, insecure adults with mental health problems, less resilient to challenges and overall less likely to fulfil their potential, a 2016 study led by Professor Robert Winston found. And obviously, that’s music to the ears of anyone deep in the baby blues.
Marie sees the impact of bonding in her psychotherapy work. A mother of four herself – she is married to the TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, with whom she shares children Oscar, Freddie, Louisa and adopted daughter Chloe, the step-daughter of BBC journalist Kate Peyton who was shot dead in 2005 – Marie sees clients in her East Devon clinic who are at their wits’ end with their troubled teenagers.
“A lot of the time, their 15- or 17-year-old teen has issues you can trace back right to the beginning,” she reveals. “Those first two years, that’s when the brain is at its most plastic.”
From birth to toddlerhood is when we learn from our caregivers about the world, laying down neural pathways in the brain that form our foundation for behaviour and future learning.
“What you learn under the age of two is going to be your default position,” Marie explains. “That’s how you’re going to assess the world – is that person safe? Is this thing dangerous? If it’s dangerous can I ask for help? You give your baby their own pair of glasses, and their lenses are made by the way you’ve bonded with them. That’s how they’re going to look at the world.”
My daughter is now 16 months old and a happy, energetic toddler who loves being tickled under the chin and being chased up the stairs by the ‘Mummy Monster’. Those gales of giggles are a balm to the soul – I wish I could somehow travel back in time with a bottle of them, and tell that tearful, numb new mum to prise open the lid, listen and know it’s all going to be okay. But what advice does Marie have for those of us still in the trenches?
“Everything we do with them has an impact,” she says. “The more you can enjoy being with your baby, the better for your baby, because they will feel safe. The more you can be curious and try to put your needs on hold and put yourself in the baby’s shoes, the better.”
Start with talking to them, singing gentle songs and making eye contact – all this promotes the ‘love hormone’, oxytocin, in the brains of both parent and child. Mimicking their subtle facial expressions causes “extraordinary explosions” in their brains, says Marie, and makes them feel safe, protected and loved.
“What we need to remember is that bonding is a process,” she adds. “All these myths about falling in love – crazy love – from the minute you see your baby, yes, some people have that, but it doesn’t necessarily happen to everyone.” What’s most important, Marie says, is “wanting to know our babies, wanting to be with them, to be curious about them and what they’re experiencing”.
She suggests a simple exercise of wondering out loud what it is your baby can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. ‘Oh, you’re looking at those colours, they’re very bright! Can you feel the breeze on your skin?’
I try it with my daughter while we’re out for a walk, pointing out the new green shoots appearing in the ground, the pink blossoms peeking through bare branches, the noise from an aeroplane crossing the sky. I feel a bit of a tit, quite frankly, and get some suspicious looks from passers-by, but my daughter lights up from her pushchair, excitedly looking around to where I point and even waving to the plane above us with an chubby hand.
Back home she demands round after round of Wind The Bobbin Up, frowning when I suggest a hearty rendition of Old MacDonald and his menagerie of animals to break the monotony. “Krr-qoi?” she chirrups, her little fists circling each other, which is 16-month-old for: “Wind the bobbin up, Mother! Do it, now!” I acquiesce and am instantly rewarded with a toothy grin, the most gorgeous sight in the whole universe.
“Getting to know your baby will take time, like it does with any stranger,” Marie adds, “and the message to new parents is, ‘Maybe your first few weeks or months were difficult, but that’s OK. It’s never too late – babies are forgiving and they want to love us.’”
*What Your Baby Wants You To Know by Marie Derome (Headline Home, £20). www.mariederome.org
