‘Keep calm, it’s only a baby’

‘Can you remember a time before the cult of motherhood? A time when parenting wasn’t viewed as a cross between competitive sport, a money-spinning, cash-in opportunity and the root cause of 95 per cent of contemporary neuroses?
A time before Yummy Mummies, Tiger Moms and SAHMs (stay-at-home mums), mummy bloggers, mumpreneurs, $2000 prams and the school-gate fashion scene; before women posted videos of their developing home pregnancy tests on YouTube, threw baby showers of such epic proportions that they’re renamed Power Showers, and declared the sex of their unborn child by cutting into a custom-baked cake, the interior of which has been food-dyed either blue or pink, by way of a formal announcement? A time before Baby Madness engulfed our society wholesale?

Me neither. General consensus suggests Baby Madness has held us in its thrall for little more than 15 years. It’s reasonable to say that in that time par-enthood has been reimagined as a consumer opportunity. All this would be fine, I suppose — everyone needs a hobby. Except great swaths of research suggest modern parenting is not making us at all happy.
Various extensive studies produced over the course of the past decade repeatedly demonstrate that parents experience more stress and lower happiness levels than their childless equivalents.
In 2004, the Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman published a survey of 909 working Texas women, who ranked childcare at No 16 on a list of 19 pleasurable activities .
In 2010, having studied tens of thousands of British families, social economist professor Andrew Oswald announced: “It’s not that children make you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make you more happy.” Unless, he added, you have more than one child, at which point “the studies show a negative impact”.
American sociologist Robin Simon maintains: “Having kids doesn’t make you happy. Sociologists find that as a group, parents … experience depression and emotional distress more often than their childless adult counterparts. Parents of young children report far more depression, emotional distress and other negative emotions than non-parents.”
Journalist Jennifer Senior’s new book, All Joy and No Fun: the Paradox of Modern Parenthood, considers these statistics in depth and contemplates parenthood from a perspective of how children affect their parents’ lives and happiness, rather than the other way round. It is causing controversy, outrage … and recognition.
Because while we struggle with these sorts of findings — which fly in the face of the human imperative to procreate, never mind the deep-rooted cultural assumptions that a fulfilled life must by defin­ition involve children — we also know, from anecdote and experience, that there is at least some truth in them, don’t we?
We know that modern motherhood is defined by guilt, judgment and anxiety, by shifting rules and shifting goalposts, by fads and trends that conflict horribly with each other, by debate and antagonism drummed up in the media and disseminated via the toxic tendrils of the competitive motherhood movement.
We know our decision to breastfeed in public or not breastfeed at all, to go back to work too soon or stay at home too long, to name our child Xavier and hothouse him through primary school and keep him away from all sugar/touchscreen devices/non-organic substances until he’s eight years old, will be challenged endlessly by our friends, family, daytime TV discussion segments and the state.
How, given the circumstan­ces, could parenthood lead to anything other than anxiety, neuroticism, indecision and misery?
What’s going on, I ask Ellie Cannon, a GP, newspaper columnist, broadcaster and mother of a nine-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy. “Basically, we’ve gone a bit mad,” she says.
Cannon’s Keep Calm: The New Mum’s Manual was written and published with the express intention of undoing some of the damage wrought by 15 years of contradictory advice, of hard sells from politicians hoping to appear mummy-friendly and companies hoping to cash in on the mummy dollar, and of the judgment and/or approbation of everyone else.
“It’s not a baby book,” Cannon says. “It’s a mission. A mission to take back motherhood, give it back to women and mothers, so that people stop telling us what to do all the time. I want mothers to take the power back.”
Cannon believes that much of our obsessive, anxious and obnoxiously competitive mothering ­issues stem from “too many rules! Too much information. And guidelines and encyclopedias and parenting ‘pseudo-experts’ and government and politicians and everyone! And some of those rules, a tiny, tiny minority, are really ­important, such as vaccinate your babies. But it’s a tiny percentage.
“There’s this whole other wave of bombardment! When we’re ­allowed to go back to work! When we’re allowed to have sex with our husband! When we’re allowed to do this, when we’re allowed to do that! Women for generations have been coping fine with their ­instincts, we now think we’re terribly empowered, yet — are we? If at every juncture someone’s telling us what to do?
“You can’t buy a toy in this country without this long list of all the things this toy is going to do for your child. I just want toys to say on them: ‘This is a red piece of plastic; might be fun.’ I don’t want it to say: ‘This is going to help socialisation’ …’’ She breaks off. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m ranting.”
Keep Calm is, Cannon hopes, the “last baby book anyone will ever need to buy.
“I’ve written a baby book to tell people not to buy baby books.”
It’s certainly a straightforward number, which extols the virtues of a few very basic principles on child rearing (vaccinate them, put them to sleep on their backs, “Um … Feed them! Ha! That’s it!”) while otherwise encouraging women to re-engage with their instincts, to trust themselves and be honest about their experiences of motherhood, rather than indulging a filtered Twitter and Facebook-friendly fantasy of how it’s playing out.
“And ignore the internet. The internet is a massive issue. Anybody can be an expert, anyone can set themselves up as an expert. There are a lot of people who like dishing out rules. A lot of people who like being experts.”

I do not have children. I felt — strongly, and from a really very young age, 7 or so — that I didn’t want them. Despite being told that I’d change my mind as soon as my friends and contemporaries started having kids, or when I met the right man, or when my biological clock kicked in, I haven’t.
As a result, I’ve had a ringside view of the evolving Baby Madness scene. I’ve watched formerly hard-bitten, wry friends, colleagues and contemporaries form strong opinions about the importance of baby massage and the right kind of muslin. I’ve seen some lose their minds over imagined issues with their baby’s weight, others come to believe it’s acceptable to show me videos of their C-section on their smartphones. I tap them for stories of the absurd mothering they’ve witnessed, which they give up joyfully, because no one enjoys sending up mothers quite as much as other mothers do.
“OK,” says a colleague. “There was this one woman in my parenting group who told me, solemnly, that she’d had to take her daughter away from the nanny because she didn’t think ‘she was stimulating her enough’. So now the daughter’s in daycare, which is great ­apparently, because she’s ‘finger-painting and so on’ … She is eight months old.”
Another tells me she was somewhat alarmed when her seven-year-old turned to her in the supermarket and said: “It’s a nightmare! I can’t see the organic!”
My newest guilty obsession is a brilliant Twitter feed called @Highgatemums, which documents extreme incidents of middle-class mothering witnessed or overheard in London’s upmarket Highgate. Among my favourite postings are: “Who WE are is who our CHILDREN are. You see?”
And: “A mother has just shouted: ‘Sebastian! You know what kind of people eat crisps!’ ”
And: “Overheard in cafe. Bearded father: ‘Sorry, I asked for a soya babycino.’ ”
The Times