Navigating Information Overload and Conflicting Advice in Motherhood
Knowing stuff can be great, and having information and research available to us about parenting and baby sleep can be a real privilege. But when does it feel like too much? When do we start to rely on information too much, and what does that mean for our own maternal confidence? Today we are going to explore how it feels to parent in the information age and how we can start to take back our power as being the experts on our children. I hope that you find this episode thought provoking and empowering.
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xx
TRANSCRIPT
Fiona Weaver 0:09
Hello love and welcome to the Manage chatters podcast. If you're keen to ditch all of the parenting shoulds and want to uncomplicate sleep and parenting, you are in the right place, through honest conversations with experts and each other, we will help you to cut through all of the noise and to love the heck out of your imperfect and authentic parenting. I'm Fiona, a social worker by trade. Now supporting families with sleep and parenting through my business, Mama matters. I'm passionate about parenting psychology, biologically normal infants sleep and infant mental health and attachment. I'm also a parent, and I am on a mission to normalise the shitshow that can be parenthood. I know that right now you might be trapped under a sleeping baby. Or maybe you've got your headphones in to soften the blue of the afternoon witching hour, wherever and whoever you are, I want you to know that you belong here. Now, let's have a chat.
Fiona Weaver 1:11
Knowing stuff can be great. And having information and research available to us about parenting and baby sleep can be a real privilege. But when does it feel like too much? When do we start to rely on information too much? And what does that mean for our own maternal confidence? Today, we're going to explore how it feels to parent in the information age, and how we can start to take back our power as being the experts on our children. I hope that you find this episode thought provoking and empowering. And please, if you do find it helpful, leave me a rating and review. For the month of June, I will be sending out personal little thank you things to people in the mail for leaving a rating and review. So I really, really appreciate it. There is so much information these days on everything but particularly around parenting, and particularly around baby sleep. I googled baby sleep today, it returned a really big number that I genuinely don't even know how to say maths is not my strong point. Okay, I did just have to google how many zeros are in a billion, but it is it returned 3,070,000,000 results on baby sleep in point five seconds. So this immediately speaks to both the blessing and the curse of having this information at our fingertips.
Of course, I never want to dismiss how privileged we are to have access to such resources. But at what costs. Not only do we have a buttload of information, we have conflicting information. And we have baby brain, which will go into another episode. And that's not an insult baby brain is awesome. But it's full of new information and we are tired and things are changing. Then we have trillions of websites to sift through to find the advice that works for us. You know that feeling of when you go to a restaurant, but there's too many options. It's kind of the same thing. When we look up baby sleep advice, there is just too much to choose from. And the more that we are inundated with these different approaches and programmes and strategies, the more confused we feel. And what's worse is that most of this advice is conflicting, it's coming up against one another. And this leaves us feeling even more confused and even less confident.
Whilst I was playing on Google I also searched When will my baby sleep through the night, which returned returned 720 million results. The top was titled in capitals from the experts and spoke about the stats on when babies are able to sleep through the night. Sidenote, their stats were a lot different to the stats that I had in my workshop where I went through all of the research, not all of it, but you know a lot. So the language in this blog is quite simplistic and leads to thinking that by 12 months all babies sleep through the night, especially if you've taught them to self soothe.
They also sell magic tricks throughout the blog with sleep sacks that mimic your soothing touch. When we read things like this, we start to think it must be easy. Why can't we do it? What are we doing wrong? That conflicting advice that you can read between websites and Instagram pages and books can leave our head spinning? No closer to the answers. We don't even know what we're seeking anymore. Any advice from friends and health professionals and your neighbour next door adds a whole other layer again, we need to be intentional about who we talk to you about what because the more we access information from a number of different resources, the higher it is likely that we are going to be getting a lot of different information.
When we feel overly confused about something, we tend to either do things that don't feel quite aligned with our instincts or our values, or we just become numb or frozen. And I think that that's often a really good indicator that we are searching too much or taking in consuming too much information is when it starts to feel debilitating or paralysing. The other thing is targeted marketing. targeted marketing preys on our weak spots and wreaks havoc on our time little noggins. baby sleep and raising children is big business, they make the money, honey. And look, I'm in this business as well, that's not lost in me. But I hope that you can connect with my ethical approach to supporting parents to find their confidence.
I will bring you a separate episode on how targeted marketing works. Because I think it's really important in being able to think critically of what we read and see when we're feeling tired, vulnerable. And dare I say desperate, we google lots of things, then the targeted marketing sees your weak spots and targets you reaffirming to you that you do indeed have a problem that must be fixed. And the only way for that problem to be fixed is to buy X Y Zed. So an example is say that I am in the business of helping parents to teach their babies how to sleep, give the gift of sleep, for example.
So if I know that their weak spots or their pain points might be that their baby doesn't self settled, their baby doesn't make sleep cycles, their baby is catnapping. What are they going to Google? How do I get my baby to link sleep cycles? How do I teach my baby to self settle, my baby is not self settling, then you can target those ads to these people who are Googling these things. And your ads might say baby not self settling, I've got the answer for you. Or I might target with an ad that says the reasons why you absolutely need to teach your baby to self settle or why your baby isn't self settling. And all of this stuff leads to the product that I will sell. So it's sneaky. And we need to be really aware of how these things work in order to be able to take control of it, which we'll talk a little bit about soon.
Fiona Weaver 7:01
But can you start to see the snowball effect of that you Google while while your baby isn't self settling, they target you with an ad about why you need your baby to self settle, you buy the programme, then probably another targeted marketing campaign is going to be targeting you for buying that programme. And then the cycle continues. And before you know it everything that pops up on Instagram and Facebook and even Google is about why you need to teach your baby to self settle what you're doing wrong and what you need to buy. One of the other problems with having all of this information and advice on tap is that we struggle to see ourselves as the experts on our own children. Now I want to preface this with I truly believe that having experts and professionals in this space or the space or season of which you're in is a privilege and should be drawn upon as as necessary or as appropriate. I also believe that parents are still the experts on their children and all of the information and guidance and support that they get is a bonus, it should complement their parenting it should add alongside their existing parenting. Does that make sense? So it shouldn't be that parents feel called to seek expert advice whenever anything comes up. It should be held gently alongside their own trial and error, their own tuning into their kids and their own flexible experimentation in finding what fits and aligns with their values. So of course, use these experts in the space, draw upon resources that you trust and you value, but hold it gently alongside your own maternal intuition and wisdom. Because when we seek answers and external validation and input, we get into a habit of not thinking so much for ourselves. When experts are telling us that we're doing it wrong, they send the message that we need the expertise to do parenting better, but you are the expert on your child. The more information we have, we also seem to set higher standards for ourselves. We might end up feeling unequipped unqualified and like we aren't cut out for it, we start to realise all of the holes in our knowledge, all of the gaps in what we are starting to think that we should know or need to know. And then it just feels a little bit overwhelming and like we just don't have what it takes. It takes us further away from using and drawing upon our own resources. When we have the answers at our fingertips and the answers are in quotes, then, we don't need to try so hard to hypothesise and hypothesising is actually such a huge part of building an attachment relationship with your child, that mentalizing that seeing the world through their eyes, that is such a beautiful part of the relationship and getting to know someone. But when we have all of this information, we look for the right answer rather than tuning into our child who is in front of us and feel actively experimenting and until something feels right. So not only does it take us away from drawing on our own resources, it also says that someone else knows better than us about our own child. But what are the positives to having all of this information and advice at our fingertips? Obviously, it is having information at our fingertips, I am sure that a lot of things have been previously missed in past lives. And in other cultures that don't have this access to resources and information. It's a way to share knowledge and to connect with people with like minded values to join groups and communities to feel part of something bigger. Absolutely, there are so many benefits to having all of this. But I want to talk to you about how you can get the best from it rather than letting it consume you and paralyse you. So let's talk about that. The first thing as with most things in life is becoming aware. So start to notice how you're feeling when you are researching something, start to notice what you are researching. If you could have worked it out yourself, why didn't you? Why did you pick up your phone and Google it before you thought about it for yourself. Start to notice when you think it's taking you away from the child in front of you, and taking you out of your expert role of being with your child. Here's a hot tip. And if anybody in the tech world or marketing world needs to prove me wrong on this, I'm very open to being proven wrong. But if you do your searches in an incognito window, it's called in Chrome, then I'm pretty sure that they can't track that. I think that that's pretty safe from tracking for ads and things. So if you don't want to be as influenced as you could be, maybe start using incognito windows for searching. Now I have been a first time mom before with a baby. And I know how many Facebook groups you can end up a part of, I need you to take charge of what groups you are part of how they make you feel, whether they are serving you or not. And I know so many people who have joined sleep programmes and things and then realise that they are not aligned with their values, and they can't seem to let go of the Facebook group. Even though every time they go in there, they feel not good enough or angry or conflicted in some way. So please take it from me. Go on unsubscribe from the groups that are no longer serving you. And the same goes for social media. So get on Instagram, and do a cold, all of these things that you used to follow. When you're in a different place. You don't need them anymore. They just make you angry or feel shitty. So go on, unfollow them now. And just notice when you are scrolling, what? What is coming up for you when you are looking at certain accounts? Or you squinting your eyes and being a bit cynical and a bit moody? Or are you starting to feel like you will never be like that or never be good enough for what's coming up for you. What are you feeling inside your body? Does it make your tummy go funny? Does it make your shoulders tense, just that noticing how you are feeling as you scroll through social media, I have never met someone who's regretted doing a massive social media call, you can always follow these people again, if I make you feel shitty, I want you to unfollow me, I'm totally cool with that I don't check my own follows at all. And you can always come back at a later time if you're feeling like you might be missing the best Instagram community there is. So the other thing to do is to maybe unsubscribe to a bunch of emails as well, because I know that so many of these baby companies might start to send you things about milestones. And that can send us into a spin as well. So take note of the emails that you're getting in your promotions folder and start to unsubscribe to ones that say, Oh, happy sixth month birthday by now your baby doesn't need night feeds and they should be self settling and all of that. So unsubscribe. The other thing is, do we need to talk about the tracking apps? Do you have those apps that track your baby's sleep? Maybe in the early days they tracked nappies and feeds and things as well. I remember trying to track Knox asleep when he was little, because I was very, very determined to find a pattern, but there was no pattern. And the tracking apps just made me miserable. So I want you to delete the tracking apps stop counting the weeks anyway, I'm getting into another realm here. But loser tracking apps is just another way that you can find ways of telling yourself you're not good enough. So then think about who is in your professional village or your village have resources online and stick to them. Stop going to all of these different resources and hoping for something different because not only will you find something different, you'll find 50 different things and you will be paralysed again. So if you have a child health nurse who you trust stick with her or him. If you have a GP trust, stick with them. If you have somebody who you go to for breastfeeding advice, somebody who you go to for sleep advice I see you trust somebody you go to for child development advice, just stick with those people in your circle and those resources. So be really intentional about who you put in your little cyber village. become really familiar with your parenting values. And I'm going to do a separate podcast episode on this as well. But be really mindful about what's important to you what's important to your family, and what your negotiables and non negotiables are, so that when you are finding this advice and information from other resources, then you can start to screen out really consciously. Does this align with my values? Does this feel right for me, and the last thing, and potentially the biggest thing is get to know your child, start tuning into them, instead of looking for resources and expert advice. Look to your child, there are going to be plenty of times in your parenting life, that you need the support and guidance from a professional. Again, I'm definitely not dismissing that. But I want you to be intentional about who you go to for what, and always make sure that that person is empowering you as the expert on your child. So like I said, their advice and guidance should be used to complement your parenting because nobody knows your child like you do. And if you meet a professional who makes you feel like shit, like you're not cut out for it, like you don't have all the answers, then they are not the ones for you. So I hope this has been helpful. I want you to go and do all your jobs. Now go and do a social media call. Go and check your email inbox. Be mindful of what you're Googling. Be mindful of how you're feeling whilst you're on social media and be mindful of how you are feeling in accessing research and information. Think about who is in your circle and your and your little village of supports and keep checking in with your own values as well. Does this align with my values? Does this feel right for me? If it's not making me feel good, I'm gonna let it go. And loser tracking apps
Fiona Weaver 17:02
thank you so much for listening to mama chatters if you enjoyed this episode, let's continue the conversation on Instagram at MAMA matters.edu. Be sure to share this app with your family and friends. And don't forget if you liked it, please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again and I will see you next time.
