By Rosie Millard
Published in the Sunday Times of London April 25, 2010
Penelope Leach is understandably rather pleased with herself. Not just because her new book has generated a flurry of column inches but because, at last, the babycare expert has science on her side. Meaning that she can, and has, delivered a bloody nose to the likes of Gina Ford, whose Contented Little Baby Book, published in 1999, has encouraged mothers to impose a strict routine on even tiny babies, and advocates “controlled crying” as a way of getting newborns to sleep through the night.
Having always said that the Ford way was a nonsense and that if a baby cried, you should pick it up, Leach now has research from boffins to prove that controlled crying is positively dangerous.
“It is fact,” says Leach crisply, hazel eyes twinkling, auburn bob tossing. If you ignore an infant and leave it to cry itself to sleep night after night, the stress involved affects the development of its immature brain.
Her new book, The Essential First Year: What Babies Need Parents to Know, cites research that shows that when a baby “experiences acute and continuing distress”, its adrenal glands are stimulated into releasing cortisol, the “stress hormone”, which floods its body and brain.
“Brains that are growing and developing are very sensitive to an overload of cortisol,” Leach says. And, apparently, high levels of cortisol that build up over time can be toxic to a young baby’s rapidly developing brain.
“One is not saying every time a baby cries it will produce too much cortisol which will damage its brain,” says Leach. “But if there is a policy which allows babies to cry for quite a long time, and over quite a lot of nights . . .”
What? “The growing brain will stop developing expectations. And you will alter the brain stress thresholds,” she says. “So that a child to whom this happens a lot, may become a child who is liable to depression and anxiety. We can now scan living brains and cortisol lends itself very well to research because you can access it easily via saliva swabs.”
Leach says the research for her book ran to more than 150 scientific sources and quotes study after study, including one in which three sets of parents looked after babies in different ways.
The first group fed their children on demand, carried them around with them, slept with them, and responded instantly to their crying. The second group was attentive but strove for the beginnings of some separation. And the third operated on the Fordesque “controlled crying” basis, only picking children up to be fed when the routine allowed.
“And at three months the distribution of crying was as you would predict,” says Leach. “The babies who were picked up most, cried less.” She smiles warmly, but there is no hiding the steely triumph behind the Jaeger summerwear.
Leach, 72, whose husband Gerald died five years ago, lives in an immaculate house in Sussex that revels in a peerless view over the South Downs. She has a beauty, and an energy, that belies her age, and one suspects that a future based around being a grandmother (she has six grandchildren) is not probably an acceptable one. Rather like Joan Bakewell, you can’t even begin to imagine her being called Granny, let alone a diminutive like Penny, or, heaven forfend, Nan. “Why would I even think about retiring?” she asks. “I mean, who would I announce my retirement to?”
Indeed, she has brought something of a fighting spirit into a publishing zone usually associated with celebrity-oriented waffle. Her book tells it like it is. “Babies ruin sex ... at least for a while. They ruin finances, lifestyles and careers — especially women’s careers,” she writes. “In fact, becoming parents clearly puts people at a disadvantage compared with peers who have taken a no-children route.”
It’s certainly a sea change from all the Me and My Bump stuff currently clogging up the Waterstone’s parenting section. “Well, an awful lot of people don’t stop to think about what having a baby means,” she says. “And that they will have to look after it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the next 10 years.”
Whereas the Ford camp suggests how babies can be moulded into adult life, Leach advocates that adults must invent a new, parent-baby life for themselves. And that, she warns, is tough.
“An awful lot of partnerships break down in the first five years of a first baby. Parents have got to realise that life will change irrevocably. And that, say, going to Paris with their partner and a one-year-old is not going to be like going to Paris was with their partner last year.
“The post-industrial western world is just out of step,” she sighs. “Many parts of the world, including the whole of China, incidentally, consider it cruel to leave a baby on its own. They wouldn’t dream of leaving it crying alone in its cot.”
A doctor of psychology, she gave up her work as an academic when her son Matthew had meningitis, aged two. “I went back to work and it was one of the most misjudged things I have ever done. Of course I’ve done lots of jobs since, but always from home.”
She considers that as a childhood behavioural expert who is also a parent, she has a foot rather usefully in either camp. (Whereas Gina “let ’em cry” Ford is famously childless). “I actually do know what it’s like to be woken up 14 times a night,” says Leach. “And I have a very strong sense that the way to deal with that is not for the parent to impose adult desires on the baby, but to try and integrate baby and adult.”
She is as trenchant about breastfeeding as she is about picking up your baby when it is yelling. “I decided it was time to talk turkey about this. Bottle-feeding is not as good for your baby and it’s not as good for you as breastfeeding is. Fact.
“Everyone says, ‘Breastfeeding is better for your baby but if you can’t, don’t worry, he’ll be fine on a bottle’. Well, he will, but you need to know what you are giving up! The risk of leukaemia is much less. And breastfed children are more intelligent.”
She never bottle-fed her own two children, and when her daughter Melissa had her first of four children, she encouraged her never to have a bottle in the house. Did she? “No.”
Would she ever tap someone bottle-feeding a baby on the shoulder and advise them that in giving their child formula milk, they are ruining their intellectual growth? “No. I wouldn’t tell anyone off in public about anything but smacking. That is the only thing I think is wrong on every possible level.”
Did she ever smack her two? Leach, who has been campaigning for the illegality of smacking since 1988, looks at me with kindly dismay. “No. It never occurred to me. It never occurred to me to smack my husband, either.”
I’ll bet she feels like giving Gina Ford a wallop sometimes, though.
The Essential First Year:What Babies Need Parents To Know by Penelope Leach is published by DK (dk.com) at £13.99
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