Well-Being

When we start to bring mindfulness into our lives and to our parenting, our new awareness may lead us to reexamine and question many basic assumptions that we usually take for granted.

For instance, new parents are often asked: “Is the baby sleeping through the night yet?” Behind this question is a natural concern for the parents’ well-being. It is often predicated on the supposition that babies are supposed to sleep all night long. The underlying assumption may be that the parents’ needs should take priority.

This assumption often surfaces in the form of unsolicited advice to new parents, such as: “Make sure you have time alone together.” “Give attention to your relationship.” “Leave the baby with a sitter and have a date.” If we look closely at this, we may see that once again, the focus is predominantly on the parents’ well-being rather than on the child’s. Babies are seen as tough and resilient, while the parents are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Of course new parents do need to take care of themselves and each other, and they need the loving care and support of friends and family during this intense period of adjustment, when all sorts of new demands are being placed upon them. But it is important that in the process, the baby’s needs are not minimized or lost sight of. If we can act with some degree of awareness, we can try to find ways to take care of ourselves that are not at the expense of our baby’s well-being.

In deciding how we are going to parent and what our priorities are, we need to be aware of the paramount importance of building and maintaining trust and feelings of connectedness with our baby, both for his long-term well-being and for the long-term well-being of the family as a whole. As we noted in the chapter on empathy, scientists who study infants have found evidence that the most basic lessons of emotional life are laid down in the small, repeated exchanges that take place early on between parent and baby. Of all such intimate moments and exchanges, the most critical, according to attachment researcher Daniel Stern, seem to be those “that let the child know her emotions are being met with empathy, accepted, and reciprocated.” This is part of the process of attunement. Knowing that attunement in infancy forms the basis of a child’s later emotional competencies can motivate us to pay much greater attention, moment by moment, to how we actually interact with our children, especially when they are little, and to the choices that we make about their care.

Let’s say a baby isn’t sleeping through the night. The parents, tired and frustrated, decide to let the baby “cry it out” until she “gets the idea” and falls asleep. But consider for a moment what the baby’s experience of this might be. The baby and the parents form an interconnected whole. When distressed, the baby cannot meet its own needs and depends on the parents to soothe her and stay in touch with her. If those needs are not met and the baby is left without human contact at such times, the feelings of distress may be overwhelming, and shutting down may be the baby’s only option. Disconnecting and shutting down in the absence of human responsiveness is certainly something that adults experience as well. Why do we think it is okay for babies, who have far fewer resources?

Mindful parenting focuses on the mutual interrelatedness of the parents’ and the baby’s needs rather than seeing the baby’s well-being as in some way competing with our own. According to William and Martha Sears, “There is a biological angle to mutual giving.… When a mother breast-feeds her baby, she gives nourishment and comfort. The baby’s sucking, in turn, stimulates the release of hormones that further enhance mothering behavior.… The reason that you can breast-feed your baby to sleep is that your milk contains a sleep-inducing substance.… Meanwhile, as you suckle your baby, you produce more of the hormone prolactin, which has a tranquilizing effect on you. It’s as if the mommy puts the baby to sleep, and the baby puts the mommy to sleep.” Having a greater awareness of the many ways in which we are so highly interconnected, we might look very differently on many aspects of parenting—including nursing and having our baby in bed with us.

To parent mindfully does not mean that we won’t at times have strong feelings of frustration, or wish that a certain situation wasn’t happening when we feel as if our needs are in direct conflict with our baby’s. For example, there will inevitably be nights when our baby needs to be held or walked with at three in the morning. Our first impulse might be to resist what the situation requires of us. Intentionally bringing mindfulness and discernment to such moments, we can acknowledge our feelings of anger, resentment, and frustration, and also our feelings of empathy and understanding. In the spirit of seeing everything we face as part of the practice of mindful parenting, we can choose to see our resistance to meeting our child’s need in that moment, drop down below our either-or thinking, no matter how rational and reasonable it seems, and respond with greater wisdom from our hearts. This way of holding the present moment allows us to find truly creative solutions that do not come at the expense of our child’s well-being. Our well-being is nurtured as well, as we expand the envelope of what we perceive as our own limits.

Babies are not babies for very long. This formative stage in which they are completely dependent on us is relatively brief and very precious. During this time, their sense of well-being is intimately related to how attuned we are to what they are feeling and needing in each moment and the quality and constancy of our responses. So in parenting mindfully, we try as best we can to cultivate the kind of responsiveness that honors what our children most need from us.