Sing or read to your belly
Newborns can recognize a song or story they heard in the womb.
In a quiet place, pregnant women read a three-minute story excerpted from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. The women read out loud twice a day for the last six weeks of pregnancy.
After the babies were born, researchers gave them pacifiers attached to machines that could measure their sucking. Stronger sucking triggered audio of their mother reading the story. Weaker sucking triggered audio of her reading an unfamiliar story. The newborns sucked more strongly. They wanted to hear their story! (Or, at least, its familiar rhythms and intonations.)
Your baby, too, likely will find familiar words or songs to be soothing. You can try reciting them as soon as baby arrives.
While you’re still pregnant, don’t bother reciting anything to baby until your third trimester. Before that, baby can’t hear you.
BILLIONS OF BERRIES FOR BLACKBERRY JAMBLE
My husband read Jamberry, by Bruce Degen, each night to my belly in the last couple months of my pregnancy. Turns out baby can’t really hear dad’s voice before birth. (We didn’t know!) Mom’s voice—resonating through and amplified by her body—is what baby can hear over the din of whooshes, sloshes, gurgles, and heartbeats in the womb. Still, my husband’s reading provided a lovely bonding time for us. And the book became a favorite bedtime story for baby.
Which song will you sing? Which book will you read?
Are you thinking you’ll move to a new city, start an intense new job, buy a new house, and finish remodeling just days before your new baby is born?
Here’s a better idea: weekly massages, lazy weekend mornings, and dinners spent laughing with friends.
That’s because toxic stress during the last few months of pregnancy transfers directly to baby. Excessive stress can
• make baby more irritable and less consolable;
• inhibit baby’s motor skills, attention, and ability to concentrate;
• damage baby’s stress-response system, causing fight-or-flight hormones to stick around too long; and
• shave an average of eight points off baby’s IQ (the difference between average and bright).
How to identify toxic stress
Not all stress is bad, of course. And not all people react to the same stress in the same way. For example, at nine months pregnant, I was racing to finish editing a book. I found the late nights, tight deadlines, and clashing personalities invigorating. Friends thought I was crazy.
The problem is when you feel you have no control over the things stressing you out. Unrelenting stress is the main culprit. Our bodies just aren’t built to handle a sustained assault of fight-or-flight stress hormones. An overly demanding job, a chronic illness, poverty, losing a job, an abusive relationship—these are examples of toxic stress.
Pregnancy does create a buffer against stress. Women, pregnant and not, were exposed to the same stressor, and the pregnant women had lower heart rates and cortisol levels. But if you’re experiencing chronic stress or anxiety, especially starting in the second trimester, make it a priority to remedy your situation.
If you can’t manage to lower your stress during pregnancy, focus on creating a trusting relationship with your newborn baby (see page 38). This has been shown to mitigate the effects of prenatal stress.
THE RESEARCH
Ice storm babies fall behind
When a freezing rain fell on eastern Canada in 1998, more than a million people lost electricity for up to forty days, and a hundred thousand families were shuttled into emergency shelters.
Women who were pregnant during all this were, understandably, stressed in a toxic way. It turns out their children were, too: at age 5½, the kids had lower IQs and poorer language abilities than kids whose mothers weren’t affected by the storm.
List any areas causing you toxic stress.
What big or small steps can you take to regain control?
What will you do for yourself to reduce stress in general?
Women in two-income households still do most of the work around the house.
This imbalance is a major minefield that new parents face, especially because baby brings so many new chores. It’s also one of the most frequently cited sources of marital conflict. Find a fair solution, and it might save your marriage. (Hey, it might even improve your sex life. A study of nearly seven thousand couples found that as men’s share of the weekly housework increases, couples have sex a little more often.)
Bottom line: if you’re both working outside the home, household duties need to be shared fairly.
Gay couples are much better at this than straight couples, studies show, because they can’t fall back on the assumptions that come with traditional gender roles. They have to start from scratch and divvy up every single task.
This is what you need to do, too.
A ton of work
My husband and I were pretty surprised by the increase in housework that came with having a baby. This may be because, focused on our careers, we had done as little of it as possible. For example, we used to do laundry every two weeks, if we felt like it. Baby’s cloth diapers and major spit-up habit meant we suddenly found ourselves doing laundry every two days.
We used to dirty one or two pans for dinner—if we weren’t eating out. Plenty of nights we’d cook some pasta, stir in some spinach, and open a jar of sauce. Or toss a pizza in the oven. When baby started eating solid foods, I spent a lot more time cooking fresh produce, beans, and grains. Suddenly we were cleaning a whole pile of kitchen gear every night.
Not to mention wiping off and sweeping up food smeared on the table and dropped on the floor three meals a day. Or picking up toys and the contents of drawers constantly strewn across the house. Or making sure the floors were passably clean, since baby spent so much time on them.
You get the point. Housework goes from “if we get to it” weekly to “must be done” several times daily.
So you can imagine how resentment will quickly build if one person shoulders an unfair amount of that work.
Who
