'Don't rock your baby'

The “Indianised” version of Dr Benjamin Spock’s best-known book on parenting is here. Veenu Sandhu meets one of its authors to understand how it will impact the sensibilities of Indian parents.

The poison hotline at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences one day received a call from a paediatrician in Cleveland, Ohio (US). Some days later, this doctor, Abdulla Ghori, called the 24-hour hotline — National Poisons Information Centre — again. And then again. And again. Ghori wasn’t dealing with an immediate poison emergency. But he did want to check if the hotline lived up to its promise — of providing immediate information on various kinds of poisonings (from drugs, chemicals, plants, animal bites, stings et al) and their treatment round-the-clock, 365 days a year. Only when he was absolutely satisfied did he put its number and website down in the book he was writing.

On November 1, Ghori’s book, Dr Spock’s Baby & Childcare in India, co-authored with Robert Needlman, another paediatrician and his colleague of ten years at the Case Western Reserve University at Cleveland, was released in India. For more than 65 years, Benjamin Spock’s parenting book has been a bible for parents the world over. But it is for the first time that it has been adapted specifically for parents in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

“What’s happening in India today is very similar to what happened in America in the mid-90s,” says Ghori, 53, who completes 30 years as a paediatrician next month. “There has been huge economic and education development, fewer families have grandparents to help with childcare, and young parents are confronted with a vast range of questions on child-rearing with the Internet offering innumerable options and suggestions,” says Ghori.
 

TIPS FOR INDIAN PARENTS

• Contrary to popular belief, babies don't need their formula [milk] warmed up: they can drink it straight from the refrigerator… Any time a bottle sits at drinking temperature, room temperature or pleasant outdoor temperature, any bacteria that may have got into the formula will multiply rapidly.
• By about three or four months, it's a good idea for them [babies] to get used to falling asleep in their own beds… A baby who gets used to being held and rocked to sleep tends to need the same attention for months or even years; when she awakens in the night, she expects the same treatment.
• There is no evidence that sleeping together — or not sleeping together — affects a baby’s physical or emotional health.
• Treating feeding problems in toddlers: You sometimes hear the advice, ‘Put the food in front of the child, say nothing, take it away in thirty minutes, no matter how much or how little has been eaten. Give nothing else until the next meal’… This is all right if it is not done in anger or as a punishment. 

Source: Dr Spock’s Baby and Childcare in India

And while young Indians have adopted some ways of the West, they continue to be rooted in tradition and are culturally different from the audience for whom Spock originally wrote the book back in 1945. Family relationship, interactions and expectations are culturally different. Indian  children are also confronted with diseases that are different, like malaria, dengue, typhoid, amoebiasis and gastrointestinal infections. So Ghori, who is of Indian origin and attracts a lot of Indian parents in Cleveland, and Needlman took Spock’s masterpiece and reviewed it paragraph by paragraph, page by page , taking out whatever they felt did not apply to Indian parents and introducing what they felt was critical to them. Supporting them in this three-year-long journey was Spock’s widow Mary Morgan, who is currently in India and has been touring Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram before she heads to Sri Lanka to promote the book. She helped with the legalities with the England-based publisher, Simon & Schuster, to make this project possible.

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The result is a book that combines the “best” parenting practices of the East and the West, and, in a subtle way, busts some deeply-ingrained myths. Like this one: milk has to be warmed before being fed to the baby. That’s something every Indian parent does. “Once the milk has been boiled and refrigerated, you don’t need to warm it again before feeding it to the baby,” says Ghori. Does that mean milk straight out of the fridge can go as it is into the baby’s feeding bottle? “Yes,” says Ghori, adding with a laugh, “but try telling that to an Indian parent.”

Another thing Indian which is best avoided is rocking the baby to sleep. “In doing so you take away the independence of the child at the onset,” says Ghori. Babies, he adds, can learn very early to self-sooth and self-comfort. “It’s healthy for them, too” he says. So, the book suggests: put the child to bed when it’s sleep-time even if the baby is awake and allow him go to sleep on his own.

However, the one thing Dr Spock’s book for India has not been very courageous about is sex education. A lot on the issue, like explicit discussion on pornography, has been removed, says Ghori. But this book does deal with the common Indian practice of a 40-day abstinence period after the baby is born. And that, it says, “makes sense”. For the first time, Dr Spock’s baby and childcare book also has a chapter on pregnancy and prenatal care by Sheila Balakrishnan, a doctor based in Thiruvananthapuram. It’s specifically targeted at India and NRI parents and addresses commonly asked questions like: can I continue to work? Can I exercise? Or, is it okay to travel? This section also deals with the father’s feelings, which are often ignored, during pregnancy.

One area which is bound to get some strong reactions is: when to move the child out of the parents’ room? Ideally, the book suggests, the child should be put in the crib from the beginning. And six months is a good time to move the child to a separate room. While this in no way means that your paternal or maternal love is diminishing, few Indian parents will hear of it, says Ghori who has been chided by his own relatives on the issue. “‘You’ve become too American’, they say to me.”

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Grandparents, and the sensitive situations that may arise between the young Indian mother and her mother or mother-in-law during child-rearing, have also been subtly dealt with. Typical American slangs have been done away with, units have been changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius, pound to kilogram and Western names have been replaced with Indian. Indian feeding rituals, Indian vegetables and dals (pulses), too, have been introduced. The baby on the cover is also unmistakably Indian, and so are the illustrations done by Needlman’s daughter, Grace. But the authors’ faith in “healthy” Indian habits, like the belief that Indian children walk to school, might be a bit behind time.

Since it was first written, Dr Spock’s has sold over 50 million copies and has been translated into 49 languages, including Hindi in the early 1950s. The book that comes now has taken off from the original. But instead of being an instruction book for parents, Ghori says it is a useful and simply-written resource that they can dip into. Because Spock always said to parents, at the end of the day, “trust yourself. You know more than you think.”