Parenting Study Groups

I had a pretty difficult first year with my son. He didn’t sleep at night. My two-year-old daughter had turned from utterly delightful baby into tearaway toddler and wouldn’t sleep during the day. It made for an awful year of sleep deprivation and all that.

And I flippantly say “all that” because we got over it. It’s been and gone, and life is easier and more fun for us with slightly older children.

The advice that sticks with me now from that time is not the discussions I had in Young Master S’s coffee group, nor even my Miss B’s coffee group full of second time mums like myself.  Amid the general social directive that you have to cherish the baby years above all else because they go so quickly, the really helpful advice for me came from the light-hearted and almost resigned response of people with older children:

Having a baby and a toddler is awful, but they grow up.

Oh, I wouldn’t live those years again if you paid me.

You know, it just gets better and better with every year.

One day you’ll wake up and you’ll realise that it’s got so much easier and you didn’t even notice.

Stuff like that.

What that year of insanity taught me was that coffee groups are not for me, but not for the reasons everyone thinks. It was never the women in the group whom I clashed with, it the shared experience of having a baby. 

I managed to fall into three separate coffee groups. The first was my friend’s antenatal/neo-natal group in Edinburgh. I was pregnant, unsure of where I was going to have the baby or which country we would live in, so I did aqua-aerobics and then had coffee with a wonderful group of likeminded women.

Still, I’d always feel depressed when I got home, but never told anyone.

My second was another friend’s Plunket coffee group in Mt. Eden, Auckland. Yet another group of likeminded women, two of whom are my very good friends with children who are my children’s very good friends. Still love seeing everyone - could never quite deal with my reaction to coffee group.

The third was a group of wonderful likeminded women I met at yoga during my second pregnancy. Again, great women, but coffee group coupled with severe sleep deprivation quite literally tipped me over the edge. And yes, when I lost it, I lost it at coffee group. Classy. (Guess what? No one really wants to see you lose it. Ever. For that I apologise unreservedly.)

Obviously it was me. I don’t suit coffee group, which is fine. Plenty of people don’t. The need for information and advice brought out the bossy know-it-all in me, but without the altruistic joy of teaching literature or the frivolousness of pub quiz. Coffee groups really are earnest places and you just can’t jest with a group of tired, anxious first-time mothers, no matter how likeminded you all are. This was made apparent when I went to pick my husband up from work one day and his colleagues were all deciding which of them would be Piggy in a Lord of the Flies situation. As I exclaimed in desperation at the time, “this conversation would NEVER happen at coffee group. God, I miss boys.”

Yet, I still wanted to figure out what new motherhood reminded me of and I kept coming back to a single analogous reason: it’s like School Certificate. (Insert NCEA Level 1 if you’re young; or GCSEs if you’re English; or Standard Grade if you’re Scottish - or whatever national examinations you have in your country around the age of 15, if indeed you have such a thing).

Having a baby suddenly made me feel like I was at school. You’re surrounded by females your own age (yes, I went to a girls’ school), and you’re all doing the same thing. There’s always a group of self-appointed prefect types who like bandying about rules and saying how things should be done, and there’s also a group of very helpful and concerned middle-aged women who constantly offer well-meaning but unnecessary advice.

By extension, coffee groups are like a class of School Cert students certain to pass, but still freakishly obsessing over their exams, and who refuse to listen to the university students they know who say, “you know what, so long as you pass, in a few years no will even care what you get. No one will be in the least interested. Actually, come to think of it, there are some people in my course who never even got School Cert and enrolled as mature students once they turned 20, and I’ve other friends who just got a job and are doing well. It just doesn’t matter.”

I am in no way suggesting that there is a correlation between success in school and success in raising children, but like having children, secondary education is common ground for most people in some capacity. As with doing well in your school exams, social factors generally have more to do with your success at raising children than any adherence to a particular methodology. Put simply, getting into university was always going to happen in my peer group, just as raising healthy happy children is pretty much a given. (And much of the healthy part is outwith our control anyway).

Yet we persist in stressing about it and stressing each other about it.

There is always the need for peer group support, but I wish I’d remembered when my babies were brand new how much I hated the peer group hype and the devastating import placed on progressive stages of High School. I just could never believe it - I knew enough older people to make me utterly cynical of intense preparation and the belief that this was the most important thing ever.

How you raise your children is obviously important, but we’re probably all going to “pass” the “test”. We just might do it in different ways. Also, success is not charted by a final mark.

So maybe we need mixed-level coffee groups or peer-support tutors to give newbies some perspective. Any volunteers? It might also help to enforce co-ed coffee groups - but really, the last thing my husband wanted to do was come along to coffee group. Honestly, he’d rather work a 60 hour week. Or go to pub quiz. Maybe the dads are onto something...

Seriously, we probably just need to remember that our parents and our slightly more experienced friends do know what they’re talking about, and that if you are struggling, help is more likely to come from someone slightly removed from your situation. Indeed, our first time mother friends might be the last people we should be listening to because they may have lost the plot too. 

But whatever happens in those early months, in a few short years, no one will care about how you got your baby to sleep.