Do We Think Jonathan Last is Married? And Do We Expect Him to Stay That Way?

[ricevermicelli]

I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal's lifestyle reporting, not because of it's accuracy or worthiness, but because of it's utter daffyness. (Fave example: This article, which discusses salary cuts with reasonable seriousness for several paragraphs before leaving the reader with the indelible impression that the really bad thing about global economic slowdown is that it's bad for kitties.)

Yesterday, Jonathon Last published a book review/editorial regarding the role of men in the delivery room, in which, to put it briefly, he is wrong.

"Various fads," he opines, "have cajoled fathers into cutting the umbilical cord or playing catcher as the baby exits the birth canal or stripping off their shirts and clutching the newborn 'skin-to-skin.'"

Yes, the time my husband spent (shirtless and adorable) cuddling our newborn son while doctors did horrible things to the lower half of me and I couldn't hold the baby... faddish nonsense. Kid should have been on the warmer, exercising his li'l baby lungs. Human body heat and soothing rumbly noises weren't in any way helpful. No one has researched the benefits of skin-to-skin contact for premature babies and newborn infants, or perhaps they have not been found beneficial.

Cutting the umbilical or catching the baby are not skilled jobs in a normal birth. Anyone can do them! Why not someone who has a huge emotional interest in the baby?

At the same time, he claims (based on rates of divorce and births to out of wedlock mothers) that fathers are overall less involved than ever. Some of those divorced and unmarried fathers are and remain active in their children's lives, others don't. But surely, this is not a problem that can be solved by telling new fathers that their job is to sit tight and hand out cigars.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The word for this is not "faddish," it is awesome. (The blanket is just over Colin, not wrapped around him; he was stripped to a diaper so they could be skin-to-skin.)

It apparently never occurs to Last that the men who abandon their kids shortly after birth are probably mostly not the same ones who are coaching the mothers in Lamaze breathing. If "lots of guys" do Thing A, and "lots of guys" do Thing B, that's not actually proof that A causes B, or that A and B are even correlated.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

That is a sweet picture.

At a guess, guys who are securely romantically attached to the mothers of their children are more likely to stick around, and guys who provide physical and emotional support for things like labor and delivery are more likely to be romantically attached.

[naomikritzer]

Ed complained later about the childbirth movies we'd had to watch in our childbirth class at the hospital: they were gross, he said. And it was too bad they were so icky, because they'd had him expecting that the birth of his OWN children would be yucky the way the births were in the movie.

"Molly's birth wasn't gross?" I said.

"NO!" he said, misting up. "It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my LIFE."

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

*stands cheering*

Chris spent a fair bit of time skin-to-skin in the hospital with D. One of my postpartum nurses, coming in to check D's status, was appalled to discover that she was clad only in a diaper, lying on Chris's chest with a blanket over her. We managed to short-circuit the appalled lecture by suggesting that she go ahead and check D's temperature (which she'd obviously come to do -- the thermometer was already in her hand); the numbers proved us right, and she finally left us alone -- after making D scream by examining her with the coldest hands I've ever encountered.

Skin-to-skin works for the baby. It gives the parent involved all those warm fuzzy feelings that are so conducive to good parenting (and being involved, and sticking around, and....). And it gives the parent who's watching the opportunity to have all those warm fuzzy feelings about the baby spill over into being about the other parent, also, which is a nice little bit of marital bonding to have.

Chris has never caught any of our kids -- I've always insisted on squeezing the life out of his wrist during contractions, which makes that a little difficult. But, yeah. Far from a collection of fads. Very, very far.

My guess? If he is, he won't be for long. Or else he has a wife I probably wouldn't be able to talk with very easily, who has never experienced having a spouse who does these things and therefore doesn't know what she's missing.

Newt

[graceo.livejournal.com]

If Jason hadn't taken off his shirt and snuggled Hattie, she'd have wound up in a warmer in the NICU. Snuggling me didn't work because my body temperature is lower than average - she was half a degree warmer than me and still at a lower temperature than the nurses were comfortable with.

I don't remember if I cut the cord

[drwex]

But I damned well remember taking off my shirt so I could cuddle my newborn kids.

hell, yeah.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's no research on skin-to-skin, it's not like it dropped the infant mortality rate from 70% to 30% among premature babies in Columbia, etc, etc, etc.

I mean, I think skin-to-skin is good for perfectly intuitive reasons too, but unlike 20 years ago, we can counter this sort of moron with actual science. IIRC, while daddy skin-to-skin isn't quite as good as mommy, it is still good.