Newborns and New Moms by Dr Farah Adam Mukadam, An excerpt

Newborns and New Moms by Dr Farah Adam Mukadam dispels the confusion new mothers in urban India often go through. An excerpt from the chapter on Maternity Break.

With the new era, gender roles are getting blurry and the gender divide practically non-existent. Notwithstanding the fact that we are in charge of the uterus and bearing babies, mother and father both contribute to rearing babies in today’s evolved family structure. The father is not any more the sole breadwinner and many families need to take a call as to who should work after a baby is born taking into account total earnings and insurance benefits. It isn’t surprising that some fathers these days have taken the nurturer’s role and the mother is the hunter gatherer so to speak.

Where lines of societal norms are getting blurred, the concept of maternity break also becomes a wee bit redundant. In more progressive countries such as The Netherlands and Sweden, family breaks are given instead of the singular lump of maternity break as seen in India. If you think practically, in a nuclear family a woman cannot get by alone looking after herself and the baby especially in the first few weeks. She needs to focus on herself and her baby and try to get as much rest as possible and not worry about the dishes and ordering diapers. When everyone wants to stand independently on their own two feet, there is not much of a backup support system in place in the tiny nuclear setup.

When the Indian parliament increased the paid maternity break from twelve to twenty-six weeks in 2017, women rejoiced in the country but only temporarily. When the buzz of this bold change wore off, did we come to realize that this supposed blessing was a curse for gender equality. Women were seen as a liability in the company, someone who would get knocked-up and leech resources from the business for six months. And to prove themselves as worthy of being employable and an asset in the workplace, more women rushed to rejoin work and prove their usefulness within a month or so after their deliveries. Weeks of paid maternity leave lay wasted as new mothers scurried to join back the rat race that their corporates were.

I am a feminist but I do not believe in gender equality. For as long as women have to bear children in their wombs, the genders cannot be equal. We have a mighty responsibility placed on our shoulders by nature. If we could share our baby-bearing burden with our husbands, we would do it without thinking but as for now, as our worlds and families shrink, and our duties expand in this disconnected family unit, parental leave and not maternity leave is the way to go. Women get to have the rest they require if her spouse/partner is there at home to support her without worrying about the added cost of having a new member in the house.

The long-term benefits of breastfeeding and increased mother-child bonding put to shame the short-sighted view corporates seem to have about paying the mother for six months. Breastfeeding gives the baby a healthy start with insurance against allergies, protection from obesity and promotion of teeth and jaw development.

In the many parts of the world, particularly the west, from Day 1, the baby is made to sleep alone in his nursery. Being left by the parent to comfort himself in his colour-coordinated nursery is sort of criminal. Children who are held and comforted when they cry, grow up to have strong ties to their mothers and are able to replicate such relationships with their future spouse. Not getting closeness and comfort in infancy makes the person a stressful one. On a primal evolutionary level, a person in stress has flight or fight response on being stressed in the short term. But the subconscious reacts to the stress over long periods of time as a threat to his survival. So, in the long term the person tries to ensure survival of his lineage. What does this translate to? This thought process initiates behaviour where a person is seeking to continue his lineage with multiple sexual partners. Prolonged stress from infancy due to not being held plus weak bonds with the mother makes the person what we now call commitment-phobic. These children who grew unattached to their mothers are more prone to opting for multiple partners. Such is the effect of what you did with your child when he was a newborn. The more we keep our children at an arm’s length and let them sleep alone abandoned in separate bedrooms, the more we are contributing to the crumbling of the institution of marriage.

Paid maternity leave is a great start to a new life and has more far-reaching consequences on the lives of the mother and child. And if we take away from every mother’s life this essential need, then we stand to disrupt hers and her child’s life for many years to come.

Excerpted with permission from Newborns and New Moms by Dr Farah Adam Mukadam  published by Pan Macmillan India.

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