Nurtured parenting.

Trust that you are doing important work.

Sometimes I forget that it’s not the norm to have an attached parenting style. That it isn’t everyone (or even most parents) who respond to their babies cries and emotions, day and night. This continue to anger and frustrate me. Like seriously, how ISN’T responding to all of your babies needs the norm? I forget sometimes that this is how our world looks like because I truly believe that nurturing our babies comes naturally and intuitively to (most) mothers. However, when the outside world tells us nurturing doesn’t matter and that the baby will be “fine” without it, over and over again, it can be hard to recognise our own intuitive pulls.

When a baby comes into our world, our world inevitably has to change and adapt. We can’t just treat our babies as objects that can fit into certain boxes in order to fit into our lives. We can’t for example put the baby in a box that says he or she will sleep 11 hours per night, not need to be carried the majority of the day and that it doesn’t matter if he/she is formula fed or not because it’s just as good as breastmilk.

Those tings are convenient to us, but are not usually the healthiest or what’s best for our babies (obviously every baby is different).

We need to adapt and change our lives to fit in a human (not an object) with needs. They need love, closeness, nurture, safety, food, rest. They need attention and encouragement, they need connection and help with regulating their emotions.

There are of course needs that we can work around. We can pump, so that we can have someone else feed the baby sometimes or have someone other than mum and dad take care of baby for a few hours. We can (and should!) take baby with us on our daily to' do’s and take naps on the go. We can do toy rotations in order to hopefully encourage a little bit of independent play and therefor some time to “ourselves” even if we’re in the physically present with our babies.

But we can’t make babies sleep through the night, we can’t ignore their emotions and therefor let them learn emotional regulation on their own, we can’t give them formula and say that it’s just as good as breastmilk.

The world are not helping mothers, mother. We don’t get enough support. However, we’re not powerless. We can make choices that are in the best interest of our families, our babies and us. We can adapt and make changes in our priorities. It will of course look different for everyone, and I know I am extremely privileged in my situation as a mother. Even if you’re a lot less privileged than I am, you can still do your best to nurture and be close to your babies. Doing your best is always a lot better than giving into the system and let it take over how you raise your kids.

If everyone was nurtured, loved and cared for, would the world really look like it does today? I do believe that by prioritising and nurturing our babies, we are creating a better future.

So if you are a nurturing mother doubting if you’re doing the right thing, trust that you are. Trust that your most important work lies in raising resilient, loved and cared for babies. Trust that the MOST important thing you can do right now is to be present and help your baby thrive. Because it is. No matter what the world and it’s fucked up systems is telling you.

If you’d like some more science backed information on this, please read the book “The nurture revolution” by Greer Kirshenbaum. Another amazing resource on “mothering against the machine” as she calls it is

Brittany Chambers

here on substack and @goodnightmoonchild on instagram. She and some other accounts consistently remind me that this way of mothering is THE most important work we can do.