How will baby come out - what to answer

JRKmommy

Mon, Apr 17 2006, 5:22 pm

I also had all c-sections, so my kids were told everything. They know I had an operation, and have even seen pictures.

For them, there is no mystery. They trust me to give them complete answers. I haven't given the explicit details as to how the baby gets in (just the tznios version - when mommy and daddy get married and want a baby, the daddy fertilizes the eggs in the mommy's tummy and they pray to Hashem to make it grow into a baby), but I have no doubt that they'll come to me.

I saw with breastfeeding that my kids picked up on my very relaxed, matter-of-fact attitude. As far as they were concerned, that was simply how babies were fed, period. Some of my oldest dd's friends started giggling about it one day, but we easily set that straight - she knew that the friend was just being silly.

My kids know that some babies are born from a special passage between the legs.

I think it's important to give some information to prevent some real misconceptions.

1 - "the doctor took it out" - while that happens to be true in my case, I don't want my kids growing up thinking that birth is all about the doctor, not the mother. I guess I've been hanging around hippie home birthers too much to want that Smile

2 - being overly vague about how the baby gets out - many children wrongly believe that the baby comes out like a bowel movement. Not a great image! I've also read psychological cases of children with this belief getting constipated.

3 - extreme lack of details - I think that many children would naturally be somewhat concerned about a mother. You know, she's obviously swelling up, this baby needs to come out, how can that happen without killing her?

4 - On the other hand, I also think that a child should understand that this doesn't just magically happen by itself, so that they have some proper respect and sympathy for new mothers!

5 - How can a child properly relate to everything in the Torah without decent information? How will they understand the birth of Eisav and Yitzchak, or the birth of Binyamin and the death of Rachel?

JRKmommy

Mon, Apr 17 2006, 5:42 pm

One more thought the add to counter the "don't tell them a thing until they are in shidduchim" school of thought:

If I give my kids information - I know that I got to control what they learned. Even if they subsequently hear something else, they won't be as interested, and they'll have my words to guide them.

If I withhold information - they is always a chance that I won't have the opportunity to teach my kids. Some of you will say that this is ridiculous, or accuse me of being morbid, I know. However, there are no guarantees in life. How many of our foremothers may have been planning to give that special talk in the future, when the shtetl was hit with a progrom, the Nazis marched in, etc.? C"V, we should never had that happen to us, but it certainly WAS something that many faced. I suspect that this may be one of the reasons that observance of TH had declined, even more so that mitzvot like kashruth. It was traditionally passed on from mother to daughter, and tragically so many daughters lost their mothers. They could hear about kashruth in the community, but until relatively recently, TH wasn't taught or spoken about publicly.

I am writing this, btw, as someone who grew up knowing about kashruth, Shabbat, etc. from school, shul and camp, but who never would have learned about TH from the traditional means b/c my mother knew nothing about it and my background wasn't very frum so I was never refered to a kallah teacher.