When a new mom gives birth, it is overwhelming. We want to do it all correctly, and if we give birth in a hospital, the staff is right there with us to help us figure it all out. One of the most stressful parts of being a new mom is feeding your baby, which can be agonizing. Today, we have so many resources to go to for help. Can you imagine what it was like for our moms, though?
Thankfully for us, a Reddit mom posted a page from a 1970s instruction manual for feeding tips for new moms, and it is amazing. Well, amazingly crazy and nothing like anything we see today. Moms in the Mommit forum got the biggest kick out of the pages, and so did we.
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In the '70s, the babies stayed in the nursery.
Today, hospital stays are short and sweet and your baby is right there by your side nearly the entire time in many hospitals. Way back when, that wasn’t the case. Nurses cared for your baby for you unless it was time for the little one to eat. According to this manual, that was at extremely specific times.
“Unless your baby requires incubator care, your baby will be brought to you to feed at approximately 5:30 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 1:20 p.m., 5:40 p.m., and 9:30 p.m.,” the page reads.
If you had a smaller baby, you got to see them more often. “If your baby is 6 lbs. or under … you will feed approximately every three hours — 6:30 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m."
This all happened, of course, after the first feeding, which was six hours after birth!
Staff asked that all moms be ready.
This is where it gets good. In order for a mom to give her full attention, she was asked to turn off the TV and hang up the phone. Oh, and moms needed to put out their Virginia Slims too. No smoking around the baby.
“Make yourself as comfortable as possible in your bed or chair and be prepared to receive your baby at the times mentioned above,” the manual reads.
And it was up to the mom to be safe. “Insist that the nurse checks your wrist band against the name on the baby’s band.”
The comments section was howling.
It was the smoking that really got people. Today, we don’t even see smoking in restaurants. Can you imagine being in a hospital next to someone puffing away?
“ and it’s not even like, IF you have a cigarette, they’re just assuming you are lighting up constantly,” someone laughed. "But then if you have a cold, def wear a face mask! This is crazy lol."
"My mom told me she went to the hallway to smoke after she had me," another person wrote. "This was in 1985.”
Someone else commented: “My MIL got a cigarette from the doctor right after she had my husband. They smoked in the delivery room lol.”
That seems totally wild, but then she added this: “She proudly tells people she smoked while she was pregnant with her kids to have smaller babies to give birth to. Yeah, I was speechless….”
People did like the idea that moms got their rest, though.
Back in the '70s, women weren’t rushed out of the hospital; they stayed and recovered. There were plenty of fans of this method on Reddit.
“The idea was that moms needed some sleep to recover,” someone wrote. "They went too far in one direction back then but I think we might maybe possibly have gone too far in the other direction."
Another agreed: “Honestly I would’ve appreciated this a lot … I asked for my daughter to be taken to the nursery for just like 2-3 hours so I could get some sleep and the nurse was like ‘oh we don’t have one of those! We’re a baby-focused hospital!'”
“I was so terrified that I was going to fall asleep while I was nursing my daughter and she was going to fall off of me onto the floor and die,” a mom shared. "I was not happy with that stupid policy. Women should have the choice to hand over their brand new and very fragile human to a mother qualified caretaker just after giving birth."
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Maybe we could mix a bit of the old with the new.
Can we all agree that banning smoking in hospitals is a good thing? But maybe a bit more time in the hospital for moms to rest could make a comeback as the standard? But according to one mom, we’ve got it made here.
One mom noted: “In the UK you’re jammed into a room with 8 other women and their babies immediately after birth, with one shared toilet in an en suite, with just flimsy curtains between you all and the cots literally bashing each other through them – for 24 hours whilst all the babies screamed and in my case no partners were allowed in to help because of covid . What a night that was.”
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