Rob's Blog

I’m led to believe that taking photos of your children is fraught with difficulty. It’s not just Frank Furedi: friends have told me stories about not being allowed to videotape the school play, and similar.

This weekend we took 6-month-old Rob Junior to the local pool for his first ever swim. Obsessive photographer that I am, I took the camera, fully expecting to later write a ranty blog post about how in this day and age you can’t even take a picture of your son’s first swim.

But to my surprise, when I asked at the reception desk, I was offered a “photography permit”. I had to fill in my name and address, and write down why I was taking photographs, and of whom, and my relationship with the subject. All this presumably so they could check up on me or cover their asses when, in whatever way they might imagine, it went horribly wrong. And the life guard, who hadn’t seen me walking round the pool clutching my camera and waving my photography permit in the air trying to look as un-suspicious as possible, came pacing towards me with raised eyebrows as soon as the flash went off. I showed him my permit, which he didn’t just glance at: he properly read it as if he’d never seen one before. Then he grunted and stomped off.

So: things are not as bad as they might be. Yet.

There’s an awful lot of guilt-mongering “advice” about looking after babies. In general, if something makes your life easier, someone will come up with a reason why it’s bad for your baby.

Mrs Rob just caught me putting Rob Junior’s milk in the microwave to warm it a bit out of the fridge. Apparently you’re not supposed to do that because of “hot spots” and because it adversely affects anti-infection ingredients in the milk. Sure enough, this stuff is all over the internet.

Well the hot spot stuff set off my bullshit detector. I can see how a microwave will heat things unevenly because of interference patterns in the radio waves, but between thermodynamics and convection the temperature in the milk will even out pretty quickly.

And microwaves don’t heat things especially differently to any other method of heating. I can’t see the chemical composition being affected much. Perhaps a few molecules get super-heated and chemically changed, but on average they will be heated to, er, the average temperature of the milk, which if I get my timings right is about body temperature.

Anyway, I heated some cow’s milk in a glass in the microwave, taking out the turntable which is there to even out the heating effect, a feature which not all microwave ovens have. Then I immediately drank the milk and it was uniformly warm. Hot spots must have been invented by someone unable to think or do experiments.

So put your baby’s milk in the microwave to warm it, enjoy the convenience, and don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about it. Just don’t be an idiot about it and heat it too much.

Advice comes from everywhere when you have a baby. One piece of advice that we’ve got from midwives, health visitors and friends is: don’t use (Johnson’s) baby oil, use sunflower oil (or olive oil).

It’s better for their skin because it’s natural, seems to be the argument. But what kind of argument is that? Nature produces many poisons. Johnson’s baby oil is “petroleum based” we are told, as if that is supposed to scare us. My instinct is that most oil-like substances are very similar molecules, whether they are plant based, or plants and animals that have been crushed into the earth for millions of years and then extracted and refined.

Johnson’s baby oil contains perfume that can irritate the skin, we are told. This sounds plausible. Perfume is found in “nature”, so I suspect the perfume in Johnson’s baby oil is made from plant extracts. And plants make pollen which irritates me so it is more plausible that their perfume could irritate a baby’s skin than any kind of oil, “petroleum based” or otherwise.

But hang on, sunflower oil and olive oil also contain plant stuff that gives them flavour. How is this better than perfume?

A quick look at the ingredients on the back of our (unopened) Johnson’s baby oil bottle: “paraffinum liquidum” is apparently a fancy name for “mineral oil”. Why can’t they just write that then? Anyway, my old friends The Beauty Brains have an article about five myths about this stuff. While I haven’t heard of the five myths, they are probably the origin of the fear of mineral oil. The Beauty Brains argue that it is harmless, although not from a chemistry angle, which is what I’d really find convincing.

The next ingredient is isopropyl palmitate, which Wikipedia lists as a moisturiser. The Internet says it is derived from palm acid and it can cause skin irritation and clogged pores. But who knows?

Parfum is the final ingredient, and it just means perfume. Why don’t they write that then? Wikipedia has a fascinating article about perfume and what it is made of, which seems to boil down to oils from various sources. I can see how it might be possible to be irritated by some of these molecules, but I don’t see why it would be any more likely than to be irritated by molecules found in cooking oil.

The sunflower oil we have is labelled “pure sunflower oil” and doesn’t have any other ingredients. It is composed of palmitic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, lecithin, tocopherois, carotenoids and waxes. At first glance that’s more scary sounding ingredients than the baby oil, but we don’t really know what’s in that parfum.

I wonder if palmitic acid in sunflower oil has any relationship with the palm acid that isopropyl palmitate is derived from. In any case, it “impairs leptin and insulin’s ability to regulate food intake and body weight”, or at least it does when eaten by rodents. Makes me wonder if the lack of scary articles about sunflower oil used on the skin is simply that no-one has thought to do such research on a food.

Stearic acid, on the other hand, does sound dangerous when applied to the skin. It is carcinogenic and toxic. It seems like we know this because it is used in cosmetics. Also it can be extracted from animal fat, and PETA says it can be harsh and irritating.

Those who want to convince me not to use certain products will have to stop using the meaningless adjective “natural”, which is a marker for a particular strain of sloppy thinking, and explain why the same substance is safe when it is found in natural, pure sunflower oil and dangerous and irritating when it is extracted from poor, helpless animals and used by evil, multinational cosmetics companies.

Mostly the various state baby experts are helpful, as long as you take what they say with a pinch of salt. But I do have misgivings about them. It’s hard to have entirely warm feelings towards someone who is part of the machinery with the power to have your baby forcibly adopted, no matter how unlikely that is in our particular case.

First there are hospital midwives who say you can’t go home until baby is feeding well, which means, variously, every two hours or every three hours for between 15 and 30 minutes depending on who you are talking to and when. But Rob Junior is, like his dad, very sleepy. Going to too much effort to wake him up and force him to eat doesn’t seem quite right. So we end up somewhat torn between what we want to do, which is let him eat when he wants, and what Mrs Rob thinks we probably should do, which is closer to what the experts want us to do.

In the event, Rob Junior is putting on weight just fine and we now do what we want. And now that the experts can see he is putting on weight and is a bit older even they are saying that what we want to do is just fine. But I am left with the feeling that in the early days at least they need to have their boxes ticked and anything too far from average is treated as a problem, when in reality babies, like people, are different.

Then we get home and there are the visitors. Again, these are mostly helpful and Mrs Rob finds it comforting when they reassure us that we are doing it right and everything is okay. But they turn up at our flat, pretty much when they want to, which on one occasion is was when we were all getting some rare sleep and is always when the flat is in a mess. Hopefully they have us in the nice-middle-class-family box and are not ticking any boxes about that.

Today we went, under compulsion again, although they never put it quite like that, to the Sure Start Children’s Centre to have him weighed and checked. He is fine and that is reassuring. But the place is odd. The receptionist has the same “customer” service that you get from receptionists at doctors’ surgeries. Indifferent; slightly annoyed that you are bothering them; surprised to discover that you don’t know where to go or what to do because, you know; you don’t go there very often.

There’s an certain institutional feel about the place that you get from government buildings. I can’t put my finger on what it is. The primary coloured paint; the fact that it’s an old building spruced up to modern “standards” with that certain kind of functional decor and furnishing; that there are notices *everywhere*. One notice says you are not allowed to take photos anywhere in the building, which is the kind of notice that instantly makes me feel unwelcome because I like to photograph everything. Another says that there is a special breastfeeding room and to please ask if you would like to use it. Presumably this is for multicultural reasons.

Then there are the photos, presumably taken by the official, CRB-checked photographer, of the children doing their activites. Sure Start centres are not just for weighing babies, they are for young children to do their state approved, politically correct, risk assessed, culturally diverse Activites. Wholesome stuff, like finger painting, or as they call it, “making your own marks with paint”. But, to me, made icky by the state-approvedness of it. Mrs Rob looks at me, looks at the leaflet, then looks back at me and says, “I will be stuck at home with him a lot.”

A woman passes by and hands us a leaflet about heatwaves. It is the ultimate leaflet of the Fucking Obvious, with such advice as “keep out of the sun”.

On the wall is a collage of photos of various famous black people, with Obama at the bottom. The heading was “celebrating Black History” (their caps). This is something else that marks out anything connected with the state: their pet obsessions. I don’t see why any pre-school child needs to particularly learn about the history of black people, specifically.

So I find myself with a similar attitude to all this as I have towards the BBC. I hate some of what it does and like some of what it does. I’d consider a lot of it to be worth paying for. If only I could get the parts of it I want on an equal basis, as a *customer*, with a real relationship with a real business, with double thank-yous, and without all the veiled threats and the guilt and the attitude that I should be bloody grateful for all this stuff I am getting for free.

A wiser man than I said it is better to compartmentalise things: there is the way things should be, and the way things are. And you just have to work with the way things are, all the while arguing for the way things should be. So that is what I am doing.

Update: It’s not just because we’ve had a new baby. Health visitors look to be a permanent feature of our lives now, by the sound of it.

The nice man on the train asks you how far you are travelling. To the end of the line? Oh, he was just wondering because your 8-year-old son is in his reserved seat and it would make the standing more bearable to know when he’ll be able to sit down. But no, he’s not going to ask you to give up the seat, even though it has the power socket he requested and he really wants to charge his electronic gadgets, because he’s such a nice man.

You tell the man thank-you*, but you are missing out on a teaching opportunity. Your son is 8, he’s not a baby. You could tell him to stand or sit on the floor. If he whinges about it, you could explain to him the benefits of forward planning, and the benefits (saved time and money) and costs (you might have to stand) of not reserving a seat. You could explain that nearly every decision, no matter how trivial, is a similar weighing of costs and benefits, even if sometimes we are not aware of it and appear to make choices on a whim. You could explain the nature of contracts, and how your purchase of the train ticket included such terms as not being guaranteed a seat unless you reserved one. And you could explain about the property rights of the train’s owner and how some of those are transferred to the nice man who has reserved the seat.

Or you could do nothing, and by your inaction teach your son that the world is a caring place where strangers give favours according to need and there is no particular virtue in refusing such favours for the principle of the matter. The cost? He’ll grow up to become a wimpy socialist who can’t even stand up for a couple of hours. The benefit? Well, it’s easier.

My children are going to hate me.

*The thing is, she didn’t even thank me with feeling. It was as if my offer was not a favour, but expected. What I expected was some token insistence that I take my seat. But the thought didn’t even cross her mind. Possibly because her parents** chose the second option.

**Meanwhile, Will Hutton‘s parents presumably marched him to first class and forcibly evicted someone in a nice suit (in the Sunday Times he actually said the CEOs had done “nothing for society”, but I can’t find that article online).

Michael McIntyre makes a very good point about teaching children to share.

Teaching children about property has some subtleties to it. It’s not that “you must share your toys for the sake of other children”, it’s that “if you share your toys you may discover that there are certain benefits to you”.