Over 25 years after 'Your Baby and Child', Penelope Leach tells Oliver James about a very different second edition.
Penelope Leach was a working mother while both her children were in infancy. Yes, the same Penelope Leach, babycare expert, whose new edition of Your Baby and Child is about to be published. And the same Penelope Leach who, as she puts it herself, "is sometimes regarded as being unsympathetic to working mothers and overly child-centred".
In fact, Leach's experience with her own children is precisely what makes her ultra-attuned to the needs of working mothers, a matter to which she devotes a great deal of space in this revised edition of the book.
Although it has the same title as the 1977 original, Leach actually started all over again, writing afresh, because of these changes in parents' roles. In this new version for a new generation, instead of assuming the readers to be full-time mothers, the assumption is that they are most likely working.
Leach worked part-time after her daughter Melissa was born and four days a week until her son Matthew was nearly two. Then he was hospitalised with meningitis and this event diverted the trajectory of her life. Until then, she had progressed from Cambridge University (Newnham College, which her mother and daughter also attended) to the London School of Economics where she obtained her PhD and then a Medical Research Council research fellowship. She would have become a full-time academic had it not been for the response of her employers to Matthew's illness.
"The first week, they couldn't have been more supportive: flowers, cards, messages. The second week they were plaintive and the third week they were, frankly, bloody horrible," she recalls.
After six weeks, she returned to work. "I left this howling baby, morning after morning. He mistrusted anybody but me - literally terrified of footsteps coming down the stairs in case it was a doctor with a needle," she says.
"Then, after four weeks, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, 'This is madness, I don't actually have to do this'." Her point today is not that mothers should or should not work; it is that employers back then lacked any notion of work-life balance.
"If somebody had asked, 'How do you want to do this?' and offered a break to let me be with Matthew, followed by flexitime, I'd have gone quite a different route." In fact, Leach is militantly in favour of mothers having the chance to work if and when it feels right.
"It makes me mad when people say, even today, that in an ideal world mothers would be at home full-time. The ideal is for both parents to have a choice that can flux and change as children grow."
Another important experience in Leach's life was her parents' divorce. Her father was Nigel Balchin, a novelist, and in later life, her mother, Elisabeth, became a distinguished cookery book writer and archaeologist. But early in the marriage, her father "very much wanted her to be a country lady, caring for three children, breeding bees and playing the clarinet. You had to know her to see how comical this was - hopeless." They divorced when Penelope was 12, and there were a couple of years when she had to traipse between her parents, caring for her sister, who was seven years younger. This sister "was very much my first baby".
Perhaps some of her rage comes from her relationship with her father. As she explains: "We never clicked. He was devoted to my older sister until the day he died. To him, she was everything a girl and woman could possibly be." Whereas he was inclined to favour authoritarian parenting, her mother was much more relaxed. "Don't let her argue with you," he would roar. "How can she learn, if she can't argue," she would reply.
"Mummy was the light of my life, very, very much the special person for me," she says. "She was not permissive exactly, just very devoted, interested, intelligent, warm." She remains as prepared as ever to stick her neck out on behalf of the needs of the child. "Some mothers have complained that I tell them to put their babies first and that makes them feel guilty. My initial reaction is, 'If a book makes you uncomfortable, why read it? But I do think that loving and caring for a baby and child is too important to give less than the best that we can."
- (Guardian service)
Penelope Leach's Your Baby and Child is published by Dorling Kindersley on March 6th.