Exams in Parenting

Over the last 4 weeks on Obs+Gynae the mothers I've seen can be basically drawn up into two groups. Firstly, there are the thirty-something married ladies who may have waited a little too long to start a family, but otherwise are in the best possible situation, both medically and socially, to raise children. They were both thankfully the majority of the case load, and the most enjoyable to learn from.

And then there are the younger girls. Now let me start by saying that as a general rule, getting pregnant young is not something that I can criticise. The body is built to conceive in the early twenties, and plenty of people are perfectly well adjusted to have kids at that age.

Unfortunately, the real world is a different place. It seems that by some morbid irony, those same girls that don't have the common sense to use contraception properly end up with the most responsiblilty, in a baby. I can't use specific examples, of course, but some of the pregnant girls we saw in the Early Pregnancy and Ante Natal clinics astonished me with their attitudes. They turned down simple, possibly life-saving tests and missed important appointments on the weakest of pretexts, sometimes reducing even the wise old consultants to blank, stunned expressions with the risks they were taking for such petty reasons.

When I took histories from them they commonly smoked copiously, were proud of cutting back the booze to a few bottles a week, and had little or no knowledge of the mechanics of what was going on inside them. And the amount of times I finished talking to a pregnant lady whilst her other children bickered around her feet, only to return to her notes and find that she was younger than me, were too many to mention.

Maybe I'm more angry about it because abuse of babies always seems to be in the news. For example, take the vegan couple who unwittingly killed their baby by exclusively feeding it soya milk and apple juice. Words can't express how stupid these people were to subject their child to their extreme beliefs. You don't need to be a doctor (or an average medical student) to realise that your baby will suffer greatly from living by a set of principles wholly unsuitable for basic development. Nor do you need qualifications to realise that although hospitals may have more "germs" than your bathtub at home, they also have more trained professionals than your bathtub too, and hence it might have been a better idea to go in for the birth.

And what about the herion addict who gave his baby methadone to stop him crying? It beggars belief. News just in, you idiot, babies cry. They cry when they want something, they cry when they don't. They cry all the time. But you're supposed to have the maturity and knowledge to cope with it without giving it Class A drugs.

The easiest argument these people have is that I'm at medical school, and I'm exposed to all this knowledge about pregnancy and parenting which they don't have the opportunity to see. Wrong. I do 4 weeks of Obs+Gynae, and in comparison they have a fetus inside them for 9 months, when they have the chance to ask a horde of professionals every question they possibly can about babies and their care. And if they have any sense they'd have been learning about it whilst they were planning it too, although this genuinely might not always be possible. It's not opportunity that they fail to benefit from, it's common sense.

Anyway, seeing as how you have to pass exams to do absolutely everything bar raise a child these days, I thought I'd advocate a quick multiple choice paper, preceded by an algorithm, just to check that you're up to the task. Here we go.









1. Which foodstuff provides your baby with absolutely essential nutrients, without which it stands a significantly higher chance of becoming ill or developing a low IQ?

a) cow's milk or powdered baby milk

b) whatever you happen to be eating, blended or chopped up

c) breast milk

d) lager if my current partner offers it around



2. Your baby is crying. What do you do?

a) comfort it regardless of whether it needs anything or not (unconditional love)

b) ignore it until it shuts up, it's just been fed and we're watching Big Brother

c) give it a hit of premium crack

d) scream at it in a rage displaying my total lack of character and ability



3. You're pregnant and suddenly get headaches, eye problems, tummy pain and you can feel your heart beating hard. The midwife said that if this happens you should come in RIGHT AWAY. What do you do?

a) come in RIGHT AWAY so that I don't have fits and die

b) take 3 hours then laugh off a chastising from the midwife (I've seen it).

c) don't worry about it, doctors are always wrong in the news

d) Decide after Celebrity Chef Idol on Ice finishes.