Women have been under-represented in Australian political life since Federation in 1901. Not only in the numbers of women in Parliament, but also in making their voices heard. Women don’t have the financial clout to lobby parties, as business leaders do. Simply attending a protest rally is difficult when you have small children to care for. But I attended a rally today, made possible only because my little boy could chill out in a carrier, despite the wind and on-again-off-again rain. We were outside the National Press Club, while Prime Minister Julia Gillard was inside addressing the media. This isn’t a political blog, so I won’t be discussing the politics of the rally. But I do have a few observations about babywearing and its place in our democracy.

I’ve been attending rallies for about 15 years now, for various reasons. And in the last couple of years, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of mums with babies at the rallies I’ve been to. It’s much easier to hold up placards or participate in public walks with the kids tied onto you, and no worries about them running onto the road or being upset by all the loud chanting. Plus protest rallies become a social event, almost like a mother’s group for the politically active.

Whether the rally is for parenting issues, or totally unrelated issues, mums and dads are taking up their right to have a say in how the country is run. And it’s a good thing for democracy, simply because it enables a more diverse range of views to be heard. It means we’re also hearing from a sector of the community who are preoccupied with nurturing, caring, and gentle behaviours and roles. Quite a contrast with the business sector who dominate paid political advertising, younger revolutionary activists, and trade unionists whose protests tend to be more active, loud, or aggressive than the protests organised by a bunch of babywearing mums. Not that there’s anything wrong with being politically aggressive - I just enjoy seeing diversity in the way we express our views.

The comments from non-babywearers show that our passive, peaceful forms of protest are making an impact, too. While not everyone knows the right terms (I’ve had a TV cameraman refer to my ring sling as a shawl), they know it’s all about looking after the child’s needs. I’ve had comments about how effective my gentle tone of voice was when speaking to a packed hall with sleeping newborn in a FWCC (front wrap cross carry), and “oohs” over my sleepy three year old in a SSC (soft structured carrier) from the Federal Police detective at this morning’s rally.

Oh, and the babywearer-spotter’s roundup at today’s event: a gorgeous printed cotton ring sling, another very elegant neutral toned plain cotton ring sling, and lots of SSCs in various colours and prints. Didn’t spot any mei tais or pouches, and I vaguely recall a stretchy wrap but could have been wrong. Only saw two prams (one was a double for twins). Still, that’s a pretty high percentage of babywearers for a rally of about 35 women!

Happy World Breastfeeding Week! It’s celebrated internationally from 1 to 7 August 2010. Unlike breastfeeding, which is something normally done by the mother, babywearing can be done by anyone - breastfeeding or not. But one of the many cool things about carrying a baby in a traditional-style sling or carrier is that it can make breastfeeding easier.

You can use your sling or carrier to support baby for hands-free breastfeeding. We’ve blogged here in the past about how best to breastfeed in a long wrap, mei tai, and in a ring sling.  As a retail shop owner, I’ve helped many mums of newborns with getting baby in the right position to breastfeed hands-free, and some of them have come back later to tell me how it helped their posture (reducing back pain from leaning over while breastfeeding) or made it easier to chase a toddler while feeding the baby.

Another benefit of babywearing is that all the skin contact helps get the hormones working properly. Skin contact prompts oxytocin, which prompts milk in the breast to flow, which prompts prolactin to make more milk. A beautiful supply-and-demand cycle.

My second baby also benefited from babywearing to support breastfeeding when being worn by a child-care worker. She was an extreme bottle refuser who would rather starve to death than take liquid from any form of cup or bottle til she was about nine months old. So when she was five months old and I returned to work, I drove from work to the childcare centre to feed her in my lunch break. Sometimes she would be hungry before I arrived, but there was nothing they could do to feed her until I got there. Enter babywearing! Many times I would arrive to feed my baby, expecting to find her distressed and starving, only to see that she was chilled out and happy in the sling that I had left with her carer (a twenty-something rugby-fan bloke). In an ideal world, she wouldn’t have had to wait. But in this imperfect world we live in, keeping her calm made it much easier for her carer to attend to the other babies in the room, and made it easier for me to get her attached for a proper feed when I arrived. Ever tried to get a cranky baby to latch on properly? Not easy! A calm baby is much easier to feed, in my experience.

There have also been times when breastfeeding was a real struggle for me. Being able to carry my babies and keep them close helped soothe the emotional upset for both of us, making it easier for me to stay positive and keep trying. Without that positive influence, the confidence that I am a capable parent, I might have found it easier to just give up on other aspects of parenting that were difficult.

So thankyou babywearing, for making it easier for to breastfeed my babies.

Here’s the official Australian government notice about the Infantino Sling Rider and Wendy Bellissimo slings having been recalled by their Australian distributor.

This follows a US safety warning on slings - read all about it here. The important thing to note here is that the warning applies only to slings that make it difficult to keep a newborn’s airways clear while lying in a cradle hold position, or where it is difficult to monitor a newborn’s position in the sling (ie you can’t see the baby easily in the sling to make sure they’re still in a good position). Babies who are newborn, premature, or have health issues are at higher risk in these carriers.

Ring slings, pouches, and wraps are often used to carry newborns in a cradle carry position, and it’s quite safe to do. In fact, some babies prefer this position when they’re sleeping. It also makes it easy to breastfeed baby in the sling. But it is also important to make sure you use your sling properly. If in doubt, get advice from an experienced babywearer at a sling meet in your local area, use internet forums to find experienced babywearers near you who can give you some help, or drop by a shop that provides a professional fitting/demonstration service for the type of sling you’re using. You can also check out videos on YouTube, or get a copy of the Tummy2Tummy babywearing DVD to get help on newborn positioning, and there’s also a Newborn Correct Positioning article available here.

If you’ve been following the Baby Carriers Downunder blog, you may have noticed we don’t write a lot of posts along the lines of “OMG! I so love [insert brand here]“. In fact, we don’t have any posts that sing the praises of a particular brand. It’s not because we don’t want the sponsorship dollars, or because we are all hard-core DIY-only babywearers. It’s because Baby Carriers Downunder is independent. And to quote Stan Lee, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Which is far more relevant than my other favourite thing to tell my kids, “with pants comes dignity”.

Being independent means we can talk about the features that make a carrier fabulous or FAIL, or the ways to use and abuse a particular style of carrier. But because we don’t name brands, we have no financial incentive to promote one carrier over another, nor risk the wrath of a manufacturer for suggesting a variation on their instructions. And we can more easily get Baby Carriers Downunder working with other non-profit parent support organisations, because we’re here to promote ALL forms of babywearing that support healthy babies and parents/carers.

If you’ve been following my posts on this blog for a while, you might also have picked up that I work in the industry. And yet I cannot post about my own business here. So why do I spend time writing for Baby Carriers Downunder? Because every person that is helped along the way to successful babywearing is a good thing, regardless of where they get their gear. I’m an addict that wants to get more users hooked, and I don’t care what dealer they go to.

Babywearing needs to become mainstream, it needs to be normalised, if we are to have a viable long term industry. More importantly, babywearing needs to be normalised so that parents can more easily find and use a tool that makes their job easier. Nothing makes me happier than having someone tell me how much better their baby sleeps, or that they no longer wear baby chuck five times a day, or that they can now get out of the house with their baby, or simply that their back feels good now that they have a good sling and the skills to use it.

If we’re going to normalise babywearing, we need independent blogs and support groups. It’s not hard to tout your own brand all over the interwebz. But we have bigger things to consider here. Things like the concept behind babywearing, safety tips that apply to ALL carriers, and what makes a well-constructed carrier at home or in a commercial factory. People who want to discuss the many brands do so in our Google Group forum. But as bloggers, we realise that what we say carries a different level of credibility, and is rated differently by search engines. We want blog readers to take this material as a starting point in their search for the perfect sling for their needs - not just look up a list of the Top 5 Best Baby Carriers Ever and buy the one that’s in their price range.

So if your comment recommending a brand name carrier disappears from our blog, or we don’t bother publishing your media release about your new baby carrier product, please don’t be offended. We’re just enjoying our babywearing independence in a brand-free zone. And if you’re looking for the Top 5 Best Baby Carriers Ever, here’s the list in my personal order of preference (which will change tomorrow, as I feel about baby carriers the way most women feel about shoes):

• Mei Tai
• Short Wrap
• Soft Structured Carrier (SSC)
• Long Wrap
• Ring Sling

Oh look, useful information without brand names! See, it is possible Now go argue the crap out of my top 5 list…

If you’ve got an addiction to good quality baby carriers and slings (c’mon, I know I’m not the only one…) then you’ve probably bought from more than a few WAHMs in your time. WAHMs - work at home mums - are the backbone of the baby carrier and sling industry in Australia. They’re the ones who come up with innovations in design, source the to-die-for fabrics that make a regular carrier something special enough for a wedding or christening, and are sometimes willing to vary their design ever so slightly to make it fit you just right. So what does it take to be a WAHM, and why do women want to do it?

Being a WAHM isn’t going to make you a millionaire. In fact, you’ll be lucky to get more than a bit of occasional pocket money from it. But it can be very personally rewarding, more flexible than other forms of paid work, and a bit of extra pocket money will help pay for your own sling stash (or at least justify your fabric stash). To be a successful WAHM in the babywearing industry, you’ll need:

• Skills. If you can sew, then you can be a sling manufacturer. If you can do marketing and publicity but can’t sew, perhaps you’re better off as an importer or retailer rather than manufacturing.
• Time. Don’t kid yourself that you can run a successful WAHM business while the kids are napping or sleeping at night - unless you plan on never getting any sleep yourself. You need to find at least 2-3 blocks of time each week to sew, market your business, do the taxes and administrivia, and pack and post orders. That means setting aside times when someone else is supervising small children, kids are at school, or the kids are busy with their own activities and likely to not interrupt your work every 20 seconds with “muuuuuu-um”.
• Cash. You can start a business with just a few hundred dollars in cash, but you do need to carefully plan for how you’ll fund the start-up and growth of your venture. Don’t rely on credit cards to fund it - the interest rates are a killer. Look at using savings, mortgage redraw, or micro-loan credit schemes if there are any in your area (the ACT Government has recently started one).
• Willingness to prioritise. It is not humanly possible to be a perfect mother, partner, house cleaner, cook, and whatever other roles you fulfil. If you’re adding business owner to your list of roles, consider what you can give up to make time for the business. You may need to cook quicker, simpler dinners. Do less cleaning. Access childcare or babysitting, or let the kids watch more TV. Have less time with your partner after the kids go to bed at night. If you’re not willing to give up or change anything else in your life, then you need to seriously reconsider whether you have room in your life to be a WAHM. Even a hobby-level business is time-consuming, and a business that you intend to provide for your family adds an additional layer of stress if you’re stretching yourself too thin.

But there’s also a lot of rewards to being a babywearing WAHM:

• Being able to fit your work around your family’s needs. You can attend that school assembly at 10am, and catch up on the sewing or emails at 8pm if you’re willing to be flexible about your hours.
• Building a business that is yours, and being the chief decision-maker.
• Lower overheads than most businesses - no need to lease an office or factory, or buy expensive equipment, until your business outgrows the dining room table or spare room.
• Supporting a passion for babywearing, and spreading the babywearing love to other parents.

So are you a WAHM or considering it? What is it that you love about the WAHM lifestyle? What have you learned on your journey?

I’ve had the most fantastic weekend at the Corinbank Festival! I was there to teach babywearing in the Green Kulture village, but I also spent lots of time spotting slings while sipping chai, playing Scrabble, learning about clay-balling, watching circus acts, avoiding infringement notices from the Fashion Police, eating vegetarian feasts, asking chicks in the line for Tableaux Vivants (live nude show - and I spotted a baby in ring sling being breastfed in the audience) if her dreads require much maintenance, listening to Ash Grunwald and heaps of other great bands… well, you get the picture. It was a general festival of family-friendly fun with as little environmental impact as possible. I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

Left: Dominique is wearing an Australian brand pouch sling - and her baby is probably keen to grab that coffee because it might have chilli in it from the Mayan Coffee stall!

Centre: Katoomba mum with her big girl chilling out in a blue SSC (soft structured carrier). See, babywearing isn’t just for babies!

Right: I recognised this as an organic Eyes Of The World print fabric (I used to have a woven wrap in this fabric). Turns out this pouch sling was made in Canberra!

Circus Playground looked like a lot of fun - and if you look closely, you might spot a dad with a baby in a camel-coloured SSC on his back!

I had lots of fun demonstrating Ninja Babywearing to save your baby from the invading zombie hoard who want to eat your brain… or just get your baby on your back so you can get on with washing, cooking, chasing other kids, or generally looking good. Even wore my ninja babywearing t-shirt while I did the job I also showed people how to carry a baby with a tablecloth, shawl, or bedsheet so you can rock on at the main stage without losing your toddler, or settle a cranky baby to sleep even when you’re camping in the Brindabella mountains outside Canberra. I had great help from Morgyn (who works at the coolest baby shop in Canberra), plus Moira and Kate from the Canberra Babywearers, who gave me lunch break time. Thanks ladies!

So what did I miss with my camera? A very cool mei tai with feature panel in a brown print, ring slings (only spotted black and blue, where were all the stripes and prints?), and several stretchy wraps and SSC’s. Oh, but I did catch the Fashion Police from Ruby Bloomers Women’s Circus:

In between issuing infringement notices for fashion crimes, these rocking chicks also issued encouragement notices for babywearing and public breastfeeding. And looked damn fine in their leather corsets and stripey tights
I’m already thinking about a bigger and better Corinbank 2011 - what would you want to see in a babywearing demo at a music/arts festival? Buy Cialis For Daily Use
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