, GOLLY, WHY WON T YOU Aussie paediatrician, and dad of three, Dr Golly (Dr. Daniel Golshevsky) knows all about poor sleep. After experiencing a deeply unsettled baby, and distressing postnatal period as a parent, he directed all his energies into finding solutions for unsettled behaviour and poor infant sleep - to prevent others from going through what he experienced. He put these learnings to practice every day, with extraordinary results but one problem remained, reaching more people. One doctor can only see one person at a time. So Dr Golly created an online sleep and settling program for children 0-5 years old and here’s the cool bit... it focuses on fathers (or the nonbreastfeeding parent) as the secret weapon to a good night’s sleep. Golly, tell me more...
For years, women have been achieving more and more in society. Greater heights of education, expectation and employment than any other time in history – but have we seen an equivalent reduction in the expectation to do the majority of newborn parenting? When a baby enters a family unit, there’s so much focus on the baby and on the mother, especially if the mother is breastfeeding, as is most often the case. This makes perfect sense – the baby is the new arrival, requiring roundthe-clock care and attention, and the mother is the one recovering from pregnancy and delivery, while simultaneously being the source of nutrition at the same time. But I’d like to shift the paradigm a little and put the spotlight onto fathers, we play a significantly greater role than many think – and we might just be the key to having a perfectly well-settled baby and entire family unit. Nowadays, babies arrive into families of all different shapes and sizes. From traditional couples to single parents, surrogacy, same-sex families and more. It’s wonderful that almost everyone has the ability to become a parent now – but regardless of the look of the family unit, it’s important we focus for a moment on the role of the non-breastfeeding parent. For ease of explaining, I’ll just refer to them as the father for now, but know that it can be anyone else in the home. Following a baby’s birth, a mother gets a flood of oxytocin (hormone) which plays a fundamental role in social bonding, love, trust 24
and generosity. It also activates a part of the brain called the amygdala. This is important for processing memory and drives emotions like fear, anxiety and aggression. The heightened amygdala activation is what drives a mother’s hypersensitivity to their baby, making her attentive, loving and deeply affectionate. This also makes the mother far more likely to want to feed an unsettled baby. It’s close to impossible for a breastfeeding mother to not feed when picking up an unsettled baby. And if the baby is being held right next to a food source, knowing that it will be comforted by the closeness and the sucking reflex – then why wouldn’t they want to feed? That is why fathers are more likely to be able to resettle a baby, if something wakes them before a scheduled feed.
If you could give parents just one tip what would it be and why? That’s mean. How could I possibly stop at just one?! The single most important thing that I want to convey when I’m talking with parents is how skilled they already are. They have the instincts and warmth already - all they need is to grow their understanding of a baby’s forms of communication and not to underestimate how well our babies talk to us when they need something.
