If you ask around the Parents Centre community now, one of the things our parents and staff are most proud of, is the way our predecessors fought for parents to be with their sick children in hospital. The other, is how Dads fought to be allowed in the delivery room.
While staying overnight in the ward with your sick child is normal these days, in the first half of the 20th Century, parents were restricted to visiting one day a week, often on a Sunday.
The ‘medicalisation’ of childbirth meant the importance of relationships between parents and children had become a distant second to the needs of hospital processes and procedures.
“The staff have a terrible time settling down the ward after visiting, even once a week.”
– From The Trouble with Women: The story of Parents Centre New Zealand, by Mary Dobbie.
Parents were denied additional visits primarily to keep the strict order the doctors and nurses had decided was best. Parents Centre parents fought hard for change, backed by research from some forward-thinking medical professionals who promoted the importance of parents being able to be with their children when they were sick.
Protesting Papas
Many fathers were key figures in the early Parents Centre days. Even though antenatal and childbirth classes were clearly the domain of mothers in the 1950s, the name Parents Centre was chosen to ensure it was not restricted only to mothers. Wellington Parents Centre changed the time of its antenatal classes to evening classes, so the fathers who worked during the day could attend as well as mothers.
A group of Parents Centre Dads were so outraged at Wellington hospital’s decision to exclude fathers from the delivery room that they organised a protest. Eventually, fathers were allowed to stay with their wives in the delivery room and now it is normal for a father, a mother, a partner, an aunt or a friend to be there to provide that much-needed support during labour and childbirth.
“MEN IF you have been present at the birth of any of your children OR if you support the right (or privilege) of other fathers to be present OR if you don’t really know whether you hold any of these views but feel that a closed door is an affront to an open mind THEN you will be interested in A MEETING OF PROTEST”
from a parents centre protest invitation
Rooming-in
It was also normal to keep mothers separate from their new babies directly after birth; newborns were taken to the nursery for long periods of time, and there was no such thing as demand feeding. Nurses were run off their feet nursing both mothers and babies; it was normal for mothers to be using bedpans until four days after delivery. Bath time in the nursery became a peak time for bugs to be passed between nurses and babies, and babies were expending energy when they were left on their own in the nursery to cry, compromising weight gain.
The alternative was for babies to ‘room-in’ with their mothers, and towards the late 1950s the medical evidence in favour of rooming-in was mounting. Parents Centre parents knew that as well as improved medical outcomes, rooming-in was crucial from an emotional perspective and advocated for mothers and babies to be able to be room-in together.
The information on this page has been taken from Mary Dobbie’s book, The Trouble with Women: The story of Parents Centre New Zealand published in 1990.
