As I travel around the blogosphere, learning from all the wise and wonderful ladies out there, I keep encountering an idea that I feel needs a little more thinking through. Buried in amongst often excellent advice about mothering and homemaking, homeschooling and organizing is a myth, a logical sounding, but functionally unprovable and sometimes even dangerous statement that is held out to mothers as the golden key to all sorts of things, including our own sanity.

Before I go into what it is, though, I want to return to my ground rules for controversy. This is something that makes people very emotional. Some of the worst, most uncharitable judgment, condemnation, and pride in Christian parenting circles orbits this issue. So here’s my rule: We debate ideas, but we love people. And unless there are some sociopaths reading this blog, it can safely be assumed that we all love our children and genuinely want what is best for them.

OK, so that myth I was talking about. It goes something like this:

The Myth: The secret to relaxed, happy mothering is putting your babies on a predetermined feeding and sleeping schedule from infancy. Demand feeding leads to stressed out, exhausted, unhappy mommies who are at their babies’ beck and call. (The other half of this is that demand feeding produces demanding, fussy children who don’t know who’s boss. I shared thoughts on that part here.)

The problem with this, and the reason I say it’s a myth, is that while following a schedule from a book has worked out very well for a lot of people, it has also hurt a lot of people. And though a schedule is simply a tool, a means to an end and not the end itself, following one is often treated as The Test of Good Mothering. I want to unpack this whole “schedule as panacea for Mommy stress” idea just a little.

First of all, let’s be sure what the real problem is. Nursing a baby on demand is not inherently stressful. The main reason for the “don’t demand feed–you’ll be stressed” advice is all the other stuff that’s going on in a mother’s life and the perceived effect of demand feeding on her ability to cope. The root cause of most of the rough times mothers with new babies face can be summed up with one word: adjustment. If this is your first baby (and sometimes even if it isn’t), you have to adjust to being completely responsible for another human being. Your freedom is cramped. Your decisions become weighty, even little decisions like when to shower, or exercise, or go out to eat. Our marriages are often in flux as both husband and wife adjust to changing roles and the strain that postpartum recovery puts on intimacy. Many of us are adjusting to breastfeeding, which for a lot of new moms, is really, really hard, and they’re shocked by feelings of inadequacy and failure. We’re adjusting to interrupted sleep. Our houses are messier, or at least just more cluttered with baby stuff. And we might be looking a little messier, too, as we figure out how to adjust our beauty regimens to our new levels of energy and time. We may be adjusting to the new needs and patterns of a toddler who’s dealing with not being the baby anymore. Some women who quit their jobs to be home with the baby are adjusting to being home full time. Then of course, there’s that often under-acknowledged mammoth of all adjustments, the adjustment to being off your high levels of pregnancy hormones. (Heh. When you can’t get through one of your kids’ library books without crying, you know it’s serious.)

People figure that demand feeding will make all this worse. They imagine a chaotic environment in which the mother is trying to cope with all these adjustments, but she never knows what’s going to happen next with her baby. She’d just be starting dinner, or sorting through the overwhelming clutter, or heading outside to admire her husband’s new chicken coop, when Waaaaaaaah!. Baby Dear wants to nurse. Mommy has to sit down with her Boppy pillow for forty five minutes while the rest of her complicated, off-kilter life goes on hold.

A schedule seems like it would solve a lot of that. It takes so much of the adjustment out of adjustment. You can see on paper what your day will look like and strategize about how you’ll fit everything in. Ah. I’ll take a shower at 7:00 before the baby’s scheduled to wake up. I’ll read to Darling Displaced Toddler at 10:30 during the baby’s scheduled nap, have dinner on the table at 6:00 before the baby’s scheduled feeding time, and snuggle with Ever Valiant Yet Slightly Lonely Hubby at 8:00 after the baby’s scheduled to be done nursing and asleep. Neat and tidy. You could even plan out your postpartum life before the birth!

But is an external schedule that you impose on your baby really the best way to buy yourself a little predictability?

The way that most scheduling books tell you how to know when your baby needs to nurse is based on time ranges for a given age (or some books will combine age and weight). So, for example, you might read that newborns should be nursed every two-and-a-half to three hours, and that babies need to follow a prescribed pattern for sleeping, eating, and being awake. Then, the assumption is that any time the baby cries, you will know exactly what he needs because he needs the next thing he’s scheduled to need. So, if your baby already ate an hour ago, and now he’s crying, the scheduling book would have you assume that he’s tired and needs to go down for a nap. Some books will mention the feeding cues that infants show when they’re hungry, but the emphasis is on getting the baby to make it for the full time range.

Do you know what’s wrong with this picture?

It is based entirely on the baby’s stats (age or age plus weight). There’s another person here with stats. Her name is Mommy. What many people don’t realize is that, while nearly all women are capable of producing plenty of milk in a 24 hour period, there is a 300 per cent variation among women in milk storage capacity. I wrote a whole post about this, but here are some highlights. Milk storage capacity is how much milk your breasts can hold without feeling uncomfortably full and slowing production way down. Another way to think of it is simply the amount of milk available at any one time. A 300 per cent variation in milk storage capacity means that at any given feeding, a mother on the large end of the milk storage spectrum has three times as much milk available for her baby than a mother at the low end of the spectrum. OK, homeschooling math question: If these two mothers’ babies need the same number of ounces per day, can they nurse the same number of times per day? Answer: No. If the mother with the small milk storage capacity tries to put her baby on a schedule that works well for a mother with a large milk storage capacity, her baby is going to cry a lot from legitimate hunger. That’s bad for baby and stressful for mom. Scheduling books often alleviate much of this stress by telling parents to expect a certain amount of crying and offer comfort in the idea that babies who are left to cry will not suffer any psychological damage, but that’s not really helpful if your baby is actually hungry.

But if a predetermined schedule = problematic, does new Mommy life = chaos, stress, and disarray? Not at all. Let’s go back to the actual problem: adjustment. Adjusting means getting used to a new normal. It means seeing what happens over and over again until you can come up with workable strategies. Being a mother is a skill, like knitting or playing the violin, and as such, there’s a learning curve. If you are willing to go through the learning process, you can come out on the other side of the adjustment with just as much predictability and routine as you would have with a predetermined schedule, but you can be much more certain that what you’re doing is actually meeting your baby’s needs the best way you can given how your body works.

If you want to be able to schedule your day without “scheduling” your baby, there are three things you have to do. 1. Learn the typical infant feeding cues. (According to the American Academy of Pediatrics Breastfeeding Policy Statement, “Newborns should be nursed whenever they show signs of hunger, such as increased alertness or activity, mouthing, or rooting. Crying is a late indicator of hunger.”) 2. Get your baby up at the same time every day. 3. Pay attention to what happens when.

As long as you’re getting your baby up at relatively the same time every day (and as long as he’s over that first month and a half or so where your milk supply is getting established), with a little observation, you can start to predict when he’s likely going to be hungry or tired and plan accordingly. Your own milk storage capacity is not going to change from day to day, and your baby’s hunger and thirst levels are likely going to be relatively stable for weeks at a time (except during illness or teething), so as long as your schedule is regular (always getting up at the same time, always sitting down for school with your older children at the same time, etc.), you will most likely be able to see a pattern develop. You have to continue to watch your baby for cues, though, because he may need to nurse more often if he’s about to have a growth spurt or is needing more fluids because he’s getting sick. In that case, you might have a few days when you’ll need to do things in a little different order. But overall, you can very much get used to what your baby’s needs are, and can structure your days so that you are able to get things done.

At this point, you’ll be right where a scheduling mother is. Scheduling books are simply a shortcut that skips the observation phase. Rather than getting your own data based on the real interplay between your body and your baby’s needs, scheduling books hand you “data.” Those “data” are perfect for some people and are exactly what they would have found if they’d done the observation themselves. But for other people, they are light years removed from their baby’s actual needs and don’t work well at all. The goal is happy, well-functioning homes where everyone’s needs are met, and we don’t necessarily have to all get there the same way.