Babies benefit from specialised clinics: The introduction of the health centres has significantly reduced the infant mortality in NSW. Photo: Janie Barrett
The bundles arrive as they always have.
Squawking, sleeping, starving or stuffed, mostly loved, often confounding, nothing about babies has changed in the 100 years since the first baby health clinic opened in NSW, but “parenting”, as it is now known, has washed through fad after fad.
Irene Macadie watched the mothers who brought their babies to the clinic morph from stay-at-home wives with lots of close family support and exposure to other babies when she started working as a baby nurse in 1955, into working women, unfamiliar with babies and living far from their own parents when she retired in 1994.
Parenting evolved in life of baby clinics: Nurse Jenni Jones with 8 month old Ethan his mum Sharlene Pasqual. Photo: Janie Barrett
They worried always about settling their babies, but the later mothers were more anxious about their babies’ development, and the general tiredness that afflicts all mothers had funnelled into a single question: “When will my baby sleep through the night?”