Congratulations, It's A Genius!

What would you say if I told you your baby is a genius? In fact you were born a genius, too!

Would you believe me? 

In my years of being a midwife I have met hundreds and hundreds of new babies.  

A very fresh new baby is wet and squishy and warm and often coated in that fatty white substance, the vernix caseosa, that protected their skin when they were still immersed in amniotic fluid. Some babies have their eyes wide open even before their bodies are fully born and others will blink them open one at a time when they are nestled against their mothers’ chests, eyelids sticky with vernix. Watching a brand new human unfold into life outside of their first oceanic habitat is a privilege beyond measure and I am always struck by how wise they look. They seem to know the entire universe and yet they still have to learn everything. 

Here’s what Stephen Gaskin had to say about a newborn baby in ‘Spiritual Midwifery’, one of my favourite birthy books 

“A newborn infant is just as intelligent as you are. When you are relating with him, you should consider that you are relating with a very intelligent being who just doesn’t speak your language yet.”

I actually think that a brand new baby is more intelligent than an adult in many ways. Consider all the skills that a baby acquires in record time. A baby is wired to observe and apply. They learn at hyper speed and I have often wondered if we forget our nature as we learn the ways of society. 

We lose our genius.

We really do!

Have you ever heard of Doctor George Land?

Maybe you have but I hadn’t until a few days ago. 

By total fluke I came across a piece of work last week that captured my interest. It’s a study that Dr Land produced with Dr Beth Jarman in 1968 and I think it is relevant not only to how we look at our children but also to how we understand ourselves.

Drs Land and Jarman conducted a research study to test the creativity of children. There were 1,600 children enrolled in the study ranging in ages from three-to-five years old. Professor Land had devised a creativity test to help NASA recruit the most innovative engineers and scientists who showed the highest ability in creative problem solving. NASA wanted to employ people who scored at genius level. The assessment worked so well in identifying geniuses that Professor Land decided to try it on children. 

Here’s what Dr Land and Dr Jarman found:

At the age of five 98% of children scored at genius level. By the time the children were ten years old there were 30% of children in the same range and by the time they were fifteen years of age only 12% of children showed the ability to problem solve at genius level. 

The same test given to 280,000 adults with the average age of 31 resulted in only 2% of people scoring at that level. 

And here’s the corker:

The reason we lose our genius?

School! 

At school we are ultimately taught to censor our ideas.  

Our creative thinking happens through a thought process called divergent thinking; our imagination. Dr Land calls this ‘the accelerator’. Divergent thinking produces ideas, good ones and not so good ones. 

Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is the process that helps us make decisions by evaluating ideas and applying criticism and judgement. Dr Land calls convergent thinking ‘the break’. It allows us to test our ideas before executing them. It's applied logic.

We need both and geniuses employ them separately! A genius gets all the ideas out first and then test and implements them.

Dr Land and his team observed that at school we are taught to use both kinds of thinking at the same time. All of the judging goes on before we even express the thought. Instead of engaging our peers in exploring the idea we are encouraged to produce 'correct' answers that are repeateable.

For the most creative ideas to surface, we must be able to express all of our thoughts. We must have the freedom to explore ideas no matter how silly or impossible they first seem. That’s how we move forward. 

That’s what innovation is.

Personally, I am not surprised that schools oppress our genius. During my own schooling days I often wondered what it does to us to be sat on chairs from the age of six to ‘study’. 

And besides, who sets the curriculum and who decides how we are taught?

What are acceptable opinions to hold?

What questions are we allowed to ask?

I learned that some questions got you kicked out of the classroom even in the 1990s.

In his TED talk in 2011 titled “The Failure of Success” Dr Land calls schools ‘factories for human beings’. They were built for the purpose of ‘manufacturing’ people who could work in the factories that popped up during the industrial revolution. And that was initially desirable. Dr Land acknowledges that the industrial revolution helped in reducing the amount of people who lived in extreme poverty and it improved our overall quality of life.

Like everything, the comforts we are now used to as a result of industrialisation come at a prize and the pendulum is swinging back again.

The quality of our food is suffering.

Our health is suffering.

We are more prone to noncommunicable diseases than ever (which in turn makes us more vulnerable to the communicable ones).

We are seeing poverty levels rise again.

'Progress' is making people obsolete in certain lines of work. 

It is time to change our way of thinking, revive our genius. 

Dr Land shows images of brain activity when the creative thinking process is in flow versus when we engage the logical mind and it is striking to see that in creative thinking we engage a much bigger area of our brain than when we apply logic. The thing that struck me the most when listening to Dr Land’s talk (it’s only 15 minutes long and I encourage you to find it) is that when we are afraid, we engage the smallest part of our brain.

Fear paralyses the brain, it keeps us from coming up with creative ideas.

I suddenly understood how this is relevant to pregnancy and birth in today's maternity landscape.

Most of my pregnant clients are scared and many of my former colleagues are scared. They all fear that ‘something might happen to the baby’. This is, of course, possible. Fear is created by judging 'risk' by the worst possible outcome. We don't tend to do this in many other areas of our lives. Do you pack a hospital bag when you take a drive in the car just in case you end up in a crash?

And, just like we are taught to censor our creative thoughts in Dr Land’s ‘factories for human beings’, this fear is taught to us in yet another factory for humans: 

The industrial maternity complex. 

As Earth is completing its 2023rd orbit around the sun AD (does  anyone know how many there were before?) I am reflecting not just on what the past twelve months held for me personally but also on life in general. 

On a global level the last year has been a year of unimaginable suffering in many places in the world and I hope that our collective prayer for peace will be heard. 

Until it does the only thing I can do is to keep seeing hope and potential for good in the world with every new pregnant family that crosses my path. 

Every new child is capable of free will and creativity.

Every new child can be the change for good.

I have no choice but to keep helping people bring in new life and sow the seed for a better future. 

The way we do birth matters and I believe wholeheartedly that peaceful birth impacts our relationships with our children and with each other. 

I also know from experience that if you and your child experienced a traumatic birth, you can overcome this with time. 

I am here for it all. 

It is my mission to help families give their children the best start in life in the context of their own reality using aromatherapy and my unique approach to birth education.

What would help you and your baby?

In order to do this, we need to shift the conversation, we need to invite new thinking.

Thankfully Dr Land says that we can relearn our genius! Our creative brain gets exercised every day via our dreams, he says. Turns out during the dreamstate there’s similar brain activity to the creative thinking state (I knew why I have always considered ‘sleep’ one of my favourite activities!).

We can do it! We just have to choose to let our ideas flow.

On that note, have you heard of my R.O.A.D. To Birth Program yet? You can read about it in my book and (apart from these blogs) it is the most creative project of mine in a long time!

R.O.A.D. To Birth  offers you a path to getting to know your mind so that you can prepare for giving birth in your own unique way. 

I’ll be meeting with my current R.O.A.D. To Birth group on Zoom on January 2nd at 6pm GMT. We will be doing some movement and breathwork and we’ll be checking in on any questions in the group.

I love giving my clients questions to think about, too, like this one:

'What does 'safety' mean to you in the context of pregnancy and birth?’ 

We’ve just established that our industrial maternity systems create fear and they do this by focusing on ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ 

Those two concepts direct the choices of expecting parents everywhere and you need to know what those terms mean to you. 

Generally those will be presented to you as if they are absolute: ‘you are  high risk’ (how would you feel hearing this?) or ‘let’s keep your baby safe’ (would you do what’s suggested to you?). 

In reality neither of those statements give you any real information and it is likely that your perception of ‘risk’ or ‘safety’ varies  from that of your practitioner or even your partner. 

So let me ask you:

What does safety mean to you? What makes you feel safe?  How do you value physical safety over emotional safety? What about short term and long term safety? How do you think ‘safety’ gets measured? What does ‘high risk’ mean? 

Do you think your definition of ‘safety’ in pregnancy and birth might ever change?

This year I have been reminded of how lucky we are to be in a position to concern ourselves with whether or not waiting for an extra day or two beyond the supposed 41 week deadline is ‘safe’? 

How much of a symptom of wealth are our soaring induction of labour and caesarean section rates? 

Will we continue to practise in the same way as resources dwindle? 

On a personal level 2023 has been a year of coming home to myself. 

It has been a year of planting seeds for what is to come. 

The genius study has reaffirmed to me what I have suspected all along: Our true human potential is stilted by the very institutions that we believe are there to help us thrive.

We are initiated into the medical system at birth, we are turned into citizens via the birth registration process, most of us are then handed over to the education system, possibly university, a job and then we start a family and the whole cycle starts all over again.

But what is the antidote?

In 2023 I have had the privilege of meeting many families and accompanying their paths.

Some families remove themselves from the system entirely - that comes with advantages and disadvantages, obviously. The main advantage is that it offers a sense of clarity. No interference. The disadvantage is that the family carries all of the responsibility. They will likely be judged for their decision by their peers and they have a lot of negotiating to do with the institutions in retrospect. For instance if you want to register a baby’s birth when there hasn’t been a midwife or doctor present, then you will have to know a few things in advance.

Some families dip in and out of the institutions in an attempt to pick the things they like and leave the things they don’t - in my observation that appears to be the most difficult path. One foot in, one foot out. There’s a lot of interference and it takes a lot of energy to advocate for yourself if you want to decline aspects of care that is deemed necessary. Generally creative thinking and problem solving are not encouraged within our institutions. Everyone is led by the guidelines but getting a customised birth plan is possible. You do need to be prepared, though, and you might have to continue to self advocate all the way through labour and birth depending on how things evolve.

And some families wholeheartedly choose to access maternity care exactly as prescribed. They read all the information and make informed decisions to opt into the care pathways as they stand. That offers clarity, too, no interference. The big advantage is that you can hand the responsibility to your providers and it is the socially most acceptable path. The disadvantage is that it comes with high induction of labour and caesarean section rates and your chances of an unassisted vaginal birth are reflected in the statistics in your area. If you want physiology informed care and you also don’t want to step away from the systems entirely there will most likely be situations where you will want to decline aspects of the 'care pathway' in which case you’ll find yourself with the group of parents I just described in the previous paragraph.

So the big challenge as we enter 2024 for me is to find a way in which we can thrive whether we choose to engage in the systems or not. The key to this in my opinion is complete honesty. R.O.A.D. To Birth is evolving as I am finding myself less and less afraid to be true to myself. And, there'll soon be an option to join and work your way through it even if you are not currently pregnant.

You will explore honestly how modern interventions hinder physiology and what that might mean for you and your baby. We will work with that. I am including a freebirth chapter so that you will be prepared for freebirth in your own home all by yourself or with a witness if you want. You’ll be equally well prepared for having an induction of labour or a  caesarean.  We talk about ways to nurture yourself and your baby regardless of your choices. We talk about how to approach feeding your baby - the full spectrum. We will explore why breastfeeding is the primal most appropriate way of feeding our babies and we will talk about why the statement ‘breast is best’ is a fallacy at the same time. We will learn to love ourselves for all the choices we might make. 

I truly cannot wait to see the program evolve with my group of clients. Shoot me an email if you want to bear witness the process ([email protected])

By the way, what would you like to see in a program like this?

Wishing you and yours a genius and happy New Year.