Laura Newell: Want WA to grow? It’s the new mums who need the most support

When it’s 3am and you’re sat in a rocking chair with an infant screaming at you, it’s hard not to feel alone, scared and overwhelmed.

And once the rest of the world wakes up for the day, you’re still left trudging through endless chores: washing, cleaning of bottles, nappy changes. All while you’re chronically sleep deprived.

Spoiler: Early parenthood is hard.

But when does it become time to call in the professionals?

For me, it was when my daughter was four-and-a-half months old. Beautiful and bright as she was, her sleep had deteriorated to the point where I was up with her overnight every 30 minutes.

I kept it together for as long as possible, but I could feel myself cracking. Just getting dressed was a energy-sapping task of gargantuan proportions.

I was breastfeeding, so I was the one doing all the overnight wake-ups. I was then alone at home during the day while my husband worked and my return to work at six months loomed large and terrifying in the not-too-distant future.

How was I ever going to be able to do all this and work as well?

One night, as my daughter screamed in my arms, fighting sleep after her sixth wake-up of the night, I googled “my baby won’t sleep, help me”. I didn’t know what else to do.

I found the website of a local sleep consultant. I emailed immediately to ask for an appointment. The next morning, she replied, offering a free 15-minute call to see if we’d be a mutual fit.

My husband was dead-set against it — it was $800 we didn’t have while I wasn’t working and as far as he was concerned just a phase (the child health nurse had told me the same), but he agreed to be on the call “if it meant that much to me”.

It was during that call my husband finally understood the toll the lack of sleep had taken on me when the sleep consultant asked me how I was coping with being a mum.

My only response was to sob — loudly, at length and without being able to stop. I was totally broken.

I loved my baby but I couldn’t continue like this, especially as I had an underlying mental health issue that was being triggered through the lack of sleep.

My husband signed us up on the spot. Within days, the consultant’s help had my little girl sleeping through the entire night. Something she has gone on to do ever since.

And I put much of her astonishing early development down to the fact she sleeps so well. At four months, she was only just hitting milestones. From six months onwards she flew to the top percentile on every one.

Sleep is important for everyone.

I was lucky, I’d stumbled on someone who knew what she was doing and my baby had nothing medical underlying her wakefulness, but it could have been so different in a field that is largely unregulated.

Of the other families in our mother’s group, one used a different consultant and another was lucky enough to scoop a spot at the then-newly opened Glengarry Early Parenting Centre.

The mum using the other sleep consultant found it no help at all. She seemed to advocate the cry-it-out method, which left mum and baby traumatised.

But the five days at the Glengarry centre changed the other’s life. It turned out her little one had an underlying and undiagnosed medical condition causing her lack of sleep.

She’d already gone to the emergency department several times with other issues, but they hadn’t put two and two together. It wasn’t until the experts at Glengarry sat down and holistically considered what the dramas were that they started to piece it all together.

She was on-referred to other specialists and the baby went on to thrive.

I dread to think where she would have ended up otherwise — quite possibly in one of WA’s two mental health units for mums and babies, if my own experience was anything to go by.

Glengarry is one of only two private centres that I know of in WA that offer such specialist in-patient support. And news this week that it is to close is devastating. This is a lifeline that parents need.

And it comes less than a year after Glengarry’s maternity unit closed, following on from the cessation of obstetric services at Mt Lawley, and, regionally, Carnarvon.

Few now have a village to help us raise our children, and facilities like Glengarry’s EPC are, therefore, and an increasingly important part of postnatal care.

As they increasingly go the way of the dodo, we need to take a good, hard look at what can be done to support parents if we want people to keep having babies in this State. ‘