Hey, Dr. Spock--Here’s Dr. Mom : A Mother of Five Updates Child-Care Literature

DENVER, Colo. —  Dr. Marianne Neifert is being touted by her publicist as the up-and-coming authority on child rearing, a title currently held by Dr. Benjamin Spock. Yet Neifert can’t get her own five children--ages 10 to 18--to eat breakfast before school, even though consuming breakfast is considered a must by nutritionists. And the kids’ wing of the Neifert’s sprawling house outside Denver is so messy that it’s off-limits to visitors.

The Neifert brood joke that if their mother’s book, “Dr. Mom: A Guide to Baby and Child Care” (scheduled for release this month by G. P. Putnam’s Sons), becomes a hit, they’ll simply have to write a sequel: “Dr. Mommy Dearest,” revealing that their mother fumbles and compromises just like any other parent.

Neifert says that’s exactly what qualifies her to challenge Dr. Spock’s reign--she is at times as confused as any new mother. When she brought her first baby, Peter, home from the hospital, Neifert was so unsure of herself that she agonized at length over how to remove the T-shirt the hospital had dressed her baby boy in.

The infant was jaundiced at birth, and Neifert became convinced the child was dying. Jaundice is a treatable condition over which doctors do not become especially alarmed. But whenever 38-year-old Neifert overhears another pediatrician wondering aloud why a new mother is so upset that her baby is jaundiced, she knows precisely why the mother feels the way she does.

“Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care” was Neifert’s reference for raising her own children, all of whom were born while she was in medical school and residency. The book still occupies a place on Neifert’s bookshelf. Neifert says she adores Spock, and seems to feel it’s slightly sacrilegious that her press material compares her book with his.

But Spock’s book is 40 years old, and though it’s been revised, she noted that it doesn’t get into some areas that she discusses. Along with the standard information on child development and management of medical problems, Neifert’s book contains advice on current social topics such as physical and sexual child abuse, strategies for non-sexist child rearing, gay parenting, and the problems of working mothers.

But the most important difference between Dr. Mom and Dr. Spock is that Spock is not a mother, Neifert said. And although Spock can claim fatherhood as part of his training, Neifert believes that fathers--particularly in the era when Spock was raising his family--are shielded from much of the daily trauma of child care.

‘Still a Mom’

“I have experienced parental growing pains myself and have listened long and hard to the parents I have encountered,” Neifert said in the book, written with Anne Price and Nancy Dana. “I have tempered my sometimes rigid, traditional medical training with personal experience and my patients’ feedback.

“All the time I spend doctoring I’m still a mom,” she added. “All the time I spend mothering I’m still a doctor. The paths of pediatrician and parent cross, recross and run together, enhancing both roles.”

There was a time when the two paths did not complement each other, but in fact threatened to doom both pursuits for Neifert.

Neifert never wavered from her desire to become a doctor after an incident that occurred when she was 9 years old. Her brother nearly lost his life when his hand was mangled in an explosion. At the time, Neifert fervently wished she had the skills to help him.

Didn’t Date in High School

Motherhood was not a dream to which Neifert dedicated herself with the same sense of mission. In fact, she never dated throughout high school, spending her weekends studying pre-med subjects such as science and math.

During her first year of college at the University of Hawaii, Marianne Egeland met Lorance Neifert. She was married to him when she was 18.

Lorance was drafted into the Navy eight months after the wedding. Neifert spent the time while he was away doubling up on her school work. During this period, she went for her admission interview to the University of Hawaii School of Medicine. She was seven months pregnant at the time.

Eventually, most of Neifert’s classmates had received letters of acceptance from schools where they’d interviewed, but Neifert still had heard nothing.

She said it became clear to her that the all-male admission committee had rejected her application because she was pregnant. Neifert made a formal protest. The committee told her they’d accept her into medical school, but with the warning: “If we do take you, you’d better not have any more babies,” she recalled.

Found a Baby Sitter

When her second child, Paige, was born, Neifert found a baby sitter near the hospital so she could dash over and breast-feed the infant during breaks from pathology lab.

There seemed to be little support in the medical school setting for the idea that being a mother herself would make Neifert better equipped to deal with mothers and babies professionally. Yet she began to notice that the education she was getting differed in important ways from what the non-parents in the class received.

When she was pregnant with her fourth child, Neifert worked in the intensive-care nursery as part of her training. The day she went into labor, a baby she’d cared for several months was dying. Neifert was learning about a non-textbook aspect of pediatrics: compassion for a parent’s worry and pain.

“Even with male residents you can tell the ones that have kids,” Neifert said. She once observed a male intern leaving a delivery room where a child had just been born with serious birth defects. Unaware that anyone was watching him, the young doctor went directly to the hall phone, put in a dime and asked someone on the other end: “Are the kids OK?”

Terri Emanuel, from Golden, Colo., was apprehensive when she walked into St. Luke’s Women’s Hospital’s lactation clinic (designed to correct breast-feeding problems, the clinic is the only one of its kind in the country). In Emanuel’s arms was baby Kathleen, who appeared undersized for her 6 weeks. Because of a receding chin that interfered anatomically with breast-feeding, the baby was not getting enough nourishment and had been dangerously underweight on an earlier visit.

This day, Kathleen weighed in at 6 pounds, 3 ounces.

“That’s what we wanted to hear,” Neifert said. “She should pick up a pound this week and be a new baby.”

Neifert grinned genuinely at the parent’s exclamations of happiness at her daughter’s weight gain. The doctor listened to a seemingly endless list of questions Emanuel had jotted down, and answered each one.

Neifert teaches that there are no absolute answers to most child-rearing puzzles, and the best thing a new mother can do is to trust her own competence.

“Much of the success of being a parent has to do with feeling competent,” Neifert said. “Everyone’s going to be a better parent if they feel they naturally have it (the ability to parent) in themselves.”

The Neifert home, of course, is a test laboratory for Dr. Mom’s theories of child care. The Neifert method has produced impressive results. There’s a warmth among the clan that could not be faked for the benefit of a visitor. Each Neifert child is such an individual that it’s no trick to remember all five of their names on first meeting.

Peter, 18, and Paige, 16, hope to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become pediatricians. Tricie, 14, and Heather, 13, want to be actresses. Ten-year-old Mark, undecided about career goals, has the kind of savvy that comes from watching older brothers and sisters grow up.

The Neifert children are pulling together to ease the strain on the family now that their mother has added book tours to her other duties, which include working as adviser to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and as assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Everyone takes turns cooking--Tricie on Monday, Heather on Tuesday. . . . They use a lot of paper plates, and everyone pitches in to wash dishes.

The Neifert home was cleverly designed by Lorance, a management training coordinator for a local gas and electric company, to accommodate the five kids downstairs where “they’re practically self-sufficient,” Marianne Neifert said. There’s a bell at the top of the stairs that’s rung to call the family together. The view from the front deck of the home is of miles of sparsely populated fields, with the front range of the Rockies in the distance. The children like to sleep out on the deck in sleeping bags on warm nights.

Lorance, who grew up in a family of five children, as did Marianne, is the one who usually handles the heart-to-heart chats with the children when trouble is brewing.

Major Family Debate

“We’re not model kids, we have our problems,” Peter pointed out. A recent family debate that raged until past 11 on a school night concerned the question: Is it possible to have friends in high school who don’t drink?

Neifert’s chapter on the dilemma of working parents is especially timely. She advises that guilt-ridden parents “simply do the best they can, acknowledge to themselves that this is their best, and then--give themselves a break! Be just half as understanding of your own limitations as you are of others.”

Neifert once formed a strategy that she thought would allow her to provide adequate doses of maternal care: She’d spend half an hour with each one of her brood each evening. That plan lasted for one day. Then Neifert realized it was more realistic to fall back on what she calls the triage method--whoever needs mom the most at any given time gets her attention.

But for 10 days every year, Dr. Mom is on call for the Neifert kids alone.

That’s when the family goes camping on MacConaughy Lake in Ogallala, Neb. “There’s no trees, nothing, just sweltering heat,” Neifert said. “But you’d think we were going to Europe. We think about it all year. It’s sacred.”

Neifert believes her roles as doctor and parent enhance each other.

There are no absolute answers to most of our child-rearing puzzles.