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Beware of Baby Stuff

© Sara McGrath

I listened to a news report that said that infants in my country, the United States of America, spend sixty-five percent of their time alone. This was compared to many other cultures where infants spend less than ten percent of their time alone. Even in other Western cultures, such as Japan, infants are not generally left alone in back bedrooms as they are in the US.

At first this statistic seemed unbelievable to me, but I had only to look around at department stores to see how it could be true. Companies offer every imaginable product designed, for your convenience, to substitute for all the ways you could care for your baby. To free up your arms, strap your baby into a baby holder (chair, swing, bouncer, rocker, etc.) While you're out, strap her into a stroller or portable car seat. To free up your breasts, plug in a pacifier or bottle of formula. The growth hormone and steroids, among other unwanted chemicals, in that formula may trigger your child to reach puberty by second or third grade so she can start a family and be out of your care even sooner. I recently heard of a local family adopting a baby whose mother was nine.

The news report said that this distance we create between ourselves and our children conditions our kids to life without adequate loving touch. Of course, this touch is a biological need, so they find other ways to compensate. Security objects when they're young and promiscuous behavior when they're older are some of those ways. Many of us grow up to be lonely, unfulfilled adults.

Why don't we touch our kids? Because in our US culture, touch has been reserved for sex. Many parents are not comfortable touching their children for fear that their touch will be misinterpreted by others. Babies have their own beds and often their own bedrooms, because adult bedrooms have been reserved for sex. Babies are kept out of the parental bed even though sleeping away from a parent's body during their first six months may contribute to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, also know as crib death. Would there be crib death if there were no cribs?

Whatever happened to instinctive parenting? Doesn't the use of products and practices that distance parent and child feel wrong? I know there are people out there following their hearts and avoiding these products, but there are far more following the recommendations of experts, even if these experts have never had children. Why do so many people follow these experts? Because we're taught from a young age in our public schools that the only correct answers are the ones in the single-subject textbooks written by experts. We're discouraged from thinking for ourselves, and we're not given the opportunity to learn from experience as nature designed us to do.

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