Babies at Work
Document source : www.babiesatwork.org
will get the need met more quickly. So, the longer a caregiver
waits to meet a baby's needs, the more frequently and the longer
the baby will scream in the future. At the same time, the baby
who has to repeatedly scream for long periods to get his needs
met is steadily learning that
, which affects his view of his own value as a person and his
trust in his caregivers.
Dr. Meredith Small, a professor of anthropology at Cornell
University, wrote a carefully documented, enlightening book
called
, which discusses cross-cultural
parenting styles and the data on the impact of various practices on
the babies themselves, and explains a great deal about why babies
in our society cry so much more than babies in cultures with more
"attachment-based" parenting styles. The book explains why
babies are born so helpless and
from an anthropological perspective. Humans are
primates. Other primates--gorillas, for example--are able to
cling to their mothers' bodies immediately after birth and hang on
while the mothers are traveling. Human infants are born unable
to even control their own hand movements--they are completely
vulnerable and dependent on other people to meet every need.
The reasons for this, as Dr. Small explains, are the abnormally
large brains humans have relative to our body size and the pelvic
bone structure that allows humans to walk on only two limbs
instead of using four legs like most other primates. Dr. Small
goes into considerable detail on the mechanics behind this but,
basically, human babies are born neurologically "unfinished." If a
human baby stayed in his mother's body until the point of being
more self-sufficient at birth like other primates, his head would be
too big for his mother to safely give birth. Human babies are
essentially born too soon due to the fact that we walk on two legs.
This idea is also the basis of many of the concepts in Dr. Harvey
Karp's book
highly-effective methods used in indigenous cultures for calming
young babies through mimicking the environment of the womb.
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Summary :
Dr. Meredith Small, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University, wrote a carefully documented, enlightening book called Our Babies, Ourselves , which discusses cross-cultural parenting styles and the data on the impact of various practices on the babies themselves, and explains a great deal about why babies in our society cry so much more than babies in cultures with more "attachment-based" parenting styles.
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