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Nicholas Day Books

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“The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold—abuse, stress, utter indifference—can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with.”

DiversityInfancyResiliency
Book:Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle
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“Seemingly every culture before our own has had a single acceptable way to raise a baby. These cultures wouldn't have cared about the new scientific findings: they already knew how babies worked. Their answers were all very different, mind you, but they had this in common: all the other answers were wrong. Such confidence makes sense. If you have to raise a baby, not study a baby, you'd better settle on an answer, and as long as you have settled on an answer, you may as well be certain about it. Pretty much everyone has been very certain. But if everyone has been very certain, and everyone's certainty has been very different, you start to suspect that there aren't that many certainties after all. There's no one true path. Or put another way: the one true path is forked.”

Child RearingFalse Certainty
Book:Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle
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“When Jean Piaget lectured in the United States, he was frequently asked whether the rate at which children attained his cognitive stages could be accelerated—in other words, whether you could train your child to be "ahead" of other children. Piaget was bewildered by the question. In his view of development, being "ahead" or "behind" anyone else was meaningless. But he got the question often enough that he came to associate it with a particular worldview: he called it "the American Question.”

PiagetAmerican Worldview
Book:Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle
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“Pacifiers are also blamed for delayed language development, which seems logical, too—how's he going to talk with that thing in his mouth?—but there's no evidence for this either. There is evidence that the lack of evidence hasn't stopped people from making the claim: a British speech therapist even admits she was disappointed her study's data showed no link between pacifiers and speech problems. And teeth? Pacifiers only screw up the palate if used past the age of five, well after the vast majority of children have stopped.”

Language DevelopmentPacifiers
Book:Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle
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“La Leche League and the What to Expect books are even explicit about this fear: the pacifier, they warn, cannot substitute for a mother. This is the rare piece of parenting wisdom that manages to be both condescending and confusing. Condescending because it seems unlikely that parents who were considering using a pacifier—parents diligent enough to look it up in a book—were also considering abandoning their child altogether. Confusing because, well—what? How would a pacifier substitute for a mother—how exactly? Are there pacifiers on the market that cuddle and feed and rock and dote on a child? Is a mother nothing more than a nipple?”

Real TalkPacifiers
Book:Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle
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