Baby

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What a wonderful article. This is something I've been struggling with since shortly after my daughter was born

Alison Stalker started getting lectures even before her daughter, Kira, was born. “When I was pregnant, I mentioned to my doctor that we were thinking of getting one of those ‘side-car’ attachments for our bed as a place for the baby to sleep,” she explains. “She flipped out and told me that was a huge mistake because it would make the baby way too dependent on me.”

Once Kira was born, every doctor’s appointment seemed to involve more criticism of Stalker’s parenting. “She said I was spoiling her by feeding her every time she wanted and should put Kira on a four-hour schedule. When I said that would mean hours of crying, the doctor told me Kira would get used to it,” recalls Stalker. “Everyone would be happier if I just let her cry it out.”

Letting him cry

For Nicole Barrette, the “spoiling” comments come from family. “Hudson is six months old now,” she explains, “and if I start to leave the room, he’ll cry for me. I’ll turn around to get him and bring him with me, and the others will say, ‘Oh, let him cry — he’ll be fine. He has to learn. You’re just spoiling him.’”

There’s a huge fallacy in that logic, explains Ron Barr, professor of paediatrics in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine: “A baby crying is not the same as an older child crying. If you had, say, a three-year-old and you responded to every whimper, you could in a sense ‘spoil’ the child. But what’s true in a three-year-old gets extrapolated down to babies, and it’s not true for babies. That’s been demonstrated over and over again in research.”

People who think that this kind of responsive care will lead to wimpy, dependent, self-centred older children or adults might consider the experiences of other cultures. Barr studied the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert who carry their babies all the time when they’re awake and sleep with their babies skin to skin. They nurse on average about every 13 minutes, and they respond to every fret and whimper within seconds.

“And there’s nothing wimpy about the !Kung San,” says Barr. “The young boys are expected to go out into the woods and hunt wild boar, alone, and they are both brave and independent. The concept that this kind of care for infants makes them grow up to be wimps is simply not true.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, December 2008