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So let's think. What is it like to be a baby? What's it like to be a child? Our emotions go up and down. We might be in a sort of happy, sort of ecstatic state one minute, giggling, finding everything funny and silly - similar things happen on psychedelics - and then the next minute there's a sudden shift and we're…
Cultures who traditionally practice safe co-sleeping, such as Asians, enjoy the lowest incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Trusted research by Dr. James McKenna, Director of the Mother-Baby Sleep Laboratory of the University of Notre Dame, showed that mothers and babies who sleep close to each other…
If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures…
In fact, contrary to all of the early anecdotes claiming that practice has no effect on the onset of walking, one carefully controlled study has shown that special exercise can indeed accelerate it. In this study, a group of newborns were given just ten minutes per day of "practice walking." Every day between one and…
Other experiments also show that one-year-olds have a radically new understanding of people. What happens when you show a baby something new, something a little strange, maybe wonderful, maybe dangerous—say, a walking toy robot? The baby looks over at Mom quizzically and checks her out. What does she think? Is there a…
Evidence that there is some sort of heightened awareness by mothers, caused either by biology or emotions, is seen in a mother's ability soon after birth to recognize her infant by smell and voice alone. In several studies, mothers who had spent only a few hours with their newborns were able to smell out their babies…
In a more evolutionardy appropriate infant-caretaker scheme, the infant is a social partner, part of a dyad. Both mother and infant are interested in being in equilibrium, that is, in a stable and contented state. This goal is adiieved by mutual regulation, by reciprocity, and by keep¬ ing tabs on each other. This…
More significantly, the breast—bottle controversy has moved far away from the question of what is best for babies. The decision for substitute milk is influenced by the pressures of corporations, their advertising, and their lobbies. The money game behind the production of formula has overpowered what might be best…
It might also be difficult to extend the categories of temperament across cultures when the categories mean different things in different environments. For example, "difficult" babies in Western cultures are those who do not sleep for long periods and those who cry. Under a different caretaking package, these…
In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so…