22 NOV 2011 by ideonexus

 Pro Cosleeping Bullet Points

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 enjoy similar protective sleep patterns.  Mothers enjoy a heightened awareness of their baby’s presence, what I call a “nighttime sleep harmony,” that protects baby.  The co-...
Folksonomies: parenting cosleeping
Folksonomies: parenting cosleeping
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A list of evidence concerning the safety and health benefits of cosleeping with infants.

08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 How Motherese Teaches Babies Language

The tests show that babies' preferences have nothing to do with the actual words mothers use. Babies choose motherese (or "parentese" or "caretakerese") even when the speaker is talking in a foreign language so infants can't understand the words, or when the words have been filtered out using computer techniques and only the pitch of the voice remains. Apparently they choose motherese not just because it's how their mother talks but because they like the way it sounds. Motherese is a sort of ...
Folksonomies: babies development language
Folksonomies: babies development language
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With its characteristic slow, repetitive enunciation of the words in culture's language, Motherese seems like an instinctual way a mother habituates their child to the sound categorizations of their language. This begs the question: if the Motherese imitates the sounds of another language, would that stave off the child's failure to distinguish foreign sounds later on?

29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus

 How the Mother-Infant Bond Grows Over Time

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 when comparing their shirts with the shirts worn by other babies. Mothers are also pretty good at hearing their infants. Women with new infants in wards usually sleep through the...
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Mothers grow more attached to their babies as their interactions grow so that the mother can better identify her baby and respond to its cry.

29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus

 Shortening a Baby's Crying Duration

What seems to work best is simple human contact. Peter Wolff long ago demonstrated that picking up a baby works better than anything else to stop any baby from crying. In another study, infant researchers BeU and Ainsworth showed in the 1970s, with a sample of twenty-six infants, that consistent and prompt response by the infant's mother is associated with a decrease in the duration of infant crying. Urs Hunziker and Ronald Barr recently took this idea even further when they experimented with...
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Nothing works better than carrying the baby and responding quickly to its needs.

29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus

 The Paradox of Crying Babies

Crying is the earliest and most compelling of infant signals," writes Ronald Barr, and surely there is no sound on earth more piercing than the cry of an infant. The ability to cry was hard-wired into human babies long ago as a potent signal to get adult attention. Like other primates, human infants needed to be able to send a message of distress to motivate action on the part of someone more able. The same kind of vocal signals are found in Rhesus monkeys, for example, which have very distin...
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The alarm compels the mother to care for the child, but it can also push them to abuse it.

29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus

 Objections to Cosleeping with Infants

The fear of overlaying haunts many parents in Western culture today. Most believe it is possible to roll over and squish a baby or suffocate it under a mound of blankets. But as infant sleep researcher McKenna notes, babies are born with strong survival reflexes, and they will kick and scream before they let anything clog their airways. The simple evidence that most babies around the world today sleep with a parent and they are not dying from suffocation should be enough to convince parents t...
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The fear of overlaying and religious objections to parents cosleeping with their babies.

21 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 Babies Come Through an Unaesthetic Location

I do not know why the Creator unaesthetically put the baby door in this particular location—between the bladder and the rectum. It has necessitated a very unladylike but definitely mother-like position known as squatting to perform the act of giving birth. Whether we like it or not, the act of emptying the baby box is mechanically identical to emptying the rectum. As a man I will never know what it actually feels like having a baby. Being very interested in subjectively preparing mothers-to...
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Located between the bladder and rectum.

15 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Mark Vonnegut on Bad Science in Anti-Cosleeping Recommend...

Bad science sets out to make a point, looks neither to the left nor to the right but only straight ahead for evidence that supports the point it sets out to make. When it finds evidence it likes, it gathers it tenderly and subjects it to little or no testing. And that's exactly what the commission did in this, its first attempt to quantify the number of fatalities resulting from the practice of parents "co-sleeping" with their babies and toddlers. The study, published in the October issue of...
Folksonomies: bad science cosleeping
Folksonomies: bad science cosleeping
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Highlights of bad science from the report.