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

 John Locke VS Babies

Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly learn that the smooth, hard, curved surface looked like a porcelain teacup, or that the familiar, soft, yielding swells and silky hairs translated into a visual wife? Locke thought t...
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Locke wondered if a blind person given sight would need to learn how to associate this new sense with the others, but babies make these associations instinctively.

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

 Instinctual Breastfeeding

From an evolutionary point of view, it would seem that last-feeding should be one of the more instinctual behaviors, like eating or sleeping or sex. In most mammals, if mothers don't know how to offer their milk or babies don't know how to suckle, the infant dies. If die purpose of reproduction is to pass on genes, it would seem that feeding would be one of the more hard-wired biological behaviors. In explanation, Wiessinger offered this story: A female gorilla, born and raised in a zoo, gave...
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Breastfeeding is instinctual, so that separating the mother from the infant can prevent it from happening, but there is a cultural aspect to it as well for primates.