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Why Babies Need More Human Contact Here in United States, our evaporating sense of human connectedness creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by corporate culture and the commodification of life. Much thought has been devoted to the myriad possible causes of our fraying social fabric, but there is one likely suspect that has received scant consideration: how we treat our babies. For the past few generations, we have been carrying out a radical experiment in infant-rearing, recklessly disregarding millions of years of evolution: Our babies are routinely deprived of human contact. The assault began around the end of the 19th century, when Victorian society decided that cribs and private rooms were a good idea. Before that, most everyone slept with their babies, and today, 90% of the world still does. During the same era, infant formula was invented, and here again the babies were the big losers, not only getting inferior nutrition, but also missing out on the frequent intimate contact that is the hallmark of all mammals. Soon after, the Western medical establishment began treating childbirth as pathology. Birthing mothers were heavily drugged, their newborns whisked away to the nursery and sequestered except during feedings. In the 20s and 30s, proponents of “behaviorist” psychology began to advise parents to let infants “cry it out” on their own, based on the specious assumption that by providing a positive response to crying (e.g., picking the baby up), one only reinforces crying behavior. With burgeoning mass production, an endless array of isolating baby containers — strollers, carriages, playpens, walkers, bouncers, etc. — became ubiquitous parenting accessories. As car culture proliferated, people spent more time in their cars, and so did their babies, alone in car seats. Over the last twenty-odd years, single parents and families with two working parents have become the norm, often sending their babies off to daycare when they are as young as three months, where both the quality and quantity of human interaction inherently suffers. And let’s not forget the prevalence of the electronic babysitter (never mind the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation of no television for the first two years). In recent decades, there has been a slowly mounting backlash against the trends outlined above, and some have begun to reverse. The importance of abundant, warm, physical contact in fostering a healthy and long-lasting bond between baby and caretaker is being rediscovered. Parents are relearning that infants are not insentient blobs, but rather little people who happen to be helpless, with emotional needs crucial to their well being and development. This alternative outlook has come to be known as attachment parenting. Still, our present day, mainstream infant-rearing practices remain a striking aberration from most of the world’s customs throughout human history, as well as from all of our close animal relatives. Anthropologist Meredith Small notes, “The U.S. consistently stands out as the only society in which babies are routinely placed in their own beds and in their own rooms.” Across most of the planet, letting a baby cry it out would be considered the mark of a hopelessly cruel parent. As of 2000, only 18% of our babies were still being breastfed by 12 months, compared to a world weaning average of four years. Overall, American babies receive roughly half the physical human contact received by babies in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. But does any of this really make a difference in adult social relationships? After all, the resilience of the human psyche is legendary. While a positive correlation between human contact and physical health in babies is well established, it is much more difficult to causally link our aberrant parenting style to complex social behavior later in life. Based on over thirty years of pediatric practice, parenting guru Dr. William Sears observes that attachment-parented children tend to be sensitive and compassionate, with a high capacity for intimacy and the potential to become the “leaders and shapers of a better world to come.” Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead have observed that cultures in which babies are breastfed longer tend to be more peaceful and cooperative, and many psychologists believe that early weaning can have negative impacts on personality. Of course the above opinions are largely speculative, and may be dismissed by skeptics as anecdotal. The only available hard evidence applies to extreme cases in which babies are completely separated from their primary caregivers for extended periods of time (weeks or months). In 1944, Attachment Theory founder John Bowlby published his landmark paper “Forty-four Juvenile Thieves,” documenting how these babies develop “affectionless” anti-social personalities. But perhaps the most compelling evidence is revealed by those who have sought to exploit human detachment: The architects of modern advertising understood well that people with weaker social ties tend to be more zealous consumers, and ads were (and are to this day) designed to subtly question and attack these ties. Pioneering behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson, who made his name preaching that for the good of “modern” industrial America babies should never be coddled, left academia in 1922 for a senior position at an advertising agency. You do the math. Simply heeding wisdom and common sense, we know that we are exposing infants to conditions that betray evolution and that we should expect to see negative side effects from this meddling. We intuitively understand that what’s best for a baby is time spent in loving, close contact with people. Yet because our culture so reveres independence, we are inclined to ignore our hearts, and we seem to start pushing our babies away from the moment the umbilical cord is cut. Meanwhile, we lament the disintegration of family and community, the deepening personal isolation across the spectrum of our society. Could it be that we are simply getting what we’ve asked for, to the extent that our approach to parenting is a reflection of an economy-driven culture in which individual ambition reigns supreme? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume that if children learn to build intimate, compassionate bonds with their parents, this gift will carry over into their future relations with other people, as well as with the natural world. And it’s no stretch to imagine that such a child wouldn’t be inclined to seek attention by screaming for fast food or the hottest pair of Nikes, and thus would be derailed from the fast track to brand loyalty that now takes root in the single digit years. Or that an adult with such strong personal grounding would likely not seek refuge in material gratification, or mindlessly trash the environment, or work a job with questionable social value, or leave a trail of familial wreckage that further feeds the cycle of disconnectedness. As with most complex problems, it may be that our best shot at reversing Western culture’s runaway spiral of dehumanization is to begin with the fundamentals: begetting solid human foundations from the get-go, baby. Dan Bertolet lives with his wife and 23 month-old daughter in Seattle, and can be contacted at <dan@noisetank.com>. |