Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle – A Journey Through Infancy, by Nicholas Day. St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Baby Meets World by Nicholas Day is not your average baby manual. It’s a combination of scientific research and current and historical popular belief about infants. It’s a cross-cultural comparison of the many ways to raise a baby. But it’s not a how-to. So why read it, right? Well, if you’re in the throes of new parenthood it may not be the book for you. Just keep fighting the good fight and take your vitamins. But if you’ve already raised a baby or are planning to soon, or just are a fan of the small squirmy creatures in general, you’ll find something to love about this book.
Day, raised in Springfield and a graduate of Springfield High, now lives in Buffalo, New York, with his wife and two sons. He studied English at the University of Chicago before going on to be a wedding cake baker, a wine salesman and a fairground maintenance man and then a writer for such publications as the Chicago Reader, Slate Magazine, and Food52.com. When his first son, Isaiah, was born, Day became curious about what was going on inside babies’ heads and how they were regarded from different vantage points throughout history. There were already many prescriptive manuals for parents on how to deal with babies, of course, but Day wanted to write something different. According to him, “Most books about babies treat them as problems to be solved. Do this and your baby sleeps through the night; do that and your baby gets into Harvard. I wanted a book that treated infancy not just as a stage to get through.”
This book goes deeper. It is divided into four parts: Suck, Smile, Touch and Toddle. “Suck” discusses why babies feel the need to suck on anything that will stand still, investigates the nursing process in depth, including the strange history of wet-nursing by both humans and other animals, and spends not inconsiderable time with the proponents and detractors of thumbs and pacifiers. “Smile” looks at what’s really going on when a baby smiles and how much this survival mechanism does for them. “Touch” demystifies “kangaroo care,” baby- wearing and the controversial history of swaddling. If you lived in France in the 1660s, you very likely believed that improper swaddling meant, according to a source from that time, your baby “would go upon all four as most other Animals do.” Regarding touch, as recently as 1949, a hospital pamphlet advised mothers to, “Handle infant as little as possible. Do not pick up baby every time it cries. … Infant is quickly spoiled by handling.” In “Toddle,” Day delves into the origins of developmental norms for babies, differing ones across cultures (babies wielding machetes!) and the anxiety of parents whose children do not crawl.
Day’s hope is that the book fosters some healthy skepticism about child-rearing advice and that it is “the opposite of preachy.” He notes the vulnerability of new parents – in their nervousness, they are so susceptible to baby advice from experts with widely differing prescriptions, many of them even backed by evidence. But how is the evidence compiled? How is it interpreted?
Reading Baby Meets World as a mother, I felt vindicated from the still recent and disorienting experience of being bombarded with conflicting baby advice, both solicited and unsolicited. It came from everywhere – old ladies on the street, What to Expect the First Year, our absent-minded pediatrician, my mother-in-law. To be clear, this was loud and ballsy Brooklyn and not the more reserved Midwest, but I hear the experience is pretty universal.
Readers will come away from Baby Meets World with the understanding that people have always had wild ideas about what babies need (to sit in bowls, to be nursed by goats) accompanied by unbelievable amounts of conviction – and babies have somehow survived.
As Day told me in an email, “The point of a culture, in a way, is to hand down the right answer to everyone in it: this is how you raise a baby. Many of these right answers weren’t actually right, of course. (Colostrum is semen!) But that didn’t matter. They were the answer. They kept parents from going crazy. …But I think the core uncertainty that marks contemporary parenting is relatively new. Before this point, it simply wasn’t possible. And I as write in the book, it is profoundly ironic: never has having a baby been less perilous than it is now. It’s good to remember.”
After Drs. Spock, Ferber, Sears and Karp, we need Day’s huge grain of salt. There are so many zealots out there who will tell you you must sleep with your baby, breastfeed your baby (and toddler), refuse to vaccinate your baby and teach it sign language. Just a few years ago, voices just as loud were saying the opposite.
Contact Ann Farrar at afarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Capital City Parent November 2015.
