Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy QUOTES

2 " You'd expect academics, people who are by training comfortable with complexity, to be the most resistant to the idea that we're shaped by any single factor. In fact, they are often the worst offenders. Immersed in their own research, shaped by their own work, many logically see everything else as a natural extension of it. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

4 " The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold—abuse, stress, utter indifference—can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

6 " It seems as if every month brings another study showing that breast milk is what Ponce de León should have been searching for. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

8 " Watson and Liedloff are extreme cases, but a hint of the end times, in their secular incarnation, lurks in almost all guides to child rearing. It has to be there: the implicit appeal of any respectable child-care authority is that he or she is saving you from purgatory. After all, if there isn't a purgatory to be saved from, what are you so concerned about? Why are you consulting a child-care authority, anyway? "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

10 " Seemingly every culture before our own has had a single acceptable way to raise a baby. These cultures wouldn't have cared about the new scientific findings: they already knew how babies worked. Their answers were all very different, mind you, but they had this in common: all the other answers were wrong.

Such confidence makes sense. If you have to raise a baby, not study a baby, you'd better settle on an answer, and as long as you have settled on an answer, you may as well be certain about it. Pretty much everyone has been very certain. But if everyone has been very certain, and everyone's certainty has been very different, you start to suspect that there aren't that many certainties after all. There's no one true path. Or put another way: the one true path is forked. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

12 " Pacifiers are also blamed for delayed language development, which seems logical, too—how's he going to talk with that thing in his mouth?—but there's no evidence for this either. There is evidence that the lack of evidence hasn't stopped people from making the claim: a British speech therapist even admits she was disappointed her study's data showed no link between pacifiers and speech problems. And teeth? Pacifiers only screw up the palate if used past the age of five, well after the vast majority of children have stopped. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

14 " While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters—food, shelter, love—they are astonishingly adaptive. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy

16 " If we always see infancy as a narrative of progress, we never see the baby before us; we always see the child to come. "

― , Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy