4 ms·

i agree with you, but i've seen SO many public service announcements about Do Not Shake Babies that i've stopped questioning this. now, when i hold babies, i'm

by diN0bot 17y ago

i agree with you, but i've seen SO many public service announcements about Do Not Shake Babies that i've stopped questioning this. now, when i hold babies, i'm overly cautious not to jostle them.

btilly 17y ago
Which is sad. Babies in the first 3 months of life respond very well to the right kind of jostling. The 5 steps that every new parent should learn are: Swaddle, roll on Side, make a Shushing sound, Swing the baby back and forth, then finally Soothe with a pacifier. (I almost never went to the last one.)
- Afton 17y ago
  Babies, like people, start to act differently from one another almost as soon as their born (earlier, if you ask my wife). My friends had a colicky baby, and there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream. None. No way. There was no set of jostling, shushing, swinging, rocking, jiggling, singing, twisting, or hopping in place that would stop it. And as for the last one, neither of my two children could ever get the hang of a pacifier.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    What about swaddling?
    - Afton 17y ago
      > there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream Colicky-ness lasts for months. Everything was tried.
  - btilly 17y ago
    I agree that babies act differently from the start. It is also true that a very small number of babies are truly inconsolable, and most babies go through periods of being extremely hard to console. Often with good reason. For instance both of mine developed a painful problem with gas at about 2 months of age. That said, the combination of strategies that I described works amazingly well. The fact that they won't _always_ work doesn't diminish how much they help.
dkarl 17y ago
My mom was on a shaken-baby jury a few years ago, and the defendent (the father) was crying on the stand swearing he didn't know he could hurt the baby by shaking it. She was sympathetic. She teachers high school, he was seventeen, and she knows her students have no awareness of a lot of stuff they see regularly on TV. It just passes them by. It's like when you watch an old black-and-white movie that you saw all the time on TNT as a kid and realize, holy cow, this movie is full of sex and racism, and that character's an antisemitic Jewish stereotype. As a kid, you missed it all. Ten years from now, they'll watch one of those "Never never never shake a baby" PSAs and realize, "Hey, that's about not shaking a baby! I thought it was just pictures of cute babies." I kid you not. A lot of kids sit through two weeks of sex ed for five straight years and then are totally shocked when their girlfriend gets pregnant after unprotected sex. And then they're seventeen years old with a seventeen-year-old's impulse control, and they're taking care of a baby, and ....

by diN0bot 17y ago

i agree with you, but i've seen SO many public service announcements about Do Not Shake Babies that i've stopped questioning this. now, when i hold babies, i'm overly cautious not to jostle them.

btilly 17y ago

Which is sad. Babies in the first 3 months of life respond very well to the right kind of jostling. The 5 steps that every new parent should learn are: Swaddle, roll on Side, make a Shushing sound, Swing the baby back and forth, then finally Soothe with a pacifier. (I almost never went to the last one.)

Afton 17y ago
Babies, like people, start to act differently from one another almost as soon as their born (earlier, if you ask my wife). My friends had a colicky baby, and there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream. None. No way. There was no set of jostling, shushing, swinging, rocking, jiggling, singing, twisting, or hopping in place that would stop it. And as for the last one, neither of my two children could ever get the hang of a pacifier.
- dasil003 17y ago
  What about swaddling?
  - Afton 17y ago
    > there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream Colicky-ness lasts for months. Everything was tried.
- btilly 17y ago
  I agree that babies act differently from the start. It is also true that a very small number of babies are truly inconsolable, and most babies go through periods of being extremely hard to console. Often with good reason. For instance both of mine developed a painful problem with gas at about 2 months of age. That said, the combination of strategies that I described works amazingly well. The fact that they won't _always_ work doesn't diminish how much they help.

dkarl 17y ago

My mom was on a shaken-baby jury a few years ago, and the defendent (the father) was crying on the stand swearing he didn't know he could hurt the baby by shaking it. She was sympathetic. She teachers high school, he was seventeen, and she knows her students have no awareness of a lot of stuff they see regularly on TV. It just passes them by. It's like when you watch an old black-and-white movie that you saw all the time on TNT as a kid and realize, holy cow, this movie is full of sex and racism, and that character's an antisemitic Jewish stereotype. As a kid, you missed it all. Ten years from now, they'll watch one of those "Never never never shake a baby" PSAs and realize, "Hey, that's about not shaking a baby! I thought it was just pictures of cute babies." I kid you not. A lot of kids sit through two weeks of sex ed for five straight years and then are totally shocked when their girlfriend gets pregnant after unprotected sex. And then they're seventeen years old with a seventeen-year-old's impulse control, and they're taking care of a baby, and ....