Caring for babies

Human babies are born into families and communities as helpless infants who elicit responses from their caregivers. Relationships with nurturing adults are essential for survival. The specific ways that adults care for babies are shaped by child-raising practices that are part of family and community life. This means that babies develop as members of a community, and their development can only be fully understood by examining the practices and circumstances of their communities.

Interactions between infants and caregivers and caregiving routines vary across cultures. Local knowledge, geography, resources and beliefs about what babies need are embedded in sleep, eating, toileting and hygiene routines. For example, in Bali, adults ensure that infants do not touch the ground for the first three months of life to avoid being defiled by the earth, and in Central America, Mayan women bathe their infants in ice-cold water to soothe heat rash and encourage sleep (Faujour, 2015).

Barr (2011) points out that because caregiving activities are present in early life, occur frequently throughout each day, and are repetitive/occur in the same way, it is possible that they play an important role in affecting biological systems. He adds, “whether or not this occurs, and whether or not it occurs at physiological levels or molecular biological levels, remains to be determined” (Barr, 2011, p. 91).

Barr (2011) suggests that comparing different infant caregiving practices can add to our understanding of how early experiences might affect development. As early as the 1950s, ethnographers observed the caregiving practices of the !Kung San – a hunter-gather culture from Northwestern Botswana – and described extremely close contact between mother and infant (Konner, 2005). Barr (2011, pp. 73-74) summarizes researchers’ descriptions of adult-infant interactions typically seen in the !Kung San society as compared to typical Western, industrialized societies. In terms of direct physical contact, young !Kung San infants are in almost constant skin-to-skin contact with their mothers or other caregivers. On average, !Kung San babies are held for over three times as long as Western infants. At night contact is maintained by co-sleeping. During the day, !Kung San infants are carried/held in a sling that allows them to be with their mothers as the mothers go about their daily routines. In Western societies, while there is a range of average times for holding, none of the averages come close to the constant contact that is seen among the !Kung San. The use of the sling affects posture as well. !Kung San infants are usually upright both because they spend so much time in slings and because the !Kung San believe that the upright position encourages development; while Western infants spend more time in supine (lying down) positions. In terms of feeding, !Kung San babies breastfeed on demand, often four times an hour for brief feedings, and this continues to age two or three. Feeding practices vary among Western mothers but their infants typically have much longer intervals between feedings. Differences are also seen in parental responsiveness to infant distress: !Kung San mothers and other caregivers tend to respond to any distress signals, even minor ones, immediately. Western caregivers often deliberately do not respond to infants’ fusses and fretting.

Barr (2011) goes on to explain that while the !Kung San practices have been referred to as “indulgent”, it is less value-laden to instead think about their caregiving as being based on “closeness” and to contrast that with the “separation” strategies more typical of traditional Western parenting. As Miller and Commons (2010) discuss, there are also many in Western societies who practice a more closeness based parenting approach, often referred to as “Attachment Parenting” that includes co-sleeping, breastfeeding on demand, frequent holding/touching, and quickly responding to crying. They discuss that one of the benefits of Attachment Parenting is that it “prevents damaging long bouts of crying and mitigates other emotions in response to stressful situations” (Miller & Commons, 2010, p. 10).

The variety of caregiving approaches throughout history and around the world shows that babies can and do survive and thrive in very different environments. “In every society, caregivers act in ways to meet the biological needs of infants as well as infants’ other psychosocial requisites. Beyond nurturance and safety, therefore, active and enriching caregiving responsibilities fundamentally invest in young children’s education and socialization (Bornstein et al., 2015, p. 1571). Rather than suggesting that there are optimal universal caregiving strategies, the research suggests there are trade-off decisions that take into account context and the circumstances and demands of parents and other caregivers (Barr, 2011).

References

Barr, R. G. (2011). Mother and child: Preparing for a life. In D. P. Keating (Ed.), Nature and nurture in early child development (70-95). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975394

Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., Lansford, J. E., Deater-Deckard, K., & Bradley, R. H. (2015). A developmental analysis of caregiving modalities across infancy in 38 low- and middle-income countries. Child Development, 86(5), 1571-1587. https://10.1111/cdev.12402

Faujour, J. (2015). 10 unique parenting traditions from around the world. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/10-unique-parenting-styles-from-around-the-world/

Konner, M. (2005). Hunter-Gatherer infancy and childhood: The !Kung and others. In B. S. Hewlett, & M. E. Lamb (Eds.), Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods (19-64). Routledge.

Miller, P. M., & Commons, M. L. (2010). The benefits of attachment parenting for infants and children: A behavioral developmental view. Behavioral Development Bulletin, 16(1), 1-14. https://10.1037/h0100514