Can't you all just get along?
Experts have plenty of advice for new parents. If only they could agree.
(Istock Photo)I AM RAISING my baby all wrong. You're probably raising your baby wrong, too. I have it on good authority. The authority comes from an assortment of books, mostly large-format paperbacks, strewn around my living room. I can tell they are addressed to me because most of them have "Your Baby" in the title or subtitle.
Like most parents - probably more than most parents, considering everything - I am looking for guidance in handling My Baby. Parenting seemed to be a straightforward proposition when I was on the receiving end of it: I had parents, and they fed me and clothed me and discouraged me from biting and petty larceny. Only when I became a father myself did I start to consider the sheer volume of details, let alone the philosophy behind those details, let alone the possibility of there being a raging culture war over different philosophies. Suddenly I needed assurance.
The books are nothing if not assured. The uncertain project of bringing up an infant is, like losing weight or cultivating inner peace, an outlet for the American faith in the perfectibility of human endeavor. What we lack in cultural continuity, we make up for in consumer spirit. There are right answers to choose, and wrong ones.
For instance, the books tell me we wash the baby too much. Especially the hair. We are washing the baby's hair three or four times more often than we should. Also we are undermining his self-esteem and consigning him to a lifetime of mistrusting others. And we use pronouns when we talk to him. Pronouns will confuse him.
Facing the books, I am at a disadvantage. For one thing, I haven't read them, at least by the definition of "read" that I would have used six months ago. That was when our son arrived: in June and in Beijing, nine weeks ahead of schedule and 6,800 miles from the chosen hospital. My wife and I had been planning to read up on the principles of child care over the summer, in the United States, waiting for the birth. Instead, we got out the lone parenting book we'd bought, "What to Expect the First Year," and skipped ahead to page 600, in the section called "Of Special Concern."
The neonatal crisis passed, but it was three months before we could get any more reference books. When we finally could take a trip back to the United States, we went shopping for other opinions. Through
On a lark or a hunch, before leaving America I sent off for one other book: "Baby and Child Care," by Dr. Benjamin Spock. Not the current version, but the 1968 one, the edition my parents had used. It arrived in a regular shipping envelope, a squat Pocket Books paperback. And where the other books would expose us to the conflict and confusion of contemporary child care, the Spock became a source of comfort.
"Baby and Child Care" was half the size of the newer books. Has the complexity of raising a baby doubled in the past three or four decades? Maybe not in substance; the old Spock's pages have tightly packed text where the new books have airy, bullet-pointed layouts. But the new books' heft is symbolic: this is how much you don't know.
We were already well aware of what we did not know. Before we gathered up the books, our main source of guidance had been Chinese strangers. Zhen xiao! they would say, seeing the baby out on the street. So small! What they meant was: too small. It was reckless endangerment to take a baby out of doors before it was 100 days old. But air-conditioning was worse. When the baby entered a shop, staff would dive for the off button on the air conditioner, or stand to block the cool air.
Here was unanimity on child-rearing technique. Holding the baby diagonally on my chest would give him crooked posture. Letting his legs or arms or head go bare was an invitation to ruin. Around us, Beijing children squatted down and defecated on the sidewalk, while parents cast a disapproving eye at our baby's exposed toes.
Now we had new sources of information, but there was no chance for us to absorb it in whole. Our practical introduction to the books started at the back, in the indexes, where the crisis of the moment might be: "Spitting up, 104-105, 389, 691"; "Rashes. See also Eczema; impetigo"; "Vaporizers, 666-667, 684."
Before long, we began to notice that the answers to our questions depended on which book we were consulting. About that vaporizer - or is it a humidifier? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a cool-mist humidifier, because hot-mist vaporizers can scald babies. The Searses recommend a hot-mist vaporizer, because cool-mist devices breed bacteria. The authors of "What to Expect" advocate the middle ground of a "warm mist vaporizer/humidifier." (I bought whichever kind the supermarket had.)
Technical disagreements are one thing. But cross-indexing also brings out bitter, if politely coded, ideological strife. Contemporary baby care is defined by opposing doctrines - natural versus clinical, attachment parenting versus baby training - and to flip from book to book is to drop in on hostile army camps, or the shell-pocked no-man's-land between.
Consider the pacifier. "Most babies don't need them and are better off without," Penelope Leach declares. "Pacifiers," the American Academy of Pediatrics counters, "do not cause any medical or psychological problems."
Or the perilous issue of whether a baby should sleep with its parents. "Family beds do have snags and it's sensible to foresee them if you can so that you can weigh the pros and cons," Leach writes, on tiptoe. The American Academy of Pediatrics chooses its side by omitting "family bed" and "co-sleeping" from its index altogether; the Searses, partisans of love and attachment, present a bullying hard sell for cuddling through the night: "If there were fewer cribs, would there be fewer crib deaths?"
Are we going to kill our child through indifference? (As I write this, the baby has been screaming uncontrollably for five or 10 minutes.) The more we read, the more the experts began to sound like the nattering advice we were already getting. Feed the baby cereal with a spoon. Feed the baby cereal with your finger. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a recurring footnote, explains that its Section on Breastfeeding and its Committee on Nutrition could not agree on whether to start solid foods at four months or at six. Perhaps, the Searses say, you only want to start solids because you're trying to force your baby to conform to an arbitrary timetable.
Meanwhile our Beijing nanny ("Think carefully before you employ a caregiver who is not fluent in your language," Leach writes) was warning us that the baby was underdressed and that a vein at the base of his thumb looked unusually blue, meaning he was going to get sick. The next day he had a cough that would deepen into bronchiolitis.
Amid this alarming babble of advice, the old Spock has proved clear and calming. One of the first things I consulted in it was its instructions for giving a bath: "Take off your wristwatch," the doctor began. I had worked that out already through trial and error, but Spock made it a rule - a clear and helpful rule. Other passages are out of date ("Raw milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows is apt to be richer in cream than ordinary commercial milk, and so may upset a baby's digestion"), but so thoroughly and cheerfully out of date as to be inspiring. This was good advice, once; babies were raised on it. I can accept or reject it with confidence. I can do this while I'm actively caring for the baby; unlike the bulky books, the Spock can be held and consulted in one free hand, while the other is occupied with a bottle.
And it is Spock, and only Spock, who can stand up to Chinese tradition. "A bank clerk is much more likely to become chilled staying outdoors in winter than a lumberjack, who is used to such weather," the 1968 book declares. "Cool or cold air improves appetite, puts color in the cheeks and gives more pep to humans of all ages." Spare my American lumberjack baby your suffocating rules -the open sky is good for him. The doctor says so.
Tom Scocca is a writer in Beijing.
