I am often alarmed by the some of the baby advice from the so-called experts out there. If a person doesn't even consider child care from a biological/evolutionary view, I am usually skeptical of their advice.
The worst of the bunch could be Dr. Brazelton. He might set a record for the number of times an authority can get disproven in a career. First, he decided to pronounce that cosleeping (the mother sleeping near the infant) was not proper. Let's see, cosleeping was the norm thoughout millions of years of evolution, and has been now been shown to produce a ton of benefits. Brazelton was eventually deluged by letters from women telling him he had no idea what he was talking about. This led him to "reevaluate my rather rigid ideas on handling sleep problems".
Next, Brazelton pronounced that infants are not capable of being potty-trained. He was even featured in commercials for diapers that fit babies up to 35 pounds. Too bad research shows that infants can be successfully potty-trained and that later potty-training probably has detrimental effects.
Third, Brazelton endorses some type of letting infants "cry it out" philosophy (it's hard to tell because he seems to have flipped on this issue as well). But again, if you look at the research(pdf), you'll find that infants cry for a reason. And letting them cry is not the right strategy; finding out what the problem is and fixing it is the logical solution.
You would think if you proclaimed yourself an expert and were wrong about such major issues that you would just hang it up, or go into hiding. But alas, that doesn't seem to be the case with Brazelton. I don't know who in their right mind would consider this person to be an expert. Maybe he should have started with something simpler, like seeing if he could master cooking the fries at Burger King before he started giving advice to parents about how to raise their children.
I am often alarmed by the some of the baby advice from the so-called experts out there. If a person doesn't even consider child care from a biological/evolutionary view, I am usually skeptical of their advice.
The worst of the bunch could be Dr. Brazelton. He might set a record for the number of times an authority can get disproven in a career. First, he decided to pronounce that cosleeping (the mother sleeping near the infant) was not proper. Let's see, cosleeping was the norm thoughout millions of years of evolution, and has been now been shown to produce a ton of benefits. Brazelton was eventually deluged by letters from women telling him he had no idea what he was talking about. This led him to "reevaluate my rather rigid ideas on handling sleep problems".
Next, Brazelton pronounced that infants are not capable of being potty-trained. He was even featured in commercials for diapers that fit babies up to 35 pounds. Too bad research shows that infants can be successfully potty-trained and that later potty-training probably has detrimental effects.
Third, Brazelton endorses some type of letting infants "cry it out" philosophy (it's hard to tell because he seems to have flipped on this issue as well). But again, if you look at the research(pdf), you'll find that infants cry for a reason. And letting them cry is not the right strategy; finding out what the problem is and fixing it is the logical solution.
You would think if you proclaimed yourself an expert and were wrong about such major issues that you would just hang it up, or go into hiding. But alas, that doesn't seem to be the case with Brazelton. I don't know who in their right mind would consider this person to be an expert. Maybe he should have started with something simpler, like seeing if he could master cooking the fries at Burger King before he started giving advice to parents about how to raise their children.