Scare tactics

Regenerative Culture Birthing & Caring for Children
#1

Any thoughts on the perpetuation of asinine propaganda such as that co-sleeping with your children will kill them? Check out the photo in a recent ad by the city of Milwaukee (you have to scroll down past the article): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/co-sleeping-ad-baby-knife-dangers_n_1097170.html The baby is portrayed sleeping next to a huge knife to show how dangerous it is to parent the way we as animals are supposed to parent (not trying to pass judgment, just to say that co-sleeping is obviously how we would conduct nighttime parenting in the wild. We certainly would not put the infant in a cage in the far end of our dwelling.)

To me, this kind of nonsense keeps people scared, thinking that civilized living, such as cribs, separate nurseries, etc., is the only safe thing for their children. Insidious scare tactics such as these would seem to entrench people even further, to where they will defend civ to the death, because the only alternative is violent death at the hands of natural living.

#2

Ugh! I hate these kind of campaigns. For one thing, they falsely conflate suffocation with SIDS. The two are not the same. Co-sleeping, when done safely, actually reduces SIDS deaths. Isn’t it interesting that you never see a scary PR campaign about the dangers of crib sleeping? Fluffy crib bumpers! Stuffed animals! Your baby is going to DIIIEEEE!!!

#3

This is so fucking insane and not researched.

Co-sleeping, when done safely, actually reduces SIDS deaths.

Yes exactly! What the fuck?

#4

http://www.parenting.com/article/ask-dr-sears-co-sleeping-a-sids-danger

http://thebabybond.com/Cosleeping&SIDSFactSheet.html

#5

Who needs research when you can scare the crap out of people with unsubstantiated “facts”? Research shows that treating every birth like an emergency waiting to happen actually make giving birth less safe. Does anyone know or care about this? No. Most women want inductions and elective c-sections. Statistics show that crime is down from what it was in the 70s and 80s, yet children have less freedom to roam than ever before.

I am now wishing that I had video editing software so that I could make scary commercials about cribs, hospital births, and infantilized children.

#6

What scares me about it is that people keep believing the “experts!” I could tell someone that I have co-slept with my kids for what amounts to 15 years (about 3 years per kid) and NONE OF THEM DIED and that wouldn’t mean squat. I could tell them that no one I know who has co-slept (which is pretty much all the friends-who-are-parents I know) has ever had a child die from co-sleeping, and that doesn’t matter. People will believe an essentially anonymous source such as “the government” or “scientists” or “the health department” before they will accept anecdotal evidence from people THEY KNOW.

I think that if people could step back and realize that living in civilization requires that you accept the word of complete strangers (called “experts” and/or “authorities”) instead of your own experience or the word of a real live person standing in front of you, maybe they could see how absurd (and dangerous) it is to be “civilized” instead of connected to reality.

#7

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that the word of the “experts” has filtered down into common knowledge. 100 years ago they called it modern, scientific parenting, now it has the weight of tradition behind it. It’s not just doctors telling people what to do, it’s mothers ( who learned to parent from Dr. Spock) telling their daughters, “Don’t pick him up, you’ll spoil him!”

I read somewhere ( I can’t remember where) about an anthropologist who brought her baby with her to the village she was studying and had brought a portable crib for the baby to sleep in. The village women got together and gave her a stern talking to about how she was Doing It Wrong. Our mothers, grandmothers, neighbors, and coworkers are more likely to give us a lecture about the importance of putting baby on a schedule.