Babies in the Workplace

met, he does what he thinks will get the need met more quickly. So, the longer a caregiver waits to meet a baby's needs, the more frequently and the longer the baby will scream in the future.

At the same time, the baby who has to repeatedly scream for long periods to get his needs met is steadily learning that he can't trust people to take care of him, which affects his view of his own value as a person.

Meredith Small, an anthropologist, wrote a carefully documented, enlightening book called Our Babies, Ourselves, in which she analyzed why babies are born so dependent and what babies expect from their parents from an anthropological perspective. Humans are part of the "primate family." Other primates--gorillas, for example--are able to cling to their mothers' bodies immediately after birth and hang on while the mothers are traveling.

Human infants are born unable to even control their own hand movements--they are completely vulnerable and dependent on other people for every need..

The reasons for this, as Dr. Small explains, are first, the abnormally large brains humans have relative to our body size, and second, the pelvic bone structure that allows humans to walk on only two limbs instead of using four legs like most other primates. Dr. Small goes into considerable detail on the mechanics behind this but, basically, human babies are born neurologically "unfinished." If a human baby stayed in his mother's body until the point of being more self-sufficient at birth like other primates, his head would be too big for his mother to safely give birth. Human babies are essentially born too soon due to the fact that we walk on two legs. This idea is also the basis of the concepts in the recent bestseller
The Happiest Baby on the Block, which