Month: September 2005

A relative of Grace’s was visiting. So we stopped by for a quick hello. But of course, everybody has an opinion on how to raise YOUR child. Having raised three American children whom are all very successful academically, she instructed us to ignore Bryan’s cries at night so that it’d “help him” sleep through the night. Nothing annoys me more than to have old-schoolers, whose child-rearing knowledge is obviously behind the times, to tell us what to do. She casually mentioned that was the method taught in a book by “Dr. Spock”.

So who was this crazy Spock guy to tell parents that allowing babies to cry through the night is good for them?

And sure enough, Dr. Spock turns out to be a rather famous pediatrician in the United States whose books have helped “millions” of parents raising their children. But I guess 30 years ago when Grace’s relative read his book, the trend was to let babies cry. But 30 years later, Dr. Spock knows better.

But yet there are still pediatricians telling parents to let babies cry!! Who the hell are these people getting their information from? And just how dated is that information? And for all you new parents out there — you go see pediatricians for the health of your baby, not to ask their opinion on how to raise them. Early childhood education is something clearly not their domain. Research after research shows that you need to build trust with your baby for the first 6-9 months of the little being’s life.

So don’t let the baby cry. Pick him/her up and find out why s/he is crying already! Babies can’t talk, crying is the only way they communicate their unhappiness.

This morning, at 7AM, was the first time I heard Bryan being able to coo continuously and just kept “talking” away. At one point he was so excited about talking to me that he screamed… also his first.

Bryan is also getting increasingly more and more alert during the day. This translates to less and less time for me to be able to quietly work at home. “San Jose Public Library, will you be my second home?”

Bryan’s poop is getting ridiculously humongous. Sometimes when we open up the diaper, we can’t tell where his butt ends and the poop begins.

In addition to the humongous poops, the little fella has also been pooping two to three times a day on a regular basis. What could possibly be in the formula that makes so much poop? Marvels of the human body…

Yesterday was the first day of class with this famous infant/toddler instructor in the Bay Area. She was impressive. Remember the “Cry Baby” entry I did? Well, she touched on the scientific aspect of that topic in the class. It had something to do with the inhibitory and excitatory synapses and neurons. The basic idea is, when an infant is deprived of his emotions or needs (i.e. nobody attends to his cries), the inhibitory neurons get used a lot more often and thus form stronger connections for synapses. Over time, this translates into a person who’s going to be incapable of “regulating” his own emotions and is much more likely to be depressed, stressed with less self-confidence.

With all the research and knowledge we have today (30+ years of continuous longitudinal research), I am surprised there are still people who choose to believe that attending to crying babies is a form of spoiling them.

There’s been a lot of improvements in the U.S. to make things easier for people with physical disabilities. I wonder if that qualifies infants since they, too, can’t really help themselves to do a lot of things we adults take for granted.

The simplest example I can think of is utilities in the bathroom. We have taken Bryan out a few times, and when it came to changing diapers, there’s been NO diaper changing stations in all of the places we have taken Bryan to so far. These places include two popular restaurants and a four star expensive hotel. What’s wrong with the facility owners? Don’t they have kids?

Thanks to a new proposal in San Francisco, things may soon change. The new law, if passed, would require new buildings over a certain size (or renovations that go over a certain budget) to install baby diaper changing stations. The ironic thing about that is, the proposal only came after the city supervisor had trouble finding places equipped with such utility for his own kids.

Don’t you just love it when laws are made to accommodate certain policy maker’s own experience in life? Fortunately sometimes these policies actually benefit the general public at large.