This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Baby Carriers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
There’s a reason to touch your baby more often - the threat of Irritable Male Syndrome. We live in a touch deprived world and many of us don’t even notice it - but babies do. Baby boys especially can be affected by the lack of human touch. In her study of indigenous tribes in the South American jungle, anthropologist Jean Liedloff spent 2 ½ years studying children. She found that the little boys in these cultures seemed to be better adjusted than the little boys in modern countries. This may seem like a sweeping generalization to many, but Liedoff believed the boys’ behavior was related to the amount of touch they received from their mothers.
In the South American native cultures, babies were held continuously from the times of their births. Liedoff concluded that the physical practice of holding babies is a vital part of human species development and had become practiced less often in the modern world. The term Irritable Male Syndrome is derived from the idea that males who are not held often enough by their mothers become poorly adjusted children, indulging in bad behavior to get attention. This evidence suggests that mothers need to have more physical contact with their male children. One way to do this is to carry the baby in a baby carrier. Ergo baby carriers keep the baby in constant contact with the mother, while allowing the mother to keep both hands free.
