Power is a funny thing.

I will roboticize them all

Robotnik ass reply.

I gotta start reading URL's.

You’re probably seeing collision of some different parenting movements as well as generational and cultural differences.

My parents didn’t baby wear. My spouse and I both did, with both sling and carrier, with our babies.

The Boomers, in the general Anglosphere, received and reproduced “Dr Spock” and others, in which babies were expected to become independent and their parents were expected to facilitate their separation and growth as an individual. Women needed to PUT THE BABY DOWN. Babies needed to sleep on strict schedules and be encouraged to sleep by themselves, learning to “cry it out.” The baby should be placed in a cot in a bedroom and the parents should walk away and leave it to cry until it sleeps. Babies, after birth, were placed in a plastic receptacle and placed in a nursery in the hospital, while the husband looks through a window and has his baby pointed out to him for the first time. Pictures of nurseries, of varying containers and receptacles to place babies in. These principles were authoritarian, “behaviourist,” and focused on building a child that would not only “bother their parents less” but would be stronger emotionally.

William Sears then led the “attachment parenting” critique and response, based on theories of attachment. Cloth mother wire mother and the baby chooses comfort; the marshmallow test only showing that children who trust their caretakers are able to delay gratification; etc. The idea is that a child with responsive, attentive caretakers becomes MORE independent in the long run - partly because they’re better able to manage their emotions and relationships. The baby is produced and placed instantly on the bearer’s bare skin for skin time; handed to the birth partner as soon as possible. Attachment parenting stresses major practices like babywearing, breastfeeding, cosleeping. Attachment parenting says things like: ignore the need, and the need remains. Meet the need, and the need goes away.

Attachment parenting was around when our parents were, but mostly mocked. It is more dominant at the moment, being far more evidence-based. it turns out social animals provide lots of scientific evidence for being raised socially. although you can still find behaviourist advice everywhere, and parents/grandparentswho used that style often insist on continuing it. And it’s still controversial! You should see the comments online about cosleeping. You should see how attachment parenting, when it shades too “crunchy,” goes into full-on bonkers behaviour, and how quickly people tip from it into weird beliefs* and next thing you know you’re getting antivax content in your algorithm. It’s a battleground!

As the styles clash, the problems with both are apparent. Attachment parenting rarely comes with acknowledgement of the reality of caretakers needing space, boundaries, The Baby Fucking Off For A Minute.

But anyway - attachment parenting in the Anglosphere is still very much an active battleground. Babywearing is still political. Parents and grandparents who signed on to different practices may take it very personally, tell you to put the damn baby down.

Time will see who is right - but my kids seem to be growing up okay.

* if you want to recommend Mayim Bialik’s otherwise decent attachment parenting book “Beyond The Sling,” (2012) you have to tell the person you’re reccing it to that she changed her stance on that one sentence about not vaccinating her kids. Tell the people that her kids ended up getting vaccinated. And then join her and everyone else in politely pretending that it isn’t in the book. Man, in 2012, there wasn’t Covid and tradwife influencers and all this stuff, it was a little throwaway line in a backwater book for an obscure parenting practice- nobody could have known that CRUNCHY CELEBRITY SCIENTIST WRITING ABOUT BABY SLINGS would have become such a rallying citation for the antivax movement.

Oh, hi, this was the work of my adult life.

So my parents carried me in a backpack (intended for toddlers) by cramming enough towels in with me that I wouldn't fall out, when I was like 2 months old. That was 1972.

(I look so deeply skeptical in that pic. My dad was a freakin' baby, he was 21.)

When my eldest was born, circa 1993, I knew I wanted a carrier, my midwife recommended a stretchy wrap, I bought it, and wore it for a little while, but ended up cutting it up to make a simple pouch later, as my baby was VERY heavy very fast.

God damn I was young. (I was 22 in that pic.)

So, I became a doula and childbirth educator not long after that, and while helping out a client she mentioned that she'd been holding her fussy baby so much that she'd fantasized about tying him onto her with a bedsheet like an arm sling, by the corners. And I stared at her and said, "No, not like that, like this" and grabbed a sheet and showed her how to knot it at the shoulder and she used that for a while but it got her through the fussy baby stage. (She was at the point where being able to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was a luxury because the only thing she knew how to make one handed was ramen.)

Anyway, I went to a Midwifery Today conference, and they had their usual tricks of the trade circle, and I said, "Hey, I turned a bed sheet into a baby sling for a client," at which point a whole bunch of midwives from around the world showed us with the same bedsheet how they would do it in their culture, which is to this day one of the coolest things I've ever been a part of. And a Mexican midwife looked at my 20-yo purple striped bedsheet and said, "I don't need that" and showed us like 20 things to do with a Rebozo.

Not too long after I started working there and ended up writing for them and I put my experience on my website and a version of it went in the magazine, and I got in contact with a ton of baby carrier manufacturers and started reviewing some of them and talking about my experiences.

I say that some people have 15 minutes of fame and some people have 15 inches. My 15 inches was in the babywearing sphere. This thing would happen where I would see carriers "in the wild" and ask people how they liked them (or help them wear them better) and they'd say, "Oh, are you Jenrose?" to the point where my family would laughingly say, "Not THE Jenrose?"

Anyway, circa ehhh 2001 ish I started working more intensively designing baby carriers and working with Maya Wrap on some products and then the babywearing community EXPLODED and there were like thousands of different kinds of carriers being made.

I met with one of the more motivated people in the community in 2004-ish and we came up with an idea for a babywearing organization, called Nine In Nine Out. I explained how I thought it should work, and she made it happen. It grew very rapidly, but not with enough proper corporate structure. In 2005 I had my next baby, and reviewed a billionty baby carriers and designed even more. My eldest wore their sibling, too.

(me with the red hair, kiddo with the brown. Still so goddamn young. I was so tired.)

In 2006, i ran myself into the ground and into adrenal failure organizing the first international babywearing conference. It was amazing. We made baby carriers out of duct tape. I met so many amazing people who are still my friends to this day.

I wore that baby until she was 3. Here we are about to embark on a cruise in 2007.

I got really sick a couple years later and NINO fell apart, but Babywearing International started, at a time when I was not in a position to be involved at all. Meanwhile the wild west of babywearing was over as product standards were put in place.

By 2011, when I was pregnant with my last kid, the question in the parenting group I was in was not "will you wear your baby" but "Which baby carriers will you get?"

And yeah, this baby got worn, too.

He's 14 now (and has as much hair as I did wearing my first!)

I haven't worn a baby in years, but could talk someone through it still, no problem. At one point I was grandparented in as a Master Babywearer by BI--they had me evaluate another babywearing instructor on video and used that to approve me. They'd already named an award after me, so... Babywearing International shut down a while ago, but thus far I still see plenty of people babywearing.

For me, it just flat out made parenting easier and more manageable. My arms would get so sore holding a baby for hours, and this was easier on my body. I don't believe in making babies cry it out, I think the research is pretty clear that there's no benefit to that and a lot of potential harm, and this is a good way to allow parents a lot of room to function while meeting babies' needs for physical contact and movement.

One of the things I'm proudest of in my life is that the groups I've been a part of have managed to bring babywearing from a niche hippy thing (in the US) to something people are more likely to assume they will do (and something they have easy access to), to the point where it no longer catches my attention to see a carrier in public. The collective understanding of babywearing leapt forward so far between 2000-2008, it blows my mind every time I think about it.

Do I think people shouldn't use strollers or carseat carriers? Nah, there's room for both of those things. But I think they can be pretty clunky in a lot of situations and I rarely relied on them. Rarely needed to. And arm-carrying babies was unbelievably hard on my body (because EDS and fibro). Babywearing let me distribute the weight so much better. I don't think babywearing should be about ideology--it's a tool, and it's fun, and it's fashion, and it makes parents' lives easier and babies lives happier and that's a good thing.

Isn’t it interesting how “recent” that all is! Thank you for sharing.