Originally Posted by madcorgi
My daughter just had her first baby, my first grandkid. Things have gotten a lot more complicated than 32 years ago when she was born to us, that's for sure.
From the time she got pregnant, she was bombarded with scary warnings from every quarter, including her doctors. Her OB/GYN in particular kept her anxiety level extremely and needlessly high. Add in the internet, which, though always true, contains all sort of terrible warnings for expecting moms, and it was like a 9-month-long pharmaceutical commercial with people listing dire side effects.
The birth went fine, and mom and kid are fine, but the anxiety industry was only ramping up. The lactation experts warned of lasting harm if the kid wasn't breastfed. Every two hours. The dentist prophesied ridiculous potential problems that involved things way outside of his area of expertise. The kid is always hungry, and the debate rages over whether he is gaining weight quickly enough. It seems there's healthy (which he is) and "perfectly healthy," which apparently mans in the 90th percentile of every metric.
Fortunately, she is part of a new-moms group, which is facilitated by a really good leader who tells the new moms to imagine they are raising a baby in pre-historic times. When they start to fret about this or that little thing, she says "OK, what is Cavewoman doing with her baby right now? Probably feeding him when he cries and letting him sleep when he sleeps." She subscribes to the theory that if a baby's basic needs are attended to and they are not injured, there's really nothing you can do to screw them up during the first year. So: chill. I love this advice.
It seems to me the root of most of this anxiety-inducing is driven by good old fashioned cash, both protecting it and making it. The docs, I think, are worried about potential liability if something goes wrong, so they over-warn about things that are only remotely likely lest they be accused of failing to disclose something. Sure, it freaks the moms out, but I can hardly blame the docs form their concerns of being accused of negligence.
Marketers and advertisers love to stoke every conceivable fear because there's big bucks in it. Apparently a single car seat just won't do . . . if you care about your kid, you need three different ones as he grows. Gee . . . I had no idea I was such a bad parent--we only had one car seat for my kids when they were babies.
Objectively, kids today are tons safer than they have ever been, but the amount of overwrought, hysterical warnings and advice continually grows. I think this gets transmitted to the kid, and we end up with what we have today: a society sporting historically high levels of anxiety.
If I had my way, new parents would spend the first 3 months of their kid's life on an island where there was no internet, no phones, and no in-laws. A doctor would visit once daily during the first week or so, and then once a week after that, until the family came home.
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