How Not to Kill your Kid, part 2: Infancy

Now, I’m not a father yet, so this may be a bit premature. Forgive me, but I’ve been having lots of long discussions with nurses, mothers, nutritionists, and at least one person who’s been all three (my mother-in-law), and I feel the building need to write this.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how important nutrition and not stressing is to babies in the womb. Well, consider infancy the “fourth trimester”. Here’s why: formula-fed babies are universally not as healthy as breast-fed babies (as adults as well as children!) Breast-fed babies get the same nutrition, antibodies, some ingested chemicals, and some hormones as the mothers. Literally, until your baby is on solid food, he is what you eat, Mom.

The chemicals to avoid are a very long list, but the hardest ones to get away from in my experience are BHA, BHT, anything that ends in “paraben” (found in most beauty products these days, including almost every hand lotion on the planet), and the plasticizer that leaks from any plastic stamped “3″ and “7″. Really, continuing to follow the dietary advice given in the rest of this blog should be mandatory. Also, of course, no alcohol, nicotine, or drugs (prescription or otherwise unless they’re strictly necessary for your survival).

Equally critical to a child’s health is avoiding vaccines. Yes, I said avoiding vaccines. Lots of research exists to indicate that most autism, developmental disorders, dyslexia, social ineptitude, and low-IQ syndromes have their basis in an encephalitic reaction to aluminum and/or mercury in vaccines given to infants. Babies who were malnourished in utero are more susceptible to this reaction, but all infants are at risk. By far, the best policy in terms of raising an intelligent, socially-capable baby is to feed your child right for a few years, and get any necessary vaccines just before they are necessary to get the child into school. Even then, discuss with your doctor a way to maximize the amount of time between vaccine shots — because getting multiple shots in a narrow time frame greatly increases the chance of an encephalitic reaction.

But all of that is the lessimportant part. By far the more important part is the attitude and actions you take as a parent regarding your child.

As with any major life event, people almost universally fail to acknowledge that they can decide how to react to a baby. The simple fact is that 90% of your ability to cope with anything is your response to it, and that response is controllable. It’s hard to do, but it can be done. It is critical to your baby’s long-term health and well-being that you view the baby as a goal and a dream in and of iteself, and not an obsticle to your other goals and dreams.

The best attitude to have toward the baby is that you and your baby are on the same team. Your baby has goals from day one: figure out what the world is, and how to get what it wants from the world. A baby that has helpful supervision and just as importantly, an excited partner in this quest learns early that the world is a playground filled with allies. A baby that has to fight its parents as well as its lack of dexterity and understanding in order to learn about the world is going to grow up understanding the world as an obstacle course filled with enemies.

Equaly important is the understanding that you are responsible for your baby every second of it’s life. That responsibility started the instant you knew you were going to have a baby, and it will continue until one of you dies. As an infant, that means that you have to ensure that you have eyes and/or ears on your child 24/7 until it is able to fend for itself. This doesn’t mean you can’t select proxy caretakers – that’s a necessary part of parenthood – but it does mean that you have to take measures to make sure that someone always knows the status of your baby.

Finally, part of humanity is sociality. Babys, from the moment they are capable of holding their head up and looking around, look for people — and they use the information they gather to build a set of rules of what to expect of the world. If you teach them early that the world is full of people that smile and wave, they will learn to smile and wave back. If you teach them early that the world is full of people who stay their distance and don’t interact — or worse yet, that it’s not full of people at all — the baby will learn to cry, retreat, and not deal with strangers. So take your infant to places like the library, where it’s quiet enough not to alarm them, but plenty of people of all shapes and sizes will come up and wave and smile.

By giving the baby the right building blocks for a solid body and brain, avoiding toxins that can damage them, providing constant support for their quest to learn, and giving them an accurate view of what the world really is like, your infant will develop rapidly, learn to be a social, outgoing toddler, and be well on its way to a long, healthy adult life.