Nicholas Day Quotes & Sayings

We are at the tail end of a decline in infant mortality that began just over a century ago. Babies no longer wander into open hearths or are mauled by marauding pigs. We have vaccines, lead-free educational toys, diapers that can sop up a typhoon. But we have never been more worried. — Nicholas Day

The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold - abuse, stress, utter indifference - can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with. — Nicholas Day

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a baby, everything looks like something to suck. — Nicholas Day

You'd expect academics, people who are by training comfortable with complexity, to be the most resistant to the idea that we're shaped by any single factor. In fact, they are often the worst offenders. Immersed in their own research, shaped by their own work, many logically see everything else as a natural extension of it. — Nicholas Day

La Leche League and the What to Expect books are even explicit about this fear: the pacifier, they warn, cannot substitute for a mother. This is the rare piece of parenting wisdom that manages to be both condescending and confusing. Condescending because it seems unlikely that parents who were considering using a pacifier - parents diligent enough to look it up in a book - were also considering abandoning their child altogether. Confusing because, well - what? How would a pacifier substitute for a mother - how exactly? Are there pacifiers on the market that cuddle and feed and rock and dote on a child? Is a mother nothing more than a nipple? — Nicholas Day

Seemingly every culture before our own has had a single acceptable way to raise a baby. These cultures wouldn't have cared about the new scientific findings: they already knew how babies worked. Their answers were all very different, mind you, but they had this in common: all the other answers were wrong.

Such confidence makes sense. If you have to raise a baby, not study a baby, you'd better settle on an answer, and as long as you have settled on an answer, you may as well be certain about it. Pretty much everyone has been very certain. But if everyone has been very certain, and everyone's certainty has been very different, you start to suspect that there aren't that many certainties after all. There's no one true path. Or put another way: the one true path is forked. — Nicholas Day

Over time, parents have barnacled the most routine activities in infancy with their own preoccupations. It's sometimes hard to see the baby for all the barnacles. — Nicholas Day

While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters - food, shelter, love - they are astonishingly adaptive. — Nicholas Day

Over and over again, cross-cultural research on infancy teaches the exact same lesson: infants can tolerate - and thrive under - care that most any Western parent would assume would end very badly. — Nicholas Day

Pacifiers are also blamed for delayed language development, which seems logical, too - how's he going to talk with that thing in his mouth? - but there's no evidence for this either. There is evidence that the lack of evidence hasn't stopped people from making the claim: a British speech therapist even admits she was disappointed her study's data showed no link between pacifiers and speech problems. And teeth? Pacifiers only screw up the palate if used past the age of five, well after the vast majority of children have stopped. — Nicholas Day

Because most infants spend more time looking at female faces - because there are more women than men taking care of babies - they comprehend them better: babies, at least those raised primarily by women, tend to see female faces as individuals and male faces as a category. (Women have identities; men are just men.) — Nicholas Day

Developmental psychologists have pretty much discarded the concept of developmental milestones, but developmental milestones remain the only thing that most people know about developmental psychology. — Nicholas Day

Watson and Liedloff are extreme cases, but a hint of the end times, in their secular incarnation, lurks in almost all guides to child rearing. It has to be there: the implicit appeal of any respectable child-care authority is that he or she is saving you from purgatory. After all, if there isn't a purgatory to be saved from, what are you so concerned about? Why are you consulting a child-care authority, anyway? — Nicholas Day

When Jean Piaget lectured in the United States, he was frequently asked whether the rate at which children attained his cognitive stages could be accelerated - in other words, whether you could train your child to be "ahead" of other children. Piaget was bewildered by the question. In his view of development, being "ahead" or "behind" anyone else was meaningless. But he got the question often enough that he came to associate it with a particular worldview: he called it "the American Question. — Nicholas Day