Earlier, I described how pregnancy and childbirth can spark competitiveness among women on a variety of fronts. While we all know it's bad to take our offsprings Little League prowess as our own (good or bad), a lot of people still do it. And they don't necessarily wait for Little League, either.
Most of the parenting tomes (Sears' The Baby Book, Dr. Spock, the AAP's book, Penelope Leach's book, etc.) include sections describing what a baby is likely to do at various ages. They also include charts for length, weight and head circumference by age, ranked by percentile. All of these are problematic.
While the height/weight charts (in addition to listing the boy chart first, the CDC actually go so far as to list all the alternate language versions of the boy chart before listing the girl chart. Way to reinforce gender valuation, CDC) were revised a few years ago, they still represent a larger population of formula fed (partially or exclusively) babies than exclusively breastfed. There's some reason to think that formula fed (partially or exclusively) babies are fatter (and not in a good way) than exclusively breastfed babies. While things are improving, competition based on weight tends to make breastfed babies look less thriving. Also, because we all grew up in a formula fed world, we're very accustomed to the roly-poly, formula fed baby. Breastfed babies often don't look like that, and that can make even a confident breastfeeding mama a bit nervous. Charts for exclusively breastfed babies are not yet available.
I'm having trouble figuring out what the circumference measure is useful for. Very large head circumferences may predict autism.
The developmental milestones are slightly more interesting. While it's clear with a little thought that anything one can do to modify a baby's height, weight or head circumference is a bad idea , and therefore no one should be taking any credit for the baby's height, weight or head circumference, other than to bask in the glory of shared genes (if indeed those genes are shared), it is not so clear that developmental milestones aren't subject to parental interference. So rather than wait to compete on when one's offspring is class valedictorian, wins the spelling bee or tougher than all the little neighbor children by eating more ants, parents can get a jump on the competition by comparing when their child does various things that babies are all going to get around to doing fairly quickly except when they don't, which can be quite serious, and which leads us to the other problem with paying a lot of attention to developmental milestones. They give a new parent a lot of things to worry about.
Worst of all, the lists of developmental milestones vary depending on which list you look at. Note that peekaboo shows up at month three here and at month seven here. So depending on which one you look at, you could either panic, or chortle at how brilliant your baby is. My husband and I spend time puzzling over these lists trying to figure out how they devise them. As near as we can tell, they are completely unscientific, and reflect a weird style of interacting with actual infants.
The lists also reinforce (not to say reify) parenting norms. Bottles and early feeding of solid foods play a significant role in these lists, and very few of the behaviors exhibited while breastfeeding ever appear on these lists. Where is, signals through squirming at the breast that he needs to be turned upright to burp? Where is, thumps at diaper to indicate he is wet or about to pee or poop and would like to be taken to the potty and/or be changed? For that matter, where is, lights up in recognition of the arrival of another caregiver, even when in the arms of primary caregiver?
My husband and I have decided the lists are useful for generating ideas of new games to play with our baby. When we saw on a list, grabs toes, we put on the little socks with the animal head rattles on and watched our baby play with the rattles and then continue to be obsessed with his toes for days thereafter. When we read that he was supposed to recognize his own name, we abandoned nicknames for a week or so, and called him his name whenever we interacted with him until we were sure he knew that word meant him. We don't really believe in tummy time (his head is nicely round, because he's in arms most of the day, and our bed just isn't that hard), but we would occasionally give him a shot at it to see if he did anything from the lists. Eventually he rolled himself over onto his tummy. Some of his cousins walked early, so we held him upright and enjoyed feeling him push off our laps or the ground and noticed over time that he required less support and less assistance with stabilization. We sat him up in our laps and noticed over time that one hand would hold him up, then just a finger -- then promptly went back to two hands when he started to lunge in the direction of interesting things.
When each of these things happened is of enough interest to us that we wrote down the first time we noticed each of them in our baby log (which we also use to communicate when he's not feeling well and any symptoms he's displaying, and more notable elimination moments, partly to remember, and partly to communicate between parents and other caregivers).
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created December 19, 2005 Updated December 19, 2005