In the two and a half years during which I lived among Stone Age
Indians in the South American jungle (not all at once, but on five
separate expeditions with a lot of time between them for reflection), I
came to see that our human nature is not what we have been brought up
to believe it is. Babies of the Yequana tribe, far from needing peace
and quiet to go to sleep, snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired,
while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, ran, walked,
shouted, or paddled canoes. Toddlers played together without fighting
or arguing, and they obeyed their elders instantly and willingly.
The notion of punishing a child had apparently never occurred to
these people, nor did their behavior show anything that could truly be
called permissiveness. No child would have dreamed of inconveniencing,
interrupting, or being waited on by an adult. And by the age of four,
children were contributing more to the work force in their family than
they were costing others.
Babes in arms almost never cried and, fascinatingly, did not wave
their arms, kick, arch their backs, or flex their hands and feet. They
sat quietly in their slings or slept on someone's hip — exploding the
myth that babies need to flex to "exercise." They also did not throw up
unless extremely ill and did not suffer from colic. When startled
during the first months of crawling and walking, they did not expect
anyone to go to them but rather went on their own to their mother or
other caretakers for the measure of reassurance needed before resuming
their explorations. Without supervision, even the smallest tots rarely
hurt themselves.
Is their "human nature" different from ours? Some people actually
imagine that it is, but there is, of course, only one human species.
What can we learn from the Yequana tribe?
Our Innate Expectations
Primarily, we can try to grasp fully the formative power of what I
call the in-arms phase. It begins at birth and ends with the
commencement of creeping, when the infant can depart and return at will
to the caretaker's knee. It consists, simply, of the infant having
24-hour contact with an adult or older child.
At first, I merely observed that this in-arms experience had an
impressively salutary effect on the babies and that they were no
"trouble" to manage. Their bodies were soft and conformed to any
position convenient to their bearers — some of whom even dangled their
babies down their backs while holding them by the wrist. I do not mean
to recommend this position, but the fact that it is possible
demonstrates the scope of what constitutes comfort for a baby. In
contrast to this is the desperate discomfort of infants laid
carefully in a crib or carriage, tenderly tucked in, and left to go
rigid with the desire for the living body that is by nature their
rightful place — a body belonging to someone who will "believe" their
cries and relieve their craving with welcoming arms.
Why the incompetence in our society? From childhood on, we are
taught not to believe in our instinctive knowledge. We are told that
parents and teachers know best and that when our feelings do not concur
with their ideas, we must be wrong. Conditioned to mistrust or utterly
disbelieve our feelings, we are easily convinced not to believe the
baby whose cries say "You should hold me!" "I should be next to your
body!" "Don't leave me!" Instead, we overrule our natural response and
follow the going fashion dictated by babycare "experts." The loss of
faith in our innate expertise leaves us turning from one book to
another as each successive fad fails.
It is important to understand who the real experts are. The second
greatest babycare expert is within us, just as surely as it resides in
every surviving species that, by definition, must know how to care for
its young. The greatest expert of all is, of course, the baby —
programmed by millions of years of evolution to signal his or her own
kind by sound and action when care is incorrect. Evolution is a
refining process that has honed our innate behavior with magnificent
precision. The signal from the baby, the understanding of the signal by
his or her people, the impulse to obey it — all are part of our
species' character.
The presumptuous intellect has shown itself to be ill-equipped to
guess at the authentic requirements of human babies. The question is
often: Should I pick up the baby when he or she cries? Or should I
first let the baby cry for a while? Or should I let the baby cry so
that this child know who is boss and will not become a "tyrant"?
No baby would agree to any of these impositions. Unanimously, they let us know by the clearest signals that they should not be put down at all.
As this option has not been widely advocated in contemporary Western
civilization, the relationship between parent and child has remained
steadfastly adversarial. The game has been about how to get the baby to
sleep in the crib, whether or not to oppose the baby's cries has not
been considered. Although Tine Thevenin's book, The Family Bed,
and others have gone some way to open the subject up of having children
sleep with parents, the important principle has not been clearly
addressed: to act against our nature as a species is inevitably to lose well-being.
Once we have grasped and accepted the principle of respecting our
innate expectations, we will be able to discover precisely what those
expectations are — in other words, what evolution has accustomed us to
experience.
The Formative Role of the In-Arms Phase
How did I come to see the in-arms phase as crucial to a person's
development? First, I saw the relaxed and happy people in the forests
of South America lugging around their babies and never putting them
down. Little by little, I was able to see a connection between that
simple fact and the quality of their lives. Later still, I have come to
certain conclusions about how and why being in constant contact with
the active caretaker is essential to the initial postnatal stage of
development.
For one thing, it appears that the person carrying the baby (usually
the mother in the first months, then often a four- to 12-year-old child
who brings the baby back to the mother for feeding) is laying the
foundation for later experience. The baby passively participates in the
bearers running, walking, laughing, talking, working, and playing. The
particular activities, the pace, the inflections of the language, the
variety of sights, night and day, the range of temperatures, wetness
and dryness, and the sounds of community life form a basis for the
active participation that will begin at six or eight months of age with
creeping, crawling, and then walking. A baby who has spent this time
lying in a quiet crib or looking at the inside of a carriage, or at the
sky, will have missed most of this essential experience.
Because of the child's need to participate, it is also important
that caretakers not just sit and gaze at the baby or continually ask
what the baby wants, but lead active lives themselves. Occasionally one
cannot resist giving a baby a flurry of kisses; however, a baby who is
programmed to watch you living your busy life is confused and
frustrated when you spend your time watching him living his. A baby who
is in the business of absorbing what life is like as lived by you is
thrown into confusion if you ask him to direct it.
The second essential function of the in-arms experience appears to
have escaped the notice of everyone (including me, until the
mid-1960s). It is to provide babies with a means of discharging their
excess energy until they are able to do so themselves. In the months
before being able to get around under their own power, babies
accumulate energy from the absorption of food and sunshine. A baby
therefore needs constant contact with the energy field of an active
person, who can discharge the unused excess for each of them. This
explains why the Yequana babies were so strangely relaxed — why they
did not stiffen, kick, arch, or flex to relieve themselves of an
uncomfortable accumulation of energy.
To provide the optimum in-arms experience, we have to discharge our
own energy efficiently. One can very quickly calm a fussing baby by
running or jumping with the child, or by dancing or doing whatever
eliminates one's own energy excess. A mother or father who must
suddenly go out to get something need not say, "Here, you hold the
baby. I'm going to run down to the shop." The one doing the running can
take the baby along for the ride. The more action, the better!
Babies — and adults — experience tension when the circulation of
energy in their muscles is impeded. A baby seething with undischarged
energy is asking for action: a leaping gallop around the living room or
a swing from the child's hands or feet. The baby's energy field will
immediately take advantage of an adult's discharging one. Babies are
not the fragile things we have been handling with kid gloves. In fact,
a baby treated as fragile at this formative stage can be persuaded that
he or she is fragile.
As parents, you can readily attain the mastery that comes with
comprehension of energy flow. In the process you will discover many
ways to help your baby retain the soft muscle tone of ancestral
well-being and give your baby some of the calm and comfort an infant
needs to feel at home in the world.
