can you remove an infant from it's car seat?
I was in the city yesterday with family and everywhere I went I saw infants in their car seats. In cars, sure, but also everywhere else. I walked into a cafe (my 3 year old was in the car with my aunt and uncle) and the woman in line ahead of me had an infant in baby car seat at her feet. She pushed it along as the line moved, got her coffee and left all without looking at the baby (she was awake and very cute). The other women in the cafe all had infants in car seats at their feet or on a bench next to them. In all cases the mother were drinking their coffee and reading or chatting and occasionally looking over at the infants. The infants I could see were all awake. Most were alert and peaceful (my favorite time to hold or interact with babies) and some played with the toys dangling from the infant car seat handle thingy. No one touched them or talked to them.
Then we moved on and all day I saw infants in the car seats and older babies and toddlers in strollers, inside and outside. But no one was carrying the child or holding it's hand to help it walk. No one.
I used to go to a babygroup where most of the women left their babies in the infant car seats unless they were crying in a hungry way and then they would take them out, nurse them and pop them back in the seat. Or try to comfort them in the seat. I attended a weekly meeting with a woman who put her baby-in-seat on the floor under the table we sat around and ignored any noises that he made, happy or sad. The other moms at the meeting (and there were a few of us) held our kids or supervised them playing with toys on a blanket, depending on their age and interests)
This totally creeps me out. Why don't people want to hold their babies. I was dying to hold mine. I can see leaving the baby in the car seat when you get out of the car if it's sleeping and a light sleeper (though i always just got my son out and held him and he went back to sleep) but I don't understand leaving the baby in the seat all the time. I don't like going to someone's house and when I get there the baby is in it's car seat up on the table, wide awake. It creeps me out even more when the hour I am visiting (with my son who is in my lap about half the time and exploring the rest of the time) the baby never comes out of the car seat.
When I see many friend's pictures on flickr their babies are in car seats most of the time.
Car seats are for cars, in my opinion. I can't imagine trying to haul a newborn around in the carseat just a few days postpartum (which I see all the time). The baby is lighter and softer and nicer than the baby-in-car-seat. And why haul the contraption to the park and the cafe when you could instead hold a cuddly little baby? Plus when someone offers to let you hold their baby they don't really just pass you the carrier, they pass the warm wiggly baby.
I know women who say they just need their body to themselves for a while, which I get, but it's weird that it is emotionally/mentally/psychologically easier for these women to carry a piece of plastic with a baby in it than it is to carry a baby. A baby that they conceived, carried for months inside their bodies and now live in a house with.
- Henry's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Those car seats do happen to double as a little infant carrier. My son's also attached to the stroller. Kinda cool, really.
I think I carried my little sweetie in his carrier if I was going someplace that I needed to put him down; like at a restaurant, or something else like that. But I understand what you mean. Babies need to be held all the time! They love the connection! I see so many disaffected moms carrying their kids in carriers like they're objects and not babies.
Those little carriers serve their purpose I guess, but I agree, they are way overused. Get one of those little baby slings if you want a hands free moment! Then everybody wins!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. ~W.C. Fields
"Overcome the angry by non-anger; overcome the wicked by goodness; overcome the miser by generosity; overcome the liar by truth." -Buddha
it was so hard on my back, it was a pain to get Sebastian in and out, and because we've always lived in small spaces, I would keep stubbing my toe on the stupid thing.
This time around we got a seat that stays in the car - it will serve us much longer (it is good to something like 40 pounds) and it forces me to carry Rigby when I might have otherwise just left her in the seat because it would be easier. People thought we were crazy when we said we wouldn't be buying a "bucket".
The only time I miss it is at the grocery store - some days I think it would be nice to just click her seat onto the cart and go... but that's it.
ETA - I do love my stroller, though. I can do two kids without it, but I like having the option.
I did bring bug out in his (it was the carseat/stroller system) when he fell asleep, but not as an all the time thing. It was so much easier on my back to carry him in the snuggly or the sling. I wonder if it's just because someone sees someone else do it and so they start thinking it's the thing to do & they just never realize how much easier it is to use a sling.
*ETA the reason I say that is because I actually didn't realize that it was easier (for me) to use a sling. I did the carrier thing cause I was a new mom with no community and I couldn't ask anyone.
I didn't really find the OP all that offensive. I mean I used a stroller with the carseat system thing (still use the stroller but he's too big for the carseat) OMG I even used a harness once or twice! I read it as her giving her opinion, it really wasn't that harsh.
I am swisterland...switzerland? fuck it, I am swiss.
sometimes easier for me, sometimes not so easy for a mama i know with lupus, etc. i think describing another woman's choice as "creeping me out" is pretty harsh though. we aren't talking about neglect here, what is creepy about putting the occasional (as you see fit) space between you and your baby? maybe something, maybe not. mama judgment has to stop when we are talking about choices when those choices aren't harming the child.
um okay well there is a thread here where you joyfully rip into the MDC community and used language much harsher than Henry. I'm not going to dredge up every thread you ever responded to, wouldn't even mention it here except that it just read your intro.
I am sorry the MDC mamas made you feel excluded, seriously no snark. I know it sucks to feel excluded but your anger is a little disproportionate here.
I am swisterland...switzerland? fuck it, I am swiss.
Well, carrying babys in seat carriers as a sort of "culture" as Henry made clear, is doing harm to the babys. It is no good to their little spinal bones. Of course, we used the thing, too. But it is a differnce if I use it with sense or if I use it because it seems just convenient. What creeps me out is that mothers doesn't seem to talk to their babys any longer. Maybe I'm wrong but there are so many mothers sitting in the bus, not even watching their baby. Maybe they are just tired but i don't think so. Children are still seen as a disturbing thing , at least in parts of our society.
...the lover, the dreamer, and me (Jim Henson)
Well, my city's downtown is pretty much all concrete. I was terrified I might drop my son. If I wore him in a snuggli; people didn't seem to notice him and would crowd me. Once he got elbowed while in there! I shoved the bitch and told her to watch herself. If I had him in his carrier which attached to the stroller, people gave him space. People held open doors. I felt like he was safer. I didn't carry him around in the carrier thing, that's way too heavy and I hate seeing babies shaken around in those. Ever notice their little heads flopping to and fro? While he was in the stroller, I would talk to him. When he was older and in the umbrella stroller we talked all the time; if I was in a hurry I'd pretend we were a stroller derby, making screeching brakes noises, warning him about a hard corner, ask which way we should go, etc. At stoplights I'd tip the whole thing backwards to give him kisses. Maybe some people just saw me at a quiet moment and thought I was ignoring him. Sometimes, it is important for babies to have some quiet time. Does your kid ever scream at you when he's had enough playtime? Mine did. Especially while out and about; there was so much to look at he just wanted to look around sometimes. And, sometimes, I just needed a little time to not be super-happy-chipper-mama and drink my latte in peace after spending hours holding my little mister at home, engaging him, talking to him, loving on him.
i did it myself. the seats are car seats/carriers, hence the handle. it's easier to just grab the child in the seat than to repeatedly transfer him or her back and forth between a more intimate carrier and the plastic one. so if i went out for a coffee or out to eat at a diner or something, i would take that carrier and put it on the table, while i sat and drank and ate, close to my baby, but not holding her. dd enjoyed sitting autonomously in her carrier, looking at the lights and fans in the ceiling.it isn't taht i didn't want to hold my baby, it's that i didn't feel the need to hold her every second of every day, and if i'd known that people were watching me and questioning my 15 minutes or an hour of respite, i'd have felt weird about that.
Forgive my saying so, but this post comes off as pretty holier-than-thou. Not every mother yearns to hold her baby every second of the day. Does this mean they love their babies less or are inferior as mothers? I don't think so. I mean, the example you use of the mom who kept her baby in a seat under the table, completely ignoring him/her sounds pretty bad- does she do this every week or just the once? Maybe she had just reached the end of her rope that day.
You say that you get that some women need their bodies to themselves for a while but even that has a tone of judgement. Society does a pretty good job of hating on moms- I don't think we should start turning on each other.
you're most likely not seeing these women 'all the time', more likely you're seeing a lot of women for a brief moment in time and they happen to be doing a lot of the same thing, something that doesn't quite fit with your mama grove. that's okay if the car seat/carrier thing isn't your thing, but it's kinda unfair to assume these mamas are doing this car seat thinging 24/7 when really, they might only be doing it for 24 minutes. see, i could have easily been one of those mamas you saw at the coffee shop or wherever, toting her infant around in an infant carrier/car seat, though mine was typically propped up on the snap & go wheels. because as much as i wanted to tote my tot around in a sling, i was unable to do so because of a back injury. and she was unable to do so becasue she HATED the sling! so the car seat/infant carrier with the lightweight frame and wheels was the best thing ever for us. it got us to and fro, allowed me to have hands free to get my grocery shppong done in record time, gave me a free hand to sip my coffee while i wheeledher around. and i assure you, when i wasn't out and about, i held my kid all the freakin time. we sprawled on the floor, had our tummy time, we co-slept (still do), and snuggled every remaining minute of each and every day. and, like dahlia said about her son, i'm pretty sure my daughter enjoyed her time in her seat, too, gazing up at the world around her. and as soon as she could sit up, we progressed to a stroller.
Have you ever considered the simplicity of keeping your infants from grabbing a cup of hot coffee and dumping it on themselves at a restaurant? Or that its not always safe when shopping to try to juggle a squirming infant and an armload of groceries or shopping bags? Or in my case that my son liked to entertain himself when out and about and I was a young overwhelmed single mom with no help and no friends in a new city and sometimes the carrier allowed me 5 minutes to take a breath and not meltdown and the implication that I didn't love my son as much is a little insulting. My son also crawled and walked very early and it wasn't always safe for me to do simple things like shower, laundry, cook because he was into everything and occasionally the carrier was a lifesaver because he would sit in it calmly while I did what needed to be done. There are a multitude of reasons people use carriers and I'm sure there are even the ones who do it for the wrong reasons but the five minutes you see someone in a store or restaurant does not give you the inside track into their lives and into how they feel about their children.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
-James Baldwin
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
~Jack London
I carried Ike around in his seat too much. I wish I had kept him closer. I never let him be in his seat at home. I just read too much about spinal alignment. Furthermore Isaac was much too active of a baby to allow carseat overuse. If we weren't in the car or constantly moving he wanted OUT!
this is exactly the kind of crap that i hate about mothering dot commune and other mom boards...why on earth do you feel the need to judge other mamas and their choices? there are upsides and downsides to the extreme AP style you are talking about, and i would rather hear about why YOU love to hold your baby 24/7 rather than read a smear post insinuating that mamas who you see putting their children down don't love their babies. i mean, what is your point with this post? that you think you are a better mother than one who puts her baby in a car seat or a stroller instead of carrying them? well good for you. you sound like a judgmental and insecure person in this post to me. i am sure many mamas will commiserate and congratulate you but not me. and it has nothing to do with whether or not i agree with you, by the way. i just DO NOT see the point of these generalizing, judgmental, holier than thou posts. i really don't. other than ego masturbation. can't you just talk about yourself without putting other people down? i am sure that would be much more interesting to read. at least for me.
I just re-read Henry's post again, and I still don't see it. Perhaps it is because I've been here a while and "judgmental and insecure" are not adjectives I would associate with Henry, but more likely it is because I read the post as a list of observations with commentary. Sure she is of the opinion that the choice she made was the better one - if she didn't I would really wonder why she'd done it.
Now I will say that I think each and every one of us questions bits of other's parenting - it is how we develop our own ideas and patterns. And to question why something so unnatural has become the norm seems perfectly valid to me.
You should know that you have stumbled into a group of highly opinionated women. Debate is a big part of why I love this place, not snarky personal attacks, mind you - but honest debate. So if you can't handle someone stating an honest opinion that differs from yours, you should likely move on.
i can handle a different opinion, but i guess responding to it is off limits? ok maybe i should move on.
but when you call someone out so rudely, you should expect to hear about it. If you're cool with that, I'm cool with you.
Everyone who uses the carseat/carrier has an individual reason. I used it with my son, though not as profusely as what she described. I totally get her intention to point out the cultural differences between a time when babies were carried on mommies backs out in the field and our modern need to be un-attached physically, to keep your sense of self. She didn't say it was wrong, she said it was weird. Relax, my friends! If you don't like the post, as idyllia said, move on.
Why is everyone being so defensive here? Henry wasn't being judgmental, yet you fear her judgement. Sounds like there is a chance for personal growth in here somewhere...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. ~W.C. Fields
I think it's all about what works best for mom and baby. As an exhausted single mama, I can see how the carrier would be helpful in certain situations. (a little hand and lap free hot coffee time being one of them!) Unfortunately, J hates his car seat and wails whenever he is strapped into it. So, sling it is. But truly, whatever sparkles for you, sisters. We're all in this together.
Let's not turn this into a 'let's all bash Henry' sort of thing.
Nobody likes that.
bashing and disagreeing are not the same thing.
and maybe that is why you didn't fit in so well at MDC? No, it is everyone else's fault right? You are just as judgemental as the next woman refering to online mama's as "smug bitches sitting around smelling their own farts".
Get over yourself.
and thank you for distinguishing between the culture and the specific mothers, because that didn't come across to me in teh original post. although, you've been here long enough that i didn't expect that you meant what you said in a sanctimonious way at all.
Because I thought what you meant was to speak on how this, the carseat carrier, had become the default. And when I first had Sebastian, I thought it *was* the default, it was how babies were carried. I thought my mom was being a cow when she chided me for buying the "travel system" - "Oh, but it is so easy, it is so convenient, it is so wonderful!!" I told her, my eyes full of stars. It was conversations and debates like this that showed me there were other ways - not just to carry a baby, but to feed a baby, to diaper a baby and to live. Conversations like this one and so many of the other touchy topics that I've witnessed here and on other boards have helped me grow into my role as mom.
Let's not stop to avoid hurt feelings - there are enough boards out there where I feel like everyone treads lightly and is all lovey and "judgement-free" (which to me means I'm afraid to state my actual opinion on everything from Hell-Mart to politics for fear of offending and getting booted or black-balled), this shouldn't be another one. Leave the personal attacks out of it, though. I think we all need to remember that each voice here is a person, a woman, a mother and is valuable (this is not specifically aimed at you, Henry), let's show some respect.
have one view before they get pregnant; and then when they are actually parenting start doing it an entirely different way.
For example: I thought there was no question about it, I would formula feed, disposable diaper, put him in daycare, let him watch tv whenever, buy tang and koolaid and chips and candy, and hey, why doesn't anyone ever use popsicles with a teething baby? It's not like the babyteeth are that important, they are going to fall out in a few years anyhow. I wish I was kidding. Really. Of that list; the only thing I did was use disposables; after trying cloth and he was in daycare for part of his toddlerhood.
It's discussions with other moms that helped me learn to be the mother I am. When I was a young, single mama with NO mama friends, with my non-mama friends asking me all the time to just give him a candy, or taking his vegetarian ass to mcdonalds... it was places like this that kept me sane and discussions like this one that helped me to see the other options out there.
Henry, I think a lot of us mis-read your tone here. Thanks for clearing it up!
I came to motherhood with the same ideas and slowly worked my way towards more mindful parenting through this site. Not that I have something against formula feeding or car seats per se, but we aren't blank slates when we become mothers. We are fed a lot of ideas all along that contrive to make parenting somewhat more costly and consumerist. It exacts a toll on the environment when we buy buggies and cars and carseats and disposable diapers and formula. Most people wound themselves financially to afford this stuff and the earth is worsened and everybody thinks it's a need and in many cases it is because of our society and I think it's great that on this site we look at that. I used to formula feed and disposable diaper and I don't judge myself or anybody else harshly for doing it. That was fine then but now that I've been here and learned more it's nice to evolve my parenting to fit my values to feel stronger in myself and it's too bad that society is discouraging rather than encouraging these changes.
***the United States is one of only four out of 168 countries studied to not have some form of paid family leave for new moms. We join Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho in not having that policy in place. ***
Nicely put. And need I point out that there are children that are getting beaten and starved everyday by their parents? If a mother chooses to carry her baby around in a car seat and loves her baby and doesn't harm her baby, that is alllllright by me.
Navigation
Who's online
Online users
- Madame Filth
- Susan
Who's New
- BeachBunny
- gayle.mallinger
- Mamapocket
- mjcwriter
- addie smith
I get that it can be easier some of the time, I get that it works better for some people - what I am talking about that may have not been clear is the kind of culture or system where the norm becomes to not hold your child. And I notice it more probably because that isn't how it is where I live. I am not bashing an individual for not holding their baby a certain time on one day, I a saying I find it creepy when I see no one holding their baby all day, when know babies that I have never seen outside of their car seats even though I see them a lot (and once again it isn't about this certain baby, it's the trend of knowing lots of babies that I never see out of the car seat).
And yeah, I held my kid a lot. I am that kind of person and he was that kind of baby. So yes, that colors my experience. I can see how my post could have come off a certain way, and it still may, fine. When I wrote it I was worked up about the issue. Yes. But I do think it's weird that in the society I live in I see most people carrying babies in heavy plastic containers. Or that kids are are "supposed" to be in kid-centered environments but not "supposed" to be out in public as members of the community (which isn't what I am talking about in this post, but another thing entirely) or that school is really weird to me even though I went to one (another idea altogether as well), or why the society encourages selfishness as if it's a value (see, yet another topic).
So yeah, the system and culture of being distant from babies creeps me out.