12 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

It seems as if every month brings another study showing that breast milk is what Ponce de León should have been searching for.