12 Quotes by 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.

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.

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?