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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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