A question often asked in the support groups is “Am I making my baby clingy by carrying them and breastfeeding them?”

Baby humans are carry mammals. Look at your baby. Does your baby look like a strong independent human being that is ready to nip off to the grocery store to buy some milk? She’s a week old, one month old, four months old.. Tiny. She’s a human infant. And she’s beautifully wonderfully normal and you’re doing absolutely nothing wrong.

What is happening is this: There are a LOT of myths floating around about how to raise human babies. These myths tell us that if we don’t train our babies to be independent from day one they will be clingy monsters. Because of this we push our babies away and the only way that they CAN get what they need (human contact) is by becoming clingy monsters. We then spend their childhood attempting to break them of their clinginess. When it doesn’t work we attribute their clinginess to the fact that they were held too much as babies. And then we repeat this bad advice to other parents so that they can save themselves. Or maybe we are successfully able to encourage a more mellow baby to stop wanting closeness, and have never experienced a more sensitive and needy baby.

It’s all myths. Babies are MEANT to be clingy little critters. They’re meant to be carried because they’re completely dependent on adults for survival and their instincts say that if they aren’t being carried that they’ll be eaten by tigers. ( https://nurshable.com/2012/08/21/what-do-you-mean-no-tigers-will-eat-me/ )

Here’s some other reading for you:
https://nurshable.com/2012/05/04/i-am-not-a-human-pacifier/
https://nurshable.com/2012/05/27/six-week-growth-spurt/

I have three kids. All of them have been raised similarly. One of them is a shy (compared to my other two) but blossoming three year old. The other two (Six and sixteen months) are incredibly social. They’re very trusting, very social, very outgoing. They all prefer to do everything themselves (including the sixteen month old). They’re secure, they’re attached, they all have excellent relationships with multiple adults.

It turns out *fine*.

I tend to focus on making my babies feel secure by respecting their cries as communication. This tends to mean that I wear them in a wrap as much as possible for the first six months, I breastfeed on demand, I nurse for comfort. I’m responsive and consistent and loving. As they get bigger and can sit up and crawl they come out of the wrap more and more and I have to chase them to keep up. They become more independent when their bodies become more skilled and when they are more able to take care of their needs. Children crave independence. They are intensely driven and curious little explorers of the world around them.

The level of independence you can expect from a child is roughly the same as their level of ability to meet their own needs and keep themselves safe, as well as their understanding of how to reunite with their caregivers if they are separated. Young human infants don’t even have a concept of object permanence. When they can’t see their caregiver their caregiver doesn’t exist anymore.

With a one month old? That ability to meet their own needs and keep themselves safe is zero. Can’t feed themselves. Can’t use the toilet. Can’t move themselves away from danger or towards mum. At that age babies are programmed to meet their needs by staying attached to someone who meets their needs.

We live in a culture that has chosen to label normal human infant behavior as a “problem” that has to be broken rather than as a phase to be embraced. As a result we try to break our children instead of nourishing them.

We do not need to do things that way.

So where did these ideas about infant dependence being a “bad” thing come from anyway?

The whole push to make young babies and children artificially independent comes from a troubled 20th century Behaviorist named John Watson who wrote extensively on child-rearing despite his later regrets for having done so because he “did not know enough” to do a good job. Much of his writing has been discredited but despite his methods not being scientifically backed they were wildly popular because they touted a view that artificially made infants much easier for adults to manage. John Watson was highly unethical as a researcher and experimented with inducing phobias in a developmentally disabled 11 month old child, advocated for extinguishing pregnancies for 20 years while enough data was gathered to ensure an efficient child rearing practice. He advocated for a business-like relationship between mother and infant and said that love was a “conditioned” response. Sadly his teachings about responding to infants have remained popular despite his questionable ethics, extreme ideas, and lack of credentials. The reason behind the popularity of his ideas might be found in his later career moves where he rapidly rose in the field of commercial advertising where he is credited for having popularized the idea of a “coffee break” in an advertisement for Maxwell House coffee.  Also of note is that his granddaughter suffered from psychological troubles that she attributed to having been raised using her grandfather’s theories. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson ]

Rather than looking to the advice of a discredited behaviorist I prefer to follow other behaviorists whose beliefs are backed by more solid science and by observation of independent children in functional parent-child relationships.

Some authors such as Stein & Newcomb say that caregivers who habitually respond to the needs of the baby before the baby gets distressed, preventing crying, are more likely to have children who are independent and that soothing care is best from the onset because once behaviors become established it’s harder to change them.

Giving babies what they need leads to greater independence later in childhood. In reports of small-band hunter-gatherers, parents met all of the needs of their young babies and children. Toddlers were confident and independent enough to walk into the bush on their own. [Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods, edited by Hewlett, B., & Lamb, M. New York: Aldine. 2005]

Can you create a clingy child through parenting? Absolutely. But not by being responsive. Read more here: https://nurshable.com/2013/07/31/creating-a-clingy-child-through-parenting/