Sorry, Grandparents, You're Wrong About These Baby Health Beliefs |
Sorry, Grandparents, You're Wrong About These Baby Health Beliefs
As research evolves, so does safety and health guidance for babies – but paediatricians said there are certain habits that people just can't let go of.
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When you have a baby, everyone and their mom (literally) has an opinion on how you raise them. From screen time to feedings to sleeping habits, new parents hear it all, such as, “Wake them up from their nap, they won’t sleep tonight” – or the opposing, “Don’t wake them up from their nap!”
It’s hard to know what you should do when it comes to caring for a tiny human, and it’s common for new parents to reach out to their parents for support, guidance and for some much-needed grandparent babysitting breaks. And while both parents and grandparents want what’s best for the baby, their views on what exactly is best can really differ.
Parenting guidance and baby safety regulations are continually changing to account for new research and innovation, but it can be hard for grandparents to let go of how they raised their own kids decades ago for many reasons.
“We all, as humans, have some degree of survivorship bias and perhaps some defensiveness related to making specific parenting choices that we now recommend against,” Dr. Krupa Playforth, a paediatrician, founder of The Paediatrician Mom and author of Eyes, Knees, Boundaries, Please!, told HuffPost via email. “I think that all of us are sensitive to the idea of our parenting choices being judged, and there’s an implicit judgment when grandparents are told that the way they did things is now considered unsafe.”
Even still, some of what was done in 1990 and even 2000 is now not the safest way to care for a baby. Below, doctors and paediatricians correct the incorrect baby health beliefs they hear over and over from now-grandparents:
Babies should not sleep on their stomachs
Years ago, it was thought that putting a baby on their stomach to sleep was healthiest and safest, but research now shows that this kind of sleeping actually raises the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS, said Dr. Beth Oller, a family medicine physician in Kansas.
“That kind of prompted the ‘Back to Sleep campaign,’” said Dr. Michael Glazier, the chief medical officer for Bluebird Kids Health. The Back to Sleep campaign promoted back sleeping as the safest way for babies to sleep.
“The Back To Sleep campaign, first released in 1994, reduced the risk of SIDS in infants by 50% in just the first few years,” Dr. Lauren Hughes, a paediatrician, owner of Bloom Paediatrics in Kansas, US, and a medical communicator on........