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Doctor's Orders
in Boston, a pediatric(小儿料的) resident is experiencing a vague sense of disquiet as she
interviews a Puerto Rican mother who has brought her baby in for a checkup. When she is at work.
the mother explains, the two older children, aged six and nine, take care of the two younger ones, a
two-year-old and a three-month-old baby Waming bells go off for the resident young children cannot
possibly be sensitive to the needs of babies and toddlers(学步的儿童) And yet the baby is thriving. he
is well over the ninetieth percentile in weight and height and is full of smiles
The resident questions the mother in detail: How is the baby fed? Is the apartment safe for
a two-year-old? The responses are all reassuring, but the resident nonetheless launches into a
lecture on the importance of the mother to normal infant development. The mother falls silent.
and the resident is now convinced that something is seriously wrong. And something is - the
esident's model of child care
The resident subscribes to what I call "the continuous care and contact model of parenting
which demands a high level of contact, frequent feeding, and constant supervision, with almost
all care provided by the mother. According to this model, a mother should also enhance cognitive
development with play and verbal engagement. The pediatric resident is comfortable with this
formula -she is not even conscious of it-because she was raised this way and treats her own
child in the same manner. But at the Child Development Unit of Children's Hospital in Boston
which I direct, I want residents to abandon the idea that there is only one way to raise a child. Not
to do so may interfere with patient care
Many models of parenting are valid. Among Efe foragers of Congo's Ituri Forest, for example, a
newbom is routinely cared for by several people. Babies are even nursed by many women, But few
individuals ever play with the infant; as far as the Efe are concerned, the baby's job is to sleep
In Peru. the Quechua swaddle their infants in a pouch of blankets that the mother. or a
id caretaker, carries on her back. Inside the pouch, the infant cannot move, and its eyes are
covered. Quechua babies are nursed in a perfunctory (1 18)fashion, with three or four hours
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