Best 10 quotes of Nicholas Day on MyQuotes

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.)

It seems as if every month brings another study showing that breast milk is what Ponce de León should have been searching for.

La Leche League and the What to Expect books are even explicit about this fear: the pacifier, they warn, cannot substitute for a mother. This is the rare piece of parenting wisdom that manages to be both condescending and confusing. Condescending because it seems unlikely that parents who were considering using a pacifier—parents diligent enough to look it up in a book—were also considering abandoning their child altogether. Confusing because, well—what? How would a pacifier substitute for a mother—how exactly? Are there pacifiers on the market that cuddle and feed and rock and dote on a child? Is a mother nothing more than a nipple?

Over time, parents have barnacled the most routine activities in infancy with their own preoccupations. It's sometimes hard to see the baby for all the barnacles.

The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold—abuse, stress, utter indifference—can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with.

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.

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.

You'd expect academics, people who are by training comfortable with complexity, to be the most resistant to the idea that we're shaped by any single factor. In fact, they are often the worst offenders. Immersed in their own research, shaped by their own work, many logically see everything else as a natural extension of it.