21/11/2025
We aren't just told to separate ourselves from our babies we are judged for being unsafe when we keep them close, by health professionals
“Parents are the original baby monitors.
We are designed to keep our infants close. Even while we sleep, our bodies monitor and nurture our young. Our nearness promotes bonding, facilitates brain development, and regulates the nervous system. Infants are incapable of surviving without us, so the need to be close is also a hard-wired safety mechanism.
Humans are born earlier in their gestation than other mammals. We enter the world far less developed and far more helpless. A newborn calf can stand up within the first 2 hours after birth...human babies can’t even hold their own heads up until around 3 or 4 months old.
And if we look to our closest cousins, chimpanzees, for comparison…a human baby would need a 18-21 month gestation, rather than our usual 9-10, in order to be born at a comparable cognitive and neurological stage of development to that of a newborn chimpanzee. So our young toddlers aren’t even ready to cut the cord by chimp standards…
So, once earthside, we continue our gestation with the help of our parents. We stay rooted to our parents so that our bodies and minds may continue developing, in constant communication with theirs.
That is why its so troubling when our culture’s separation-focused narrative leads us to start second-guessing the value of proximity. It seems like we get our free pass for the newborn phase, but then after that there’s a bit of distaste for cosleeping or carrying or generally embracing high needs for closeness. I hope we can start to change that.
I hope that we can view proximity as something to honour as much as we can, rather than something to extinguish as early as possible.
That, instead of being considered a kind of lagging-behind or an alt parenting style, we can celebrate the magic that it is...
That we can reconnect with our mammalian nature, and, rather than feeling sheepish about these natural things we do, we can choose instead to roar with pride about them, as our little cubs roar too, right by our sides.”
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