If you are a parent of a young child, you have most likely been forewarned by many people about making sure you don’t “create bad habits” with your child (sometimes people just simply refer to these as “habits”, minus the “bad”, but then imply it’s something you must change, leaving the “bad” as unsaid but clearly present). Usually these people are talking about one of the following:

Nursing or cuddling your baby to sleep

Holding your baby while s/he sleeps

Nursing on demand, including for comfort

Holding or soothing your crying baby

These are, apparently, the “habits” you must break your child of. Apparently they will do damage to your child, to you, to your relationships, your sanity, and quite possibly global peace. To hear people speak of these actions, one would think we were attempting to raise trained assassins and these were our pivotal steps.

I ask instead that we consider our infants’ behaviours a little differently. You see, although the strict definition of a habit is, “A settled or regular tendency or practice”, when it comes to parenting you will see it almost exclusively used to refer to what parents do for the children. Therefore, when we assume the bad habit is caused by action, the assumption is that inaction is preferable. In the case of these common “habits”, the preferable actions in our society are:

Having your baby fall asleep alone

Having your baby sleep in his/her own bed in his/her own room

Only nursing when the baby is clearly hungry (no comfort feeds) or to a schedule

Leaving your crying baby so s/he can learn to “self-soothe” (or assuming s/he is capable of self-soothing)

But, what if instead we viewed habits from a biologically normal perspective? That is, what if we started off with what babies will biologically expect and then deem any action or inaction that deviates from that as the creation of a habit? What would this look like?

Well, if we look at human history, the “bad habits” that we are so fond of telling parents off for are actually the very normal behaviours that exist between caretakers and their children