Babywearing: Fads, Dangers and Cultural Appropriation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between the techniques of (extended) breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing most commonly associated with AP, the latter is perhaps the most mainstream and uncontroversial. As the preceding chapters reveal, while the message that ‘breast is best’ suggests unequivocal support for breastfeeding, the reality is more complicated and involves mothers negotiating competing notions of expertise to claim the good motherhood that the ‘breast is best’ discourse promises. Bedsharing is more explicitly controversial, although there are now recent shifts towards advising the apparently significant proportion of parents who bedshare against advice to do so safely. Reflecting a parenting culture that assigns meaning to the most minute of parenting choices and tasks, both breastfeeding and bedsharing require mothers to articulate an explanation of their choices, whether addressing their ‘failures’ to feed appropriately or the dangers associated with sharing a bed with their babies. The mothers I interviewed for this study offered many justifications for these parenting decisions but most striking among them was the use of ‘nature’. ‘Nature’, especially when paired with experiential or maternal expertise, could be deployed to celebrate the benefits of extended breastfeeding or the ‘instinctive’ desire to sleep close to one's baby. However, recourse to the natural carries risks, both racialized and uniquely suited to the neoliberal moment, where women's ‘natural’ proclivities for childrearing can be cited as justification for the withdrawal of supportive structures and resources. This tension between what ‘nature’ discourses can open up and what they close down is mirrored in the wider work accomplished by intensive mothering ideology as it identifies mothers as uniquely suited to infant care while at the same time subordinating maternal ‘instinct’ to the authority of parenting experts. These same tensions are at work in state-produced advice and the women's narratives about babywearing. When compared with the debates around breastfeeding and bedsharing, babywearing appears relatively innocuous. Although there have been some concerns about safety, state bodies in both Britain and Canada have addressed these concerns matter-of-factly while still suggesting the practice as one option among many for carrying an infant. Babywearing is an inoffensively visible marker of the values of bonding and attachment so ubiquitous and unquestioningly accepted in contemporary parenting cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".