My kids were born in the days when babies slept on their stomachs in carriages and cribs. You could still buy a nice large bucket of a baby carriage or pram as the British call them. Since my babies were very active, I had "zip a babes*" set up in the carriage, then stroller and another in the high chair. My kids stood early. "Number three" was crawling with belly up by five (or was it four and a half) months and standing straight and short in the high chair which she rocked with a vengeance.
My babies moved all over the crib before they had common sense, so bumpers kept them safe. These weren't pillowy soft padded ones. They were foam coated with some wipeable plastic. No one could suffocate because of them.
The cribs had moveable mattresses, so that tiny infants were higher up, easier on my postnatal back to reach. As the kids quickly got more mobile, turning over, sitting, standing I had to keep lowering the mattress. Of course the challenge was lowering it before the baby could topple out. Maybe that's why some (or all) newer cribs don't have that option.
American product safety laws and parent guidelines are always changing. I personally think that there should be a healthy dose of common sense besides all the technical guess-work and statistics.
*I guess zip-a-babe is out of business. The device I did find seems to have a similar usage.
2 comments:
Shalom!
Have you noticed that even as safety warnings and features increase, the accident/injury rate doesn't change significantly? Does this tell us something about the general level of common sense of adults?
True, and don't forget that the average night's sleep is much shorter than it once was. Carelessness is one of the results. It's harder to concentrate and do things safely.
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