Dangle

Today

For some reason today I found myself reading an article extolling the Scandinavian virtues of leaving baby outside in a pram in all weathers. Apparently this toughens them up nicely and helps them get a teensy-weensy dose of wintry sun to top up their vitamin D. Hmmm.

This triggered an avalanche of emails and one women described with great admiration how her mother shoved her outside for hours, only bringing her in when there was a freezing fog, because this gave her time to do the chores and settled the baby into a "routine".

In My Day

In the '40s and '50s the rule was that babies were fed and watered by the clock. In the intervening four hours they were to be left strictly alone, no matter how much they cried. I wonder who decreed the four hours rule and how they settled on this being the right time between feeds. I don't know how much heartbreak this caused new mothers who had to listen to their babies screaming; many of them parked the prams at the bottom of the garden so that they couldn't hear them.

At 4BH we had a "garden room". This room was at basement level but, the house being built on a slope, it opened directly onto the back garden. It held deckchairs and garden equipment and all the kinds of junk that people today shove into their garages.

I think I must have been about three years old. Mamma had parked Beatrice in her pram in the garden room.  You certainly wouldn't have been able to hear Beatrice cry from there, unless you were in the garden. Beatrice was old enough to roll over and was fastened into the pram with a leather harness (you can see from this picture what an ill-fit it was). Mamma asked me to go down and check that Beatrice was OK.

It's a miracle that I remembered my errand all the way down to the garden room. Even more of a miracle that, when I saw Beatrice, hopelessly tangled with the harness around her neck, dangling out of the pram, I realised that this was an emergency and had enough savvy to go upstairs as fast as my little legs would take me to summon help.

Although I think that we are a little inclined to over-protect our children these days, I sometimes wonder what my parents were thinking and feel a little surprised that we all made it to adulthood intact.