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I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal's lifestyle reporting, not because of it's accuracy or worthiness, but because of it's utter daffyness. (Fave example: This article, which discusses salary cuts with reasonable seriousness for several paragraphs before leaving the reader with the indelible impression that the really bad thing about global economic slowdown is that it's bad for kitties.)
Yesterday, Jonathon Last published a book review/editorial regarding the role of men in the delivery room, in which, to put it briefly, he is wrong.
"Various fads," he opines, "have cajoled fathers into cutting the umbilical cord or playing catcher as the baby exits the birth canal or stripping off their shirts and clutching the newborn 'skin-to-skin.'"
Yes, the time my husband spent (shirtless and adorable) cuddling our newborn son while doctors did horrible things to the lower half of me and I couldn't hold the baby... faddish nonsense. Kid should have been on the warmer, exercising his li'l baby lungs. Human body heat and soothing rumbly noises weren't in any way helpful. No one has researched the benefits of skin-to-skin contact for premature babies and newborn infants, or perhaps they have not been found beneficial.
Cutting the umbilical or catching the baby are not skilled jobs in a normal birth. Anyone can do them! Why not someone who has a huge emotional interest in the baby?
At the same time, he claims (based on rates of divorce and births to out of wedlock mothers) that fathers are overall less involved than ever. Some of those divorced and unmarried fathers are and remain active in their children's lives, others don't. But surely, this is not a problem that can be solved by telling new fathers that their job is to sit tight and hand out cigars.
Yesterday, Jonathon Last published a book review/editorial regarding the role of men in the delivery room, in which, to put it briefly, he is wrong.
"Various fads," he opines, "have cajoled fathers into cutting the umbilical cord or playing catcher as the baby exits the birth canal or stripping off their shirts and clutching the newborn 'skin-to-skin.'"
Yes, the time my husband spent (shirtless and adorable) cuddling our newborn son while doctors did horrible things to the lower half of me and I couldn't hold the baby... faddish nonsense. Kid should have been on the warmer, exercising his li'l baby lungs. Human body heat and soothing rumbly noises weren't in any way helpful. No one has researched the benefits of skin-to-skin contact for premature babies and newborn infants, or perhaps they have not been found beneficial.
Cutting the umbilical or catching the baby are not skilled jobs in a normal birth. Anyone can do them! Why not someone who has a huge emotional interest in the baby?
At the same time, he claims (based on rates of divorce and births to out of wedlock mothers) that fathers are overall less involved than ever. Some of those divorced and unmarried fathers are and remain active in their children's lives, others don't. But surely, this is not a problem that can be solved by telling new fathers that their job is to sit tight and hand out cigars.
