Parents, Know Your Baby’s Baselines!
Or you’ll be sucked into detachment and machine thinking
It’s easy not to know how to treat a baby when you have no species-normal baselines. So you ping-pong between conflicting advice. There is no need to do that. We have the baselines.
Researchers (some) learned the hard way how important baselines are for raising the young of other species (e.g., it is abnormal for rats or monkeys to be raised isolated from mother and community, with longterm negative health and social effects).
Too many adults are ignorant of what human babies need for healthy development. Instead, for example, they think genes control who a child will be. Then, all parents need to do is survive babyhood. So wrong.
Parents too often listen to advice from people who read a few research studies without deep knowledge of how to assess research quality. They too often lack an understanding of baby brain development.
Some advisers encourage parents to coerce babies into one thing or another (e.g., sleep training, scheduled feedings). Bad idea.
And most advisers lack a knowledge of humanity’s evolutionary baselines.
In all these cases, parents are relying on advice that is not rooted in species-normal child treatment. As a result, baby mistreatment is cultivating generations of ill health in every domain: physiologically, psychologically, socially, and morally.
Here are some short blog posts about what babies truly need and why:
Five Things NOT To Do To Babies: The Don’ts of Babycare
Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Babies
Where do we find the correct baselines? From our millions-year-old existence on the planet which we learn from ethnographies, archeology, and ethology.
Like every animal, humans evolved a nest designed for the optimal development and wellbeing of offspring: the Evolved Nest (website has lots of free information about and tools for evolved nestedness and its effects).
At NestedWorld.org, we are launching a Nesting Ambassador Program in January 2026 to train people in the principles and practices of the Communal Evolved Nest. Learning the baselines for baby, child and adult wellbeing will enable them to take the Evolved Nest into their life domains, whether parent, therapist, educator, community member.
