Morality and highchairs
So. There are a couple of extremely stupid books on child rearing out there, that, when I see them in thrift stores or at garage sales, I buy them so that I can dispose of them properly. I found one such book, Babywise II, at the youth group fundraiser/garage sale today. Instead of dropping it directly in the trash, I decided to read a little bit to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
Holy cow.
I could only stomach one chapter– the chapter on introducing solids.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll start out by saying that I do not think that teaching my six month old (or however old he is when I get around to introducing solids) to sit with his hands in his lap while I feed him is any kind of reasonable or worthy goal. Nor do I think it’s worth my time to make a moral issue out of a baby chunking sweet potato on the floor. However, Gary Ezzo (author of Babywise I and II, Toddlerwise, and the curriculum “Growing Kids God’s Way” (har har)) does. And here is how he suggests I achieve these things:
first offense– verbal correction.
second offense–smacking/squeezing the child’s hand
third offense– isolating child in the crib
In addition to throwing food and not keeping ones hands in ones lap, the other “common highchair violations” (I am not making this up) are: flipping the plate, dropping food, playing with food, placing messy hands in the hair, banging on the tray, standing in the highchair, arching the back, spitting “raspberries” and screaming.
Shudder. What we have here folks, is a sure fire way to suck the joy out of meal times for both baby and parent. In addition to turning meal time in to some sort of moral quagmire, where, if you don’t “discipline” your preverbal, and premobile child properly, you’re setting them up to become amoral ne’er-do-well, you also miss out on a bunch of really cool pictures. Like this one: 
Coming soon: “The Spanking Post”