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How Not to Examine a
Baby
An excerpt from
Dancing With Elves
I've seen a
professor examining a newborn baby to show a student how to do
it. The baby is lying on the table, waving his arms and legs,
looking around, opening and closing his mouth, yawning,
sneezing, doing everything. Then here comes the professor! He
wants to look in the baby's mouth. He takes a tongue blade and
puts it in the baby's mouth, and the baby promptly clamps his
jaws together, so the professor has to force the baby's jaws
open to look in the mouth.
Then the
professor wants to look in the baby's eyes with his light, so he
takes this real bright light and he shines it right into the
baby's eyes and baby clamps his eyes shut. Then the professor
has to take his fingers and pry those little eyelids open.
You can gat
a baby's eyes to open spontaneously by turning off the lights.
You don't have to pry their eyes open.
Every
mother knows how to get a baby to open their mouth. One mother
in our practice knows that her baby likes to suck on his own big
toe, so she puts his big toe up there and he opens his mouth.
There are
so many different ways to do anything. You're only limited by
what you can think of.
The
professor wanted to look at the baby's palms, so he pulled on
the baby's fingers. What happens when you do that? The baby
makes a fist. Then you have to pry the fingers open to see
what's going on.
You can
touch the back of a baby's hand and their hand will open.
In every
case the doctor was producing the defensive reaction that made
his task difficult. He was not utilizing the feedback that he
was getting from the baby, to be a signal to modify his own
behavior. The baby was yawning, but the doctor was examining the
feet. The baby's mouth was open, but the doctor was examining
the feet! Now, it's obvious that somewhere between the first
week of life and age forty or fifty, something rather serious
happens. We stop using our feedback.
We're
carefully taught to pay attention to the program inside our
head, instead of what's happening in the real world.
It just
doesn't make sense to trigger resistances unnecessarily.
Random Thoughts
You can't
not communicate … but you could at least try.
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