Forward Facing Strollers Slow Babies’ Development According to Scottish Study

Baby In Forward-Facing Buggy

It’s easy to criticize new ideas. It’s even easy to dismiss an idea that, if true, could help us empower our children through one simple change, such as buying a different baby stroller.

For instance, this morning I came across an article about a researcher in Scotland who  has conducted a study that  has yielded preliminary evidence that forward-facing strollers can slow babies’ development.

Developmental psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk is quoted as saying, ”Our data suggests that for many babies today, life in a buggy is emotionally impoverished and possibly stressful.  Stressed babies grow into anxious adults.”

Study Part Of ”Talk To Your Baby” Campaign

Her study, done in collaboration with the National Literacy Trust charity as part of its Talk To Your Baby campaign, suggested that children who are pushed in forward-facing baby carriages (as opposed to children who are pushed in prams, pushed in backwards-facing baby carriages or carried) may be less likely to talk, laugh and interact with others.

Yet this isolation and lack of interaction occurs exactly at the point in a baby’s life when the baby needs this interaction for infant brain development. 

Reactions By On-Line Readers

Report of this study provoked some rather vehement reactions of dismissal by on-line readers. ”What a load of garbage,” “totally useless,” and “what a joke,” have been typical posts, along with insinuations that both the researcher and the article were only interested in ”making news.”

My first question is: why are those readers so hostile? My second question is: And what do they think that hostility will accomplish?

The first answer has to do with pent-up fear, guilt, and stress.

People do the best they can to establish ways of living that work. They are already stressed out and worried about everything from Global Warming to the global economic crisis.

All they want is to be able to put their children into their strollers and take a walk. The last thing they want is to be told that, by doing so, they may be stunting the growth of their children. For them, it’s just too much.

Also, although parents want to believe they are good parents, it is only human to secretly fear we have not measured up. We may then project our own fear and anger at any moving target that we interpret as saying  we have been, somehow, lacking. Our child’s fate, after all, hangs in the balance.

So the answer to my second question is that, by invalidating the research and researcher, these protestors are insisting that, even though they may use forward-facing strollers, they are good parents.

However, note that the researcher has assigned no blame to parents. She has simply conducted research in an attempt to explain current trends in society. So this attack, like all attack of this nature, is unjustified.

Americans More Isolated Than Ever

It is a fact that Americans are feeling more alone and alienated than ever and have fewer friends. So what are the causes of this change within us?

Many believe the main culprit is the time we spend alone with our technology: in our cars, in front of the television, in front of the computer.

However, there may be other influences to which we have been blind. Who is to say that Dr. Zeedyk, in the end, will not help parents make better choices than they could otherwise be expected to make without her study?

Her area of research makes sense to me. After all, look at what television has done to us. In addition to separating us from others and making us feel more alone, the amount of time we have devoted to it as opposed to honing our reading and writing skills has resulted in lower literacy levels.

Instead of talking, writing, creating and learning actual skills, we have spent too much time alone, as consumers of entertainment, with the result that it is having a negative economic effect. Employers cannot find qualified employees. Jobs are shipped overseas both to save money and find motivated employees.

Whether it is spending too much time alone at our computers, excessive television watching, excessive video game playing, or all of this combined together with other factors, teachers have seen the diminished the quality of thinking and speech in our youth which, in turn, will dictate the types of jobs they can be expected to hold, the income they will earn and the lives they will live.

A Child’s “Buggy” Experience

Yet, if television isolates adults, is not the forward-facing baby carriage much like an I-Max cinema for baby? It’s total immersion with no talking and precious little human interaction.

It used to be that children were pushed in buggies so a child looked up at the sky and at mommy.

The sky was soothing and mommy instilled a sense of safety as she made eye contact, smiled and interacted with her child. As long as the child was awake, there was interaction and, as I can imagine it having been there, a sense of peace.

Contrast that with being alone at garbage-can and fire-hydrant level, and being plowed forward into an unfamiliar world in which large objects like legs and dogs hurl themselves toward you, yet miss you at the last moment.

With sudden awareness of what that experience must be like for young children, one sight I witnessed while walking down Wortley Road in Wortley Village this past summer has new and distressing meaning.

A mother, with another child in tow and pushing a forward-facing baby carriage, was following her sobbing toddler. He had run up onto the grass of a front yard and she was trying to convince him to get back in the stroller. With his little hands brushing the bushes, he stumbled along in the same direction as his mother, sobbing as he said, “I wan walk.”

At the time I thought, “This kid is desperate to stretch his leg muscles and use his body.” And that was probably true. Yet it’s just as likely that he was also sick of the loneliness and alienation and lack of control inherent in being in that stroller.

I empathized with his mom. She was just trying to get to the store and back. It would have been so easy to look at the child and say, “He’s being a brat.”

Yet, I suspect that all he wanted was to walk in the grass, to touch something green, and to be away from that street full of cars. Even when you are an adult pedestrian, it can be unpleasant and frightening to face zooming traffic.

On Facing Traffic On Foot

I don’t know if you experience this, but every time I walk along a bend and see cars speeding toward me, my body feels a little panic. Perhaps it is because my body cannot be absolutely sure that one of those cars will not keep going straight, jump the curb and hit me.

So I was beginning to think, from bits of observed experience, that those front-facing carriages, in which a child is alone and isolated at street level, may not be the best thing for kids.

Now out comes this study which might shed some light on a very important time in kids’ developmental lives.

Yet, to my dismay, so many comments about the news story and the researcher simply dismiss both as invalid and just a ploy to get “in the news.” Some even deride researchers and people with educations as incapable of useful activity.

Dr. Zeedyk’s Research Strives To Solve Social Problems

In any event, I did a little research of my own and found a May 2006 entry on the University of Dundee website in which it was announced that Dr. Zeedyk had been making progress in “helping some of Romania’s most disadvantaged children.”

“According to Using techniques based on her work on imitation with babies Dr Zeedyk and her colleague Dr Cliff Davies, a retired psychology lecturer at Manchester University, were able to reach children previously regarded as unresponsive and unable to communicate.”

I also found a reference to her giving a presentation at a November 2007 conference entitled “Working Together to Reduce Serious Youth Violence.” The premise of the conference, and of Dr. Zeedyk’s presentation, was that violence is not inevitable, but preventable. (Here is a report from that conference of 300 London police, academics and local authority executives responsible for reducing serious youth violence. It contains 45 specific recommendations for action.)

I post this additional information about Dr. Zeedyk’s work because its clear to me that her work has value. I, therefore, find the negative comments that dismiss her study to be depressingly inappropriate.

In a stroke of irony, and without evidence or research of their own, these negative pundits divined Dr. Zeedyk’s research to be pointless and invalid based upon the fact that she had not done enough research.

Yet this seems to be a perennial approach to scientific investigation.

Reasons Her Study Is Being Derided

Half of us welcome  such  investigations in the hope that humanity can yet find its way out of poverty, ignorance, war and wasted human potential.

The other half says: “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know, I won’t believe it and, furthermore, I will insult whoever brings it to my attention.”

While I can empathize with parents or would-be-parents who  do not want to have to deal with yet another unfortunate fact of life that requires a change in habit, I would urge them to research Dr. Zeedyk’s body of work and credentials because to simply condemn her work out-of-hand is, itself, dishonest and does no one any favors.

What if, in the future, it should be found that forward-facing strollers prime children to spend seven hours a day in front of the television as couch potatoes, as opposed to priming them to pursue more empowering activities?

And what if this experience does start us off feeling more alienated, more insecure, and with diminished  social and language abilities?

Conclusion

Research explores realities. Angry dismissals of research conducted by a researcher who, from all indications, appears to be earnestly trying to help kids develop into adults who enjoy their lives and relate well to others, reveal less about the researcher and more about the fearfulness of those rejecting her work.

It looks like, perhaps, a nap for the stressed-out is in order. Now, would they like that nap in a chair in front of a television? Or would they like it in a hammock as they lay relaxed and looking up at the sky?

I know what my choice would be: the relaxing hammock.

It’s easy to criticize and dismiss new ideas and the research that accompanies them. It’s tempting to condemn research that seeks to discover whether or not forward-facing strollers slow babies’ development when we are in the habit of putting our children in forward-facing strollers every day.

Yet had every new idea for investigation been dismissed in the past because we did not want our old ways of thinking and doing challenged, we would still be living in a Stone Age with an average life expectancy of eighteen years.

And that might possibly be more distressing than having to buy a new baby stroller.

Yet, the real message that Dr. Zeedyk and her fellow researchers are trying to get through our heads is this: talk to your baby and hold your baby as much as you can.

His or her future, as well as the future of the nation, depends upon it.

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