A dynamic new story about how babies make their way in the world—and how grown-ups have tried to make sense of these tiny inscrutable beings.
As a new parent, Nicholas Day had some basic but confounding questions:
Why does my son find the straitjacket of his swaddling blanket comforting and not terrifying? How can he never meet a developmental norm and still be OK? And when will he stop sucking my finger?
So he went digging for answers. They were not what he expected.
Drawing on a wealth of perspectives—scientific, historical, cross-cultural, personal—
Baby Meets World
is organized around the mundane activities that dominate the life of an infant: sucking, smiling, touching, toddling. From these everyday activities, Day weaves together an account that is anything but ordinary: a fresh, surprising story, both weird and wondrous, about our first experience of the world.
Part hidden history of parenthood, part secret lives of babies,
steps back from the moment-to-moment chaos of babydom. It allows readers to see infancy anew in all its strangeness and splendor.