Nicholas Day Quotes

#1. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a baby, everything looks like something to suck.

Nicholas Day

#2. While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters - food, shelter, love - they are astonishingly adaptive.

Nicholas Day

#3. We are at the tail end of a decline in infant mortality that began just over a century ago. Babies no longer wander into open hearths or are mauled by marauding pigs. We have vaccines, lead-free educational toys, diapers that can sop up a typhoon. But we have never been more worried.

Nicholas Day

#4. Over and over again, cross-cultural research on infancy teaches the exact same lesson: infants can tolerate - and thrive under - care that most any Western parent would assume would end very badly.

Nicholas Day

#5. Developmental psychologists have pretty much discarded the concept of developmental milestones, but developmental milestones remain the only thing that most people know about developmental psychology.

Nicholas Day

#6. Over time, parents have barnacled the most routine activities in infancy with their own preoccupations. It's sometimes hard to see the baby for all the barnacles.

Nicholas Day