Claire Verity and Bringing Up Baby

Britain's Channel 4 is under attack for its latest reality show. This one subjects newborns to a variety of childrearing methods, including some I think are barbaric.

A recent episode of Bringing Up Baby with Claire Verity, a celebrity nanny who calls herself a maternity nurse but whose only qualification seems to be sleeping with Mick Jagger when she was supposed to be caring for his child, provoked a firestorm from viewers. Verity left the baby outside crying for four hours, admonished the parents to limit holding their baby to ten minutes a day, forbid parents to make eye contact with their baby so it couldn't manipulate them, and snapped at a new father who wanted to kiss his baby "No, I don't want you touching it!"

A group of prestigious childcare professionals has condemned the show as "an exploitative parenting series" which gives out "dangerous" advice. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, the seven experts called on production companies to "stop making programmes that give irresponsible advice and turn the suffering of tiny babies into adult entertainment."

I keep waiting for Margot Sunderland, the brain researcher who is one of my heroines, to weigh in, but since I haven't seen any commentary from her, I'll do my best to describe the developmental effects on the baby of this kind of treatment.

Babies depend on normal human interaction -- cuddling and comfort -- for their brains to develop normally. When you deprive an infant of physical affection and soothing, you deny it the stimuli necessary to develop the neural networks that will later allow the child to soothe itself, empathize with others, and love. Babies develop cortisol receptors in response to being soothed, which are critical in regulating stress hormones to deal with anxiety and depression throughout life. Limiting touch to ten minutes a day may even be actually life-threatening; we know that babies die from lack of touch.

The nervous system pathways that are formed in infancy cannot be created in later life. Infants who are deprived of the normal doting that all mammals offer their young are later impaired in all their social and intimate relations.

The celebrity parents who hire Verity apparently like her ability to let them off the hook as parents. (In the old days, at least the baby had a wet nurse to feed and cuddle her!) But the truth is, you can't buy your way off the hook as a parent. These parents hold the responsibility for damaging their children, and making it likely that they will suffer from attachment disorders, anxiety, and clinical depression for the rest of their lives.

Oh, but hopefully Channel 4 will be paying for their meds.

About the Author

Dr. Laura Markham, the Dear Abby of Parenting, is a clinical psychologist who hosts the popular advice column "Ask Dr. Laura" at the parenting web site YourParentingSolutions.com, The Good Dr. answers questions from parents of infants through teens, offering parent-tested solutions you can use every day to connect with your kids and create a richer family life. Her work appears regularly on a dozen parenting sites and in print, and she frequently speaks with groups of parents, both online and in person, about transforming their parenting. Dr. Laura lives in New York with her husband, son and daughter.