About Babywearing

Babywearing is an ancient technique of carrying a baby in a piece of cloth or sling to keep one’s child close while being able to carry on daily tasks (everymum.ie, 2016). Nowadays the variety of carriers vary drastically from woven wraps to stretchy wraps to soft structured carriers to back packs (Babycentre.co.uk). But the essence remains the same: babywearing is a tool to help you to carry your baby.

Babywearing was around as long ad as humans and is still a normal practice in many countries around the world. As prehistoric humans developed to be bipedal their anatomy changed to narrower pelvic bones of females. At the same time human brains became bigger creating a situation where infants are born not developed enough to be able to cling to their mothers as newborns of other primates do. Therefore those infants needed to be carried. It is believed that humans started to use some version of slings or carriers as far back as half a million years ago. Thus far babywearing in one form or another became a norm among all societies around the glob until Victorian times when earlier baby carriages or perambulators were normalised in the western world (sapience.org, 2017).

Babywearing in western world started to re emerge over the past few decades mainly by being brought back to light by the Sears family through the concept of attachment parenting (Wikipedia.org, 2020) Nowadays everywhere you go you are most likely to see an infant or a toddler being carried by their caregiver.

References

babycentre.co.uk. Babywearing for beginners [online] Available from: https://www.babycentre.co.uk/a562815/babywearing-for-beginners

evertmum.ie, 2016. What is babywearing and what are the benefits [online]. Available from: https://www.everymum.ie/what-is-babywearing-and-what-are-the-benefits/

Wikipedia.org, 2020. Babywearing [online]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babywearing

Sapience.org, 2017. How babywearing went mainstream [online]. Available from: https://www.sapiens.org/culture/babywearing-culture-mainstream/