This is Why Babies Belong Everywhere

Mark Toby

Prisoners placed in isolation, even for a relatively short period of time, experience anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, and an increased risk of self-harm and suicide. These conditions often persist even after they are released. 

Babies who are not held and touched enough experience similar mental health effects that can last a lifetime. Some have even been known to simply roll over and die.

These are not findings derived from studies of rats (which would be bad enough), but rather things we've learned through human cruelty.

The stereotype is that we are born knowing nothing and must be taught, but I'm beginning to wonder if the opposite is true: we are born knowing everything, the true nature of the universe and our place in it, then are taught the opposite.

Babies are born seeking connection, yet our entire educational system, our entire culture, is designed around separation. We leave babies to "cry it out." We rush them through nursing, shaming mothers who continue beyond some arbitrary number of months. We dismiss separation anxiety. We scold school children to "stop socializing," to keep their eyes on their own papers, and to see their classmates as competitors. We laud those who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (a physical impossibility), while disparaging those who accept a hand up. It's almost as if we spend the first couple decades of a child's life, teaching them that connection is for the weak. The strong stand on "their own two feet," we insist. And don't get me started on "tough love."

I feel that I'm speaking for all babies when I say that this is all cruel BS. 

In Doris Lessing's novel, The Four-Gated City, a supposedly mentally ill character asserts, "If you don't know something, you can't know it. You can only learn something you already begin to know. I can't tell you something you don't know . . . though of course the 'knowing' might be hidden from oneself." On the surface, it seems like she's setting up some sort of philosophical paradox, but if we're truly born "knowing" the nature of the universe it all makes sense. Lessing is talking science.

Even our definition of "knowing" is warped by having been taught, for our entire lives, that separation is our natural state. We can't just know, but we must know we know and then demonstrate that knowing to others for it to count. This means that babies and trees and the birds on their branches can't know. They might have instincts, but we adult humans, we elevated beings, are the only ones who could be said to have intelligence.

But again, I'm beginning to understand that it's the other way around. The knowledge that we dismiss as mere instinct is, in fact, the highest form of knowing. It is the wisdom that needs no proof, that needs no conscious knowing, and most importantly, is not separate, but rather only fully understood through connection. It's hard to write or talk about it because true knowing defies the ham fist of language.

Psychologists believe that during the first stage of life, babies do not perceive a separation between themselves and their caretakers. Where does mommy end and I begin? is a meaningless question. And increasingly we are beginning to understand that existence, at a physical level, is simply a web of relations. Indeed, our theories of gravity and other forces suggest that things have no properties in isolation. Everything we perceive is a relationship we create with that thing we perceive. Even measurements and observations are relations that we establish with something: things only acquire properties through their point of contact with other things.

And this goes for us as well. No wonder prisoners in solitary confinement lose their minds. In fact, many of them literally begin to doubt their own existence.

Imagine a world in which nothing but your own mind exists. You can't. There is no mind without relationship with other people, places, and things.

I can't help but reflect on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the original humans who lose paradise because they ate of what is often mis-labeled as "the tree of knowledge," but is rather more precisely "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Like our babies who are born without cruelty, without malice, without the capacity for anything other than forming relationships with the rest of creation, Adam and Eve were without sin, but lost their place in Eden because they ate the fruit of disconnection, thereby committing the original sin.

Over the course of my life on the planet, I've seen this original sin magnified and accelerated. There are humans who go entire days, entire weeks, without human interaction that is not mitigated by some technology or other. We call it a crisis of loneliness or alienation. 

We were born knowing, however, that relationships are all there is. This means that somewhere within each of us, is this knowledge. Those of us who spend our lives connecting with the very young, are perhaps more aware of it than others who have more thoroughly learned our cultural lessons about disconnection, division, cruelty, and even sin. But it's still there in each of us, waiting to be learned.

Of course, the story of Adam and Eve is ancient. The biblical version was written around the 10th century BCE, but likely existed long before then in oral form. Humans have always been aware, at some level, what physics is now discovering, that reality is a web of relations. They have known without knowing that disconnection is like the color brown, it doesn't exist on the spectrum. It's an invention of arrogant humans who would seek to set themselves somehow outside or above the rest of it. What is new in the modern world, however, is that for the first time, many of us spend our lives without knowing any babies. Our ancestors always kept their babies right in the center of life, where they belong. Removing babies from the center is the bitterest bite of the fruit of disconnection.

Babies belong everywhere because this knowledge is not yet hidden from them. They are here to teach us. And it's only through re-connecting with our babies, a practice most commonly understood as love, that we can hope to approach the knowledge that can heal us. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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