New research into "shaken baby syndrome" puts convictions in peril

http://reason.com/news/show/136176.html

by splat • 17 years ago

32 18 17 years ago

reason.com

ilyak2• 17 years ago

Why ever shake babies? That's insane.

Afton4• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, but that's a silly question.

Assume the following: 1. first child. 2. standard spread of non-child-related stressors (money, job, relationship, illness, family). 3. standard spread of impulse control across the population 4. sleep deprivation 5. social contact deprivation (very common with parents of first-children in the first few months). 6. colicy baby

It's basically a statistical certainty that there will be cases of shaken baby when these things collide. While the warm glowing fuzzy feelings of parenthood are lauded in the media, dealing with a baby who hasn't stopped screaming for hours and who _just won't tell you what's wrong_ is crazying for anyone, let alone those at the mental margins.

ilyak2• 17 years ago

Why shake him if he'd for sure cry more and more and more??

BigZaphod• 17 years ago

Spoken like someone who has never had a baby. :P The urge to do violent things at 4am after 2 weeks of almost no sleep is very real and hard to control under those circumstances. There's a reason these same techniques are used for torture. It's somewhat ironic, though, that every parent has experienced them to some extent and we consider it part of the "miracle of life." :)

diN0bot• 17 years ago

i agree with you, but i've seen SO many public service announcements about Do Not Shake Babies that i've stopped questioning this. now, when i hold babies, i'm overly cautious not to jostle them.

btilly2• 17 years ago

Which is sad. Babies in the first 3 months of life respond very well to the right kind of jostling. The 5 steps that every new parent should learn are: Swaddle, roll on Side, make a Shushing sound, Swing the baby back and forth, then finally Soothe with a pacifier. (I almost never went to the last one.)

dkarl• 17 years ago

My mom was on a shaken-baby jury a few years ago, and the defendent (the father) was crying on the stand swearing he didn't know he could hurt the baby by shaking it. She was sympathetic. She teachers high school, he was seventeen, and she knows her students have no awareness of a lot of stuff they see regularly on TV. It just passes them by. It's like when you watch an old black-and-white movie that you saw all the time on TNT as a kid and realize, holy cow, this movie is full of sex and racism, and that character's an antisemitic Jewish stereotype. As a kid, you missed it all.

Ten years from now, they'll watch one of those "Never never never shake a baby" PSAs and realize, "Hey, that's about not shaking a baby! I thought it was just pictures of cute babies." I kid you not. A lot of kids sit through two weeks of sex ed for five straight years and then are totally shocked when their girlfriend gets pregnant after unprotected sex. And then they're seventeen years old with a seventeen-year-old's impulse control, and they're taking care of a baby, and ....

maarek• 17 years ago

This headline should read "New Research ... could free hundreds grieving parents wrongly wrongly convicted of killing their own child."

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I wonder if there would be a market for a baby muzzle with some sort of tubing mechanism to ensure that the little snotball didn't choke to death on their own mucus.

dmoney• 17 years ago

Assuming you could make it safe, probably. It would need a built in alarm, so you didn't forget about them for too long. It should be held closed by electromagnets, so that if the battery runs out it releases.

There would probably be a market for automating lots of other aspects of parenting as well, but most of them (including the baby muzzle) would probably be pretty bad ideas.

New research into "shaken baby syndrome" puts convictions in peril

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