From childhood on, we are taught not to believe in our instinctive knowledge. We are told that parents and teachers know best and that when our feelings do not concur with their ideas, we must be wrong. The loss of faith in our innate expertise leaves us turning from one book to another as each successive fad fails. It is important to understand who the real experts are. The second greatest babycare expert is within us, just as surely as it resides in every surviving species that, by definition, must know how to care for its young.
Evolution is a refining process that has honed our innate behavior with magnificent precision.
The presumptuous intellect has shown itself to be ill-equipped to guess at the authentic requirements of human babies. No baby would agree to any of these impositions. Unanimously, they let us know by the clearest signals that they should not be put down at all. As this option has not been widely advocated in contemporary Western civilization, the relationship between parent and child has remained steadfastly adversarial. The game has been about how to get the baby to sleep in the crib, whether or not to oppose the baby's cries has not been considered.