Your advice isn’t bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren’t so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:
Their conclusions are remarkably similar to those of Donohoe, who found that “the evidence for shaken baby syndrome appears analogous to an inverted pyramid, with a very small database (most of it poor quality original research, retrospective in nature, and without appropriate control groups) spreading to a broad body of somewhat divergent opinions.”
Reviewing the studies achieving the highest quality of evidence rating scores, Donohoe found that “there was inadequate scientific evidence to come to a firm conclusion on most aspects of causation, diagnosis, treatment, or any other matters,” and identified “serious data gaps, flaws of logic, inconsistency of case definition.”
The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn’t intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.
And obviously you can’t trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it’s clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. “Fell down the stairs” is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.
The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren’t related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don’t do well in prison.
Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.
When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn’t need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic “experts”. New parents don’t need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.
I don’t think that harming babies because you’re frustrated is an excuse, whether it’s shaking, beating or whatever. I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a distinction in law and definitely agree that new parents need less anxiety foisted on them. As others in this discussion have pointed out, there is a huge implicit expectation in our culture for parents to have zero limit to their patience. Combine that with the suggestion that you might randomly flip out and kill your baby and you have a recipe for yet more anxiety, if not disaster. Letting people know that it’s OK to just leave the situation for a few minutes to calm down recognises parents limits and offers a release valve to parents who have been told that there shouldn’t be one. It won’t make a difference to anyone who is simply cruel or falsely accused of child abuse but that’s not who the original comment was addressed to.
I think a combination of reasonable laws/justice and reinforcement of common sense for new parents would be really good.
I understand the comment comes from a good, conscientious place, but from context it’s clearly talking about the shaken baby thing, which I think is misinformation that originated in a moral panic and has never really been demonstrated to be a thing.
And I agree that frustration absolutely isn’t an excuse but that’s really my point, I think you need to have something deeply wrong with you to shake a baby in the way that “shaken baby” actually means. Like as a new parent I remember seeing a demonstration by a nurse on this topic, and the way she shook that doll’s body was obviously intended to be shocking, but it’s not something you do just because you’re frustrated. It’s clearly violent. Like, I can confidently say I don’t think anybody in that room needed that demonstrated any more than they needed to be told, “Remember, don’t repeatedly punch your own baby in the face.” If you’re gonna do that then no amount of warning will change it I don’t think.
Your advice isn’t bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren’t so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381308/
The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn’t intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.
And obviously you can’t trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it’s clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. “Fell down the stairs” is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.
The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren’t related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don’t do well in prison.
Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.
When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn’t need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic “experts”. New parents don’t need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.
I don’t think that harming babies because you’re frustrated is an excuse, whether it’s shaking, beating or whatever. I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a distinction in law and definitely agree that new parents need less anxiety foisted on them. As others in this discussion have pointed out, there is a huge implicit expectation in our culture for parents to have zero limit to their patience. Combine that with the suggestion that you might randomly flip out and kill your baby and you have a recipe for yet more anxiety, if not disaster. Letting people know that it’s OK to just leave the situation for a few minutes to calm down recognises parents limits and offers a release valve to parents who have been told that there shouldn’t be one. It won’t make a difference to anyone who is simply cruel or falsely accused of child abuse but that’s not who the original comment was addressed to.
I think a combination of reasonable laws/justice and reinforcement of common sense for new parents would be really good.
I understand the comment comes from a good, conscientious place, but from context it’s clearly talking about the shaken baby thing, which I think is misinformation that originated in a moral panic and has never really been demonstrated to be a thing.
And I agree that frustration absolutely isn’t an excuse but that’s really my point, I think you need to have something deeply wrong with you to shake a baby in the way that “shaken baby” actually means. Like as a new parent I remember seeing a demonstration by a nurse on this topic, and the way she shook that doll’s body was obviously intended to be shocking, but it’s not something you do just because you’re frustrated. It’s clearly violent. Like, I can confidently say I don’t think anybody in that room needed that demonstrated any more than they needed to be told, “Remember, don’t repeatedly punch your own baby in the face.” If you’re gonna do that then no amount of warning will change it I don’t think.