New research into "shaken baby syndrome" puts convictions in peril | Hacker News Reader

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

reason.com

32 pointssplat18 comments

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

Why ever shake babies? That's insane.

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.

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

Because gentle jiggling/rocking tends to calm babies. Mine, anyway. Sometimes, gentle jiggling doesn't work, so you do it a bit more. Nothing much, just kinda a joggle with the knees, but the increased frequency/amplitude works better sometimes. Add the factors explained above, and sometimes you end up shaking that kid for all he's worth.

I managed to avoid doing so, though. :)

To paraphrase your question: "why act angrily when that will unlikely soothe the child?".

The answer seems obvious: because one is angry. That's why I specified that having poor impulse control is a factor.

I kind of wonder, though—if there is an impulse built into humans to take out their anger on their children, killing the children in the process, should not we have evolved as a species to either have a stronger maternal instinct to prevent this behavior, tougher children, or children less prone to being annoying?

What is the difference in (time/velocity/etc) of the body with and without a parachute?

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." :)

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.

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.)

Babies, like people, start to act differently from one another almost as soon as their born (earlier, if you ask my wife).

My friends had a colicky baby, and there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream. None. No way. There was no set of jostling, shushing, swinging, rocking, jiggling, singing, twisting, or hopping in place that would stop it. And as for the last one, neither of my two children could ever get the hang of a pacifier.

What about swaddling?

> there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream

Colicky-ness lasts for months. Everything was tried.

I agree that babies act differently from the start. It is also true that a very small number of babies are truly inconsolable, and most babies go through periods of being extremely hard to console. Often with good reason. For instance both of mine developed a painful problem with gas at about 2 months of age.

That said, the combination of strategies that I described works amazingly well. The fact that they won't _always_ work doesn't diminish how much they help.

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 ....

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.

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.

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