six week old babies

on meeting a freshie

I had the delightful pleasure of meeting a ‘freshie’ yesterday. He was six weeks old, filled with gas and squirmy. When passed to me, he screamed

This is all just to say that he was absolutely perfect.

After screaming his lungs out, I passed him back to his father where he slept happily.

The glowing new parents talked about sleep patterns and medical complications and what they were ‘working on’ with their new baby.

I quipped that they were both brilliant and given that there are now and have been billions of babies, they’d likely figure it out. People have been doing the baby thing for a couple of hundred thousand years and with less knowledge, kids have survived.

But infant survival is quite new in terms of human history. Estimates from a thousand years ago suggest that infant mortality was between 30 and 50% of babies in the west.

In the early modern period, infant mortality rates dropped to 20 to 30% of babies not surviving. It’s suggested that the better medical education, improved p…