It is very important for a child to understand that he is normal, that he is properly arranged. Every second of love from parents, manifested in very specific actions, gives a newborn person the confidence that he is good and everything is in order with him. If this feeling of peace and tranquility does not exist in infancy, it will never appear again.
To be honest, I started reading this book with a terrible irritation. The American Ledloff spent more than two years somewhere in South America and now teaches us to treat our children the way uncivilized natives do. I decided that before me was another attempt to build a naked psychotherapeutic scheme: do this and that, and you will be happy. For example, the author proposes to carry the child on himself. around the clock. Like, before the children held on to their mother’s wool, and everything was in order. And now the woman has gone bald, but she still has to carry the child on herself, only in this case he can grow up absolutely happy. And when I got to those pages that heartbreakingly describe what happens to a child when he is left in the maternity hospital in the room next to his mother … It was hard and unpleasant to read. As a man, I naturally thought that there was some exaggeration in all these horrors.
But then my wife told me how she felt when, after a rather difficult birth, she lay and listened to our youngest Nikita yelling in the corridor. And then all the same crawled up to him and dragged him to her. And I myself remembered my mother’s stories that they brought me from the maternity hospital all smeared in brilliant green. Because I was very nervous, I screamed all the time and rubbed my legs with anger, so much so that I tore off all the ankles until they bled. And I realized that, by and large, Ledloff is not exaggerating at all. The violence that we carry out on a mother and child, supposedly in order to make them feel comfortable, can give rise to an incorrect internal state in a person for life.
The main idea of the book is not a return to nature at all. Ledloff talks about how to achieve harmony with yourself and the world. It is very important for a child to understand that he is normal, that he is properly arranged. Every second of love from parents, manifested in very specific actions, gives a newborn person the confidence that he is good and everything is in order with him. If this feeling of peace and tranquility does not exist in infancy, it will never appear again. And this, unfortunately, is the bitter truth.