Shopping in your late 30s – at Forever 21

Yesterday, I met a friend for lunch at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. After a well-balanced meal of salad and diet coke, I decided to walk down Market Street to the Union Square area to do some window shopping, maybe try on a few of the latest fashions for fall. You know, browse. I was in the mood for love – love of knee-high boots and a possible fun new dress, that is.

I went into the Gap, which of course had nothing new. It seems to always just be a rehashing of what they had last year, and the year before that. Everything seems so late 90s in the Gap, even though I know they have a hot new designer running the show now.

Now, I don’t know what was wrong with me. Maybe it was the sunny day, maybe it was the crisp edge of fall in the air, maybe it was my upbeat mood. I decided to cross the line waiting for the cable cars and go into the flagship of Forever 21. I know, the name is ironic and I’m surprised that there are not age-detectors at the entrance. If there were, I would have set them off.

Everyone in the store was wearing skinny jeans (so last year) and some type of plaid shirt (so college-in-1992). Also, there were only about three other women in the store over the age of 21, and I think they were chaperoning their daughters. One of the women working there – probably the manager, since she was about 40 – smiled at me and said: “Can I help you find something, Miss?” I could have kissed her for adding in the ‘Miss.’ As we exchanged a knowing glance, sympathetic in nature on her part, I could tell we both knew that the ‘Miss’ should have been “Ma’am”.

As I trolled around, looking at this shirt and pulling that pants suit off the rack, I wondered about what kind of fashion choices I should be making as I get older. We’ve all seen that women of a “certain age” that is wearing what looks to be an outfit stolen directly out of her teenage daughter’s closet and groaned inwardly to ourselves. We’ve all said to ourselves: “That will not be me.” So, as I padded around Forever 21, I kept thinking to myself: “Is that going to be me? Today?”

To tell you the truth, most of the clothes were objectively WAY too young for me to pull off. A black and red plaid mini-skirt? No. A black lace, ruffled, Madonna-in-Holiday-esque mini-skirt? Probably not. A shiny, spaghetti-strap, black unitard straight out of the “Let’s Get Physical” video or from Studio54? Definitely not.

But there were some things I tried on and liked. A black, purple-polka-dotted, slightly ruffle-edge trench coat with hot pink lining and just a touch of taffeta inside to poof it out? Stylish and cute. A hot-pink feather flower for my hair, circa 1920s? I actually bought that, and will need to muster up the courage to wear it outside. A strapless black jersey pants suit? I looked like Bianca Jagger in the dressing room and decided that even if I never had anywhere to wear it, I was absolutely willing to pay $27.80 to own it.

As I was trying these things on, I heard two of the teenagers who were working the dressing room talk about things they thought were “hot”. Standing inside in my pants suit, I half thought about asking them what they thought. But what do they know about being 37 and looking too old to wear something? They were eighteen if they were a day. Then I remembered all the insecurities that went along with that age. At eighteen, I wouldn’t have the balls to wear this. Now, I think I do.

I might shop at Forever 21, but that doesn’t mean I’m dying to be 21 again.

On Cougar Town – ABC’s new show

OK. I watched the debut of this show the other night, and I have to say that I, like Judith Warner at the NYTimes, disliked it. I thought the show itself was trying too hard and I found myself wondering if anyone who still looked as great as Courtney Cox over the age of 40 would really have as many insecurities and anxieties. I doubt it, but maybe I’m wrong.

Something the show did get right, I think, was the sense of loneliness that Cox’s character feels after she gets a divorce. That is all-too real for most women. There’s the sense of relief that you’re out of that dull or horrible marriage, to be sure, but then follows the crushing realization that you are no longer young and you are spending your nights alone with your book or the latest reality television show. Even a bad marriage insulates a woman from having to feel old and alone. So that hit the right note for me.

But, then, I just don’t believe that someone like Courtney would be alone for that long. Her odds are upped, aren’t they? What about the rest of us? With our sagging boobs and dimpled butts? If we have a scintillating personality or a fascinating life, then maybe we will do well on Match.com. But, if not? Ouch.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing things about the show was Christa Miller’s face. Is she in the running to become the new Joan Rivers? She used to be so cute on the Drew Carey show, back before all that face-saving surgery. Yikes.

This is the photoshopped version.

Her smile here reminds me of the Joker.

If you watch the show, you’ll see what I mean. Her face barely moves and her lips are ridiculous.

This is exactly what I hope NOT to be like when I’m over 40. To my friends out there, if I go overboard someday on the silicone and botox, please set up an intervention and show me a tape of Christa Miller on Cougar Town. I’ll understand.

Things I would most definitely say #1

Yes, I would tell you that your baby was ugly.

I’m not going to lie to you about an ugly baby. Really, I’m not.

Putting my t-shirts where my mouth is.

OK, so I’ve created a line of snarky, satirical t-shirts for sale at CafePress. Just click the link below or to the side of the site page below the search button.

For now, it’s just one design. But later, I’ll add more.

And, honestly, I’m not really an Obama hater. I’m just dismayed at how quickly people started to turn away from Obama after things got rough. Change takes a lot of actual work, no matter what type we’re talking about. 

Meaningful work isn’t supposed to be fun. Or easy.

http://www.cafepress.com/SunnyState

Awful Things People Have Said to Me This Week

I’m not sure if Facebook, blogging, and digital social networking in general are all making people less socially savvy than ever before, or if the generation just a bit younger than me (say 4-10 years) never learned social etiquette at all. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn. Either way, people have said some fairly suspect things to me this week, and I’d like to share them with the digital world for fun. It’s me getting them off my chest without having to blow up or get in someone’s face.

First, I should start with some background. This has been a personal “best week ever”. I passed my oral exam – the first one to do so in my class – and I advanced to ABD (all-but-dissertation) status. Then, I found out that I have been accepted into the Norman Mailer Writers Colony for the new journalism course. All scholarship and based on merit alone.

Here are the various responses – taken out of context in our conversations, but still as bad as they sound – to my good news:

“You should be so proud of yourself, since no one thought that you could ever do this!” (What kind of compliment is this?)

“Why would you want to go to a writing program anyway? What’s the point?”

“You’re not a journalist anymore, right? What does any of that have to do with anthropology?” (Um, good writing?? Readability? Ability to sell copies of your book?)

“That’s great. (short pause) I got a huge grant!”

“You have proved everyone who said you couldn’t do this wrong!” (Again, WHAT????)

“Did you write these field statements yourself?” (What is wrong with these people?)

That, trust me, is just a sample of the whole. I would bore you by repeating comments that were all-too similar to the ones above. If these were said in malice, then they would have made more sense. Instead, they were all said in a faux accent of “I’m so happy for you!” mixed with a smidgeon of “you bitch”. 

Honestly, it stresses me out. I don’t like fake people. I also don’t always love the level of competition that comes along with being in this program.

Graffiti in our shared graduate teaching room:

Cal Anthro: home of the smartest people in the world

That’s a bit much, don’t you think? (Especially when Livermore Labs is under a mile away from us. Or adding in U Chicago or Harvard. Those people aren’t exactly dummies, no?)

Youth, inexperience and insecurity – what a powerful combination.

 

 

I just advanced to candidacy.

Today was my oral exam. Four professors asked me questions based on three research papers on three different fields for about two hours. All that added up to one more PhD candidate at Berkeley. 

Bye-bye being a student, hello to being a professional. Or, at least a professional-in-training.

Here’s the kicker . . . I don’t really remember anything from my exam –  except for the criticism. 

I, like a vast number of people, have a serious hearing problem. . . . I only listen to the bad things that people say. Apparently, I am deaf only to compliments. I have been like this since birth (or at least as far back as I can remember).

Someday, I will drive myself insane trying to attain perfection.

Logically, I know that it’s impossible to be perfect. Emotionally, it’s a different story. Other people are addicted to alcohol or drugs; I am addicted to achievement. And just like a drug addiction, each high that I get from achieving is shorter in duration and requires more oomph for me to feel it. 

Cyril Connelly once wrote that: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.”

My so-called potential has always felt like more of a burden than a gift. In the Greek sense, I suppose that gifts themselves are always burdensome. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be worth having, right?

If I’m ever lucky enough to become a full-fledged professor, I know one thing for certain – I will always be honest about what it takes to become a scholar. Eating a large portion of humble pie is a prerequisite. So is self-doubt. But if everyone feels some sense of doubt about their abilities, then those who really acheive anything in this world all have one trait in common — perseverence.

It takes patience to become great at anything. I have to remind myself of this at least once a week. No one knows how to do anything intuitively; they learn a skill slowly, by degrees, until it appears like effortless skill.

How many layups does a professional basketball player have to do in order to make the NBA?

How many prototypes of the iPod did they throw out before they developed the right combination of function and design and programming?

How many failed experiments did Marie Curie have to perform to develop a working theory of radioactivity?

How many pages did Tolstoy write that he crumpled up in disgust?

No one was counting, but my guess is countless. 

The reason promise can be so damning is that it isn’t easy to fulfill. A very wise – and successful – person once told me that talent alone is not enough. It takes a mixture of ability and audacity to succeed. I think that he’s probably right. In order to be successful, we have to learn how to take our hits. Into the mix of ability and audacity, I think that I would add patience.

It will take time for me to learn the new language of my discipline. But, then, that is what being a novice is all about, right? Knowing what you don’t know, and seeking patches to fill in the gaps in your thinking.

Top signs that our friendship might not work out.

In the days of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other social networking sites, I feel like I have more “friends” than I’ve ever had in real life. That being said, the Dunbar number would suggest that we can only keep track of so many people. That number goes up and down, depending on who you are, but there is a limit to how many people you can actually befriend in real life. For instance, if I saw you a minimum of one time per year to maintain our friendship and I didn’t double up with a group event, I could only have 365 ‘friends’, right? 

Look, I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty pissed off if I only saw my friends once a year. The local ones that is.

The truth is, most of us are forced into being ‘friends’ with people for the sake of convenience.

That woman in your mommy group who is always bragging about her life – but who is also the mother of the only boy your own son doesn’t throw rocks at during playgroup. 

The guy in your office who is a serious douche-bag – but who is also the project manager and the key to your promotion.

Oh, hell, most people in your office – no?

For the sake of clarity, I’d like to lay out the signs that our ‘friendship’ is more of an ‘acquaintence’. Or, alternatively, that I just can’t be your real and true friend. Because these are signs that we have fundamentally different value systems. You aren’t ‘wrong’ if you fit any of these, I just don’t agree with you. So, here we go.

1. You are a vegan. Vegetarian? No problem. Vegan? That lifestyle is too high maintence for me. And you are probably too optimistic about changing the world for me, too.
2. You are an infallible optimist. My cynical self – who is, by the way, sometimes also optimistic – just cannot get behind always ‘looking on the bright side’. I’m very, very glad that people like that exist, I just don’t want to grab a coffee with them.
3. You love Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan’s music. If you just ‘like’ it, then I can simply ask you not to play it within my earshot. If you LOVE it, I wouldn’t do that to either one of us.
4. You deny that whatever age you are over 30 is “old”, or maintain vehemently that you are still vibrantly “young” or “cool”. Ugh. Do you have Flo Rida playing in the background now, too?
5. You talk about how amazing your children are for a disproportionate amount of the conversation. I think this should be based on age. If your child is under 5, I want under 5 minutes of conversation about how much they love cheerios or how great they are doing in pre-K. If they are 16 and sneaking out or already thinking about joining the Peace Corps, then we can discuss them for up to 45 minutes. That shit is at least interesting.
6. You thought the last 30 minutes of Battlestar Galactica was uplifting, or you actually shed tears watching it. See sign #2.
7. You consider yourself a “green” person and you want to talk about it or, God forbid, tell me how I could improve my own choices. I don’t care if you just bought a hybrid, wear organic or recycled clothes, or are in other myriad ways reducing your “carbon footprint” (one of the most overused phrases of all time). I know you think it makes me a bad person, but I just don’t think that it’s going to do much. See “rest of world minus Europe” for examples.
8. You hate Republicans. Or China. Or anything else that is supposed to be “all bad” and “ruining it” for the rest of us. I’d rather talk about the ways in which all political parties are self-serving and the U.S. is “ruining it” for everybody. Don’t we know more about ourselves than other people anyway?
9. You namedrop. Does this need an explanation? Oh, and I include philosophers that you’ve read.
10. You placedrop. I don’t need to know how long you lived or stayed in Paris or Guam or Istanbul.
11. You believe that vaccination causes autism. This just tells me that you have your own religion-like belief system, and aren’t that happy about not getting polio or measles anymore. 
12. You believe in God, but in a crazy way. In the way that suggests all other religions are going to ‘hell’, or make you stand out on street corners with placards. 
13. Your favorite book is On the Road. Or Ulysses. 
14. You get all snobby about reality shows or gossip sites or glossy mags.
15. You haven’t read at least three books this year. I’d prefer that it wasn’t Twilight, but I can’t be too picky these days, now can I?
16. You actually use the terms “hella” and “for real” in your sentences.
17. You speed (over 10 miles over the limit) or drive aggressively. My entire family died in cars, I’m not befriending anyone else destined to go out that way.
18. You smoke pot everyday or every weekend. Not that I’m judging you. I couldn’t care less if you toke. I just don’t like to be around people when they are high. It weirds me out.
19. You drink alcohol every single day. It also weirds me out. And yes, I count beer and wine.
20. You use botox, have had plastic surgery, or own a bag or shoes worth more than $400. You are too vain for me, and I’m pretty vain myself.

OK, that’s it. I could try to come up with more, but I think that these hit upon most topics. What are your own signs? And don’t kid yourself, you have them. You just haven’t articulated them.

40 is definitely NOT the new 30.

And I should know, since I’m turning 37 in two weeks.

I’m not being ‘age-ist’ exactly, but I do think that people should stop deluding themselves that 4o is no longer middle age. (That is, unless you plan on living to be 100, but even then you cannot stretch the definition further than 50.) Or that 40 is “young”.

If you are 40, you are not “young”. You may be “young at heart”, “young-thinking”, or “youthful” for your age, but “young” you are not. Why keep kidding yourself?

Here’s the latest news, hot off the presses:

Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests.

Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University found reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in our late 20s.

Therapies designed to stall or reverse the ageing process may need to start much earlier, he said.

His seven-year study of 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60 is published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

Now, before you freak out, there is ancillary evidence that not ALL mental powers fade after their peak at age 22. (Yes, your old eyes read that last sentence correctly. Fading begins at the ripe old age of 22.) But, have no fear. The old adage “with age comes experience” is still very much supported by the evidence. 

Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.

So, as someone about to turn 37, I guess I’m going to have to accept that my memory is going to start fading, too. I should have known that my new fetish for brightly colored PostIt notes did not appear out of nowhere, people. Lately, I’ve been forgetting to do at least 10% of the things I said I would do. For me, that’s a marked increase. (Note: I don’t have kids, so I think that you can give yourself a break here if you have them and have already been forgetting things for several years.)

I am just not the same chick I was at 17 or 27. Hell, I’m not even the same hot mama I was a mere five years ago.

At 37, my ankles crack, my shoulder sometimes aches for no knowable reason, and I often find myself wondering what it is that I am doing after I have stopped one task to do something else (especially if I have to change rooms). My hair is graying at the temples and I have begun to question my own personal ban on Botox or other facial injections. My thighs and my butt – which were never robust – have begun to sag so low that I now completely understand the term “saddlebags”. (Side note: Again, no kids. I can’t imagine what I would look like naked if I had ever given birth. But, then again, at least there would be a valid excuse for the devastation.) 

So, I’m here to attest to the fact that 40 is not the new 30. That’s bullshit.

That being said, at 37 I feel more like myself than I ever did at 27. 

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to go back sometimes, to 27.

I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes relish the fact that I’m long past all the nonsense that so often comes along with “youth”. 

Bette Davis once said that there are some days that the only thing that makes a woman feel better is a glass of champagne. I think we all know what I’ll be doing on my birthday this year. If I can still remember what day of the week that is. . . .

Why Twitter?

I deleted my Twitter account this morning. I just don’t get it.

Am I too old?

Too out of it?

Less narcisstic than I thought I was?

I simply don’t understand its functional use. But maybe it’s not about being functional at all. Maybe it’s about feeling connected in a disconnected way. Those tweets read like hopeful thoughts to me, like the people who write them are wishing for people to hear them in an ever-growing cacophony of voices. 

Monologuing. 

Somehow, being a part of Twitter made me feel like a machine, emitting meaningless radio broadcast signals into space and listening for a return. Trying to make contact, but without knowing why exactly. Is it just me?

I’m not exactly a technophobe. I love Facebook, and I don’t mind the status updates. Somehow, it feels more intimate – perhaps because in order to be connected, you actually have to know the other person. It’s less random. Or maybe it just feels like it.

I also like blogging – whenever I actually sit down to do it. 

It’s like journaling, only not for some future unknown reader. It’s for some present unknown reader, and I don’t have to wait until I die for someone to ‘discover’ me. Maybe that is the reason for Twitter – we all want someone to ‘discover’ us. Lost as we all are in the mulititude of humanity. It’s a way to feel important, special, heard. And since most of us don’t get that in ‘real’ life, I guess I understand the need for a ’second’ life.

Twitter, however, is just not for me.

I think modern, upper-middle-class American parents are crazy.

There. I said it.

A good friend of mine (who is a dad) posted a blog entry from the New York Times’ “Motherlode” column. It details the results of a survey of 1000 ‘normal’ women who are members of an online mothers’ community. Basically, women are mad at the fathers for not taking enough responsibility for parenting or for doing chores around the house. The writers – both at Parenting magazine and the blog – make it seem like this is an epidemic of anger, corroding the American family.

The writer details the problem thus:

We carry so much of this life-altering responsibility in our heads: the doctors’ appointments, the shoe sizes, the details about the kids’ friends. Many dads wouldn’t even think to buy valentines for the class, for example, or know when it’s time to sign kids up for the pre–camp physical, or that curriculum night is next Thursday at 7:30 and you need to hire a sitter and bring a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork. Even moms who work full-time take it upon themselves to store all this data in our already overstuffed heads. We’re the walking, talking encyclopedias of family life, while dads tend to be more like brochures.

What to do about it?

I proffer an unpopular solution: Moms and Dads both need to stop making their kids the absolute center of their lives. 

Seriously. No one should have to worry about self-making “a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork” and bring it to a school function. Or obsess about their children’s schedules or the details of their children’s lives and friendships.

Really, middle-class and upper-middle-class moms? No, really, really? 

How did we get here? 

When I was growing up, my mom knew who my best friends were (count three names here, maybe), whether or not I did my homework, if I needed new socks and underwear, and if I seemed healthy and happy – and that was it.  She had absolutely no interest in elementary or middle  school drama, or PTA meetings, or baking me a 19-tier cupcake tree for my birthday party (a tradition which, by the way, didn’t even begin until I was old enough to remember them).  

My mom had a life.

Admittedly, sometimes I wish she had been less dramatic and crazy, but I actually appreciate the fact that I did not grow up with an endless litany of “activities” and “playdates” and “extra-curricular classes”. No, I don’t know how to play the piano. But I did learn how to play the clarinet in school band.  No, I didn’t take soccer. But somehow I remain thinner and in better shape than some my friends who did, so go figure. 

Years ago, I visited Newport, Rhode Island, and took a tour of several of the old Vanderbilt and Astor mansions. You know, the ridiculously luxe “summer” homes of the fabulously wealthy during the late 1900s and early 20th century. In the Vanderbilt home, I learned that Mrs. Vanderbilt obsessed over her children’s education and up-bringing. They were, after all, the future of the Vanderbilt name. In particular, she erased the line between herself and her oldest daughter. Her daughter’s life was the property of Mrs. Vanderbilt herself, and she managed it with military precision. To the point that the girl grew up in a gilded cage of her mother’s fashioning. In the end, she married a man with a “title” that she didn’t even like, all because her mother planned it. 

Was this poor, little rich girl priveleged? Yes. 

Did she have everything that money could buy her, including the best education? Yes.

Was she any happier? No. By all accounts, she was one seriously depressed young girl.

I’m glad that my mom and dad didn’t pore over my life looking for ways to make it “better” or to give me a “head start”. Somehow, and without a single extra class or tutoring session, I made it into the top medical anthropology program in the country. I think it’s because my parents did something great for me – they made it very, very clear that I needed to take responsibility for myself. 

In the end, I learned to craft my own life.

I learned how not to be bored, how to entertain myself, how to self-soothe.

Maybe the reason modern mothers are so angry is that they are giving too much to their children in the first place. Maybe they are angry because secretly they want to be the dads for once, to take it all less seriously. Maybe they are angry because they can’t give themselves permission to be less-than perfect as mothers.

Scale it back, I say. Don’t do some of the “stuff” you are doing – the “stuff” that you think is absolutely integral to your child’s future happiness or intellectual capacity. It isn’t, and that I can promise you. 

This is from an article in the London Times:

In her book No Two Alike, Judith Rich Harris, an American psychologist, writes that children just want to fit into the popular culture in which they are being raised, which might not be quite what their parents have in mind.

“In the long run, it is what happens to them outside the parental home that makes them turn out the way they do,” she says. And while most parents know this instinctively, we carry on resignedly making arbitrary rules, labelling things “good” or “bad” with a randomness that reflects our prejudices but baffles our children.

And I’ll leave you with this, an old article from the Boston Globe, to ponder:

Leave those kids alone

The idea that adults should be playing with their kids is a modern invention — and not necessarily a good one

(Illustration/ Aaron Meshon)

By Christopher Shea  |  July 15, 2007

WHAT COULD BE more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look — now she’s conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to mention that the tot is learning the joys of stories and narrative, setting him on a triumphal path toward school.

A “natural” scene? Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world’s current population would still find that mother’s behavior kind of dotty.

American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries — a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy, Lancy argues in a recent article in American Anthropologist, the field’s flagship journal in the United States.

“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.

Lancy is concerned that specialists behind the movement — psychologists, social workers, preschool teachers — are too aggressively promoting this intense, interventionist parenting style to low-income parents, and that they are are too quick to claim that adult-child play is crucial for human development. He doesn’t quite rule out that some interventions may improve literacy — though the data are murkier than the psychologists admit, he insists. But the programs, with their premise (as he sees it) that a whole class of people is simply parenting badly, leave their advocates “open to charges of racism or cultural imperialism.”

. . .

One inspiration for the article, Lancy says, was that he kept coming across accounts of parents who felt guilty that they did not enjoy playing with their children. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, both at Princeton, have found that parents routinely claim that playing with their kids is among their favorite activities, but when you ask them to record their state of mind, hour by hour, they rate time spent with their children as being about as much fun as housework.

In his article, Lancy draws on decades of ethnographic work to show how rare parent-child play has been in the world. The Harvard anthropologist Robert LeVine, for example, observed in a 2004 paper that among the Gusii people of Kenya, “mothers rarely looked at or spoke to their infants and toddlers, even when they were holding and breast-feeding them.” (So much for the universality of peek-a-boo.) On Ifaluk Island, in the South Pacific, tribespeople believe that babies are “essentially brainless” before age 2, so there is no point in talking to them.

The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems.