The MOST IMPERFECT Baby Gift

Dear Reader,

Thank you for being here. To those who have been receiving my blogs for some time and then experienced about a 9-month gap, I apologize. Some of you know my husband passed away in May 2023 and it has been an upward struggle to get myself back. However, that’s not my main excuse. You will see I had my website revised. And that took so much longer than I ever expected. I thought it would be done by January 2025, but not ready until now. Hopefully you will receive this in your email in box, intact and readable!

The good news is I now have a refreshed home on the Internet. I invite you to explore. There is a free download for a parent visualization that many find powerful. You will also see that I separated my articles from my blogs. My blogs were getting to be more like articles instead of my personal reflections. I will continue to add to the articles and let you know when a new one is available. I hope you find them helpful. Here is a recent one Your Zen Mama published on the advantages of being a playful parent!

I want to use this blog to connect with like-minded souls who may be asking similar questions. My goal is for you to receive it most Saturdays. The idea is not to give answers, but rather thoughts for reflection and encouragement for inspired action. This week I am pondering…

Well, actually I am raging about this atrocity of a teething toy for babies. I don’t know even know where to begin. Maybe where it leads, where it could for babies with cell phone teething toys—to depressed, anxious, untethered teens who are completely out of touch with their own magnificence. Jonathan Haidt has unveiled the tragedy of too early cell phones—and this is when given at 8 or 10 years old…not in infancy. How we start is how we end; a rule humans cannot evade or minimize.

The companies behind this keenly know—more than most parents—about the vulnerability of young brains. Like wet cement they mold according to what is in their environment. By becoming accustomed to handling a miniature cell phone replica, and actually teething on it, we say to our babies. “Go at these with gumption—with all you got. After all, these are helpful, even benign for you; please snuggle up with them, be comforted by them and all will be well. You’ll feel so much better holding and mouthing a cell phone.”

By touch and taste, that’s how little brains get wired. Firing up on cell phones as teething toys basically means wiring cell phone normalcy for future early use. It’s a form of indoctrination.

I am outraged. These companies should be sued for malpractice or child abuse. As I tried to explain in my 2004 book, Parenting Well in a Media Age: Keeping Our Kids Human:

The technology industry has now created our culture—our signifying system. That means, these few elite billionaires tell the rest of us what is important, meaningful, and worthy to spend our time doing. This industry-generated culture opposes a people-centric one, where common folk, ordinary citizens have the visibility and influence to create our societal self-referencing system. The industry-generated culture continually abnormalizes the normal and normalizes the abnormal to keep us confused and without self-agency.

Mike Brock, former tech executive who has seen the light, gives this significant insight: “Humans are not an optimization problem, and society is not a problem looking to be solved. Technology is tool, not telos. When we confuse technological capability with human destiny, we fundamentally misunderstand both. The purpose of technology is to serve human flourishing, not to reshape humanity according to its own logic.”

A cell phone is not a child’s destiny. And we all can agree on the human logic of it all: babies’ chances of flourishing are much better without one.

Photo Credit: Besosay, Shenzhen Yifan Gifts Co. Ltd.