Word: brazeltonized
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...thrilled and felt [like I was] on top of the world," said Judith Palfrey '67, who learned of the appointment in her office at Children's Hospital in Boston. Palfrey is Brazelton professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and lived in North House--now Pforzheimer--as an undergraduate...
Well, yeah, says Brazelton, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the Pampers Parenting Institute. That's the trouble. Back in the early '60s, Brazelton was distressed by the amount of bed-wetting and deliberate fecal retention he was seeing in his patients. So he asked mothers to try something new: let kids decide for themselves when to take the potty plunge...
...giving the child a sense of autonomy," says Brazelton, "we reduced the incidence of problems from the national average of 8% to about 1%." Brazelton's results, reported in the journal Pediatrics, transformed the way most parents do toilet training. Even the term was recast as the kinder, gentler "toilet teaching...
...Brazelton agrees that the incidence of potty-related problems has been rising lately, but he ascribes it to a return to the old ways, not reliance on the new. "Working parents don't have a lot of time for a leisurely approach to toilet teaching," he says, and observes that many day-care centers insist that children be out of diapers by age three. Under this sort of pressure, he suspects, many are resorting to just the sort of rigid timetables Rosemond advocates. Like Brazelton, psychologist and child-care expert Penelope Leach dismisses the notion that laid-back parenting...
Leach does side with Rosemond on one point: Brazelton's affiliation with Pampers, which is pushing a supersize disposable diaper for children 35 lbs. or larger, stinks. Is Brazelton's pediatric judgment being influenced by Pampers' desire to sell more diapers? It certainly might be taken that way, even though Leach and Rosemond acknowledge that Brazelton was giving the same advice long before he and Pampers hooked up. "I agree there's a danger," admits Brazelton. "But I honestly believe in what the company does...