The Myth of Normal 139

intense violence.[16] The good news is that the tide is turning, with young parents less and less likely to employ corporal disciplining—a welcome instance, perhaps, of the future leading us back to the past. For another example of the modern disconnection from instinct and body, take breastfeeding. According to massive surveys in North America and internationally, the practice confers physical health benefits on both the child and, in the long term, the mother.[17] As Dr. Lori Feldman-Winter, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the New Yorker, the economist Emily Oster, in devaluing the practice, simply gets the science wrong. “It’s basically as bad as the anti-vaxxers,” the physician said.[*] Elsewhere, Oster writes that “motherhood can be lonely and isolating.” Too true—but those attributes pertain not to motherhood itself but to motherhood in an alienating culture. Horticulture on the moon would doubtless be a maddening endeavor, but that tells us nothing about gardening, only that certain conditions must be in place if we hope to succeed. At one point, Oster recounts an experience of attending her brother’s wedding, “trying to nurse my screaming daughter in a 100-degree closet.” It is hard to conceive of a more apt metaphor for the abnormally stressful conditions our culture imposes on infants and mothers than that closet: shamed or shunned into isolation, hidden away, claustrophobic, cramped, sweltering. Given how interpersonal neurobiology works, is it any wonder the infant is screaming? In a stressed environment, as I often witnessed in family practice, breastfeeding itself can become an onerous and frustrating chore, a source of maternal misery and infant distress. The same goes for some forms of “sleep training.” The assumption that infants need to be trained to sleep is based on a cultural view that the child should adjust to the parents’ schedule and agenda—which, for working parents or for stressed parents lacking support, may be a legitimate, even unavoidable longing. But we should be clear on what is being lost. As the psychologist Gordon Neufeld points out, being in physical touch is the infant’s only way of connecting with the parent. Her “resistance” to being put down and having the parent follow the Spockian counsel to “say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back” is simply