Hollywood's Latest Baby Cult?
LatestThis child-rearing system, beloved of stars like Tobey Maguire, the Huffman-Macys, and Helen Hunt, is all about “showing respect for a baby’s experience.” It sounds dubious.
The “RIE” system — short for Resources for Infant Educarers and pronounced like the liquor — doesn’t just sound suspect because its name involves a fake word. Rather, because any doctrinaire system of childcare seems, well, hard to carry out save in a vacuum. (In fairness, maybe Hollywood is one?) RIE purports, in the words of the Daily Beast’s Gina Piccalo, to
eschew the conventions of American infancy from baby strollers, high chairs and battery-operated toys to excessive praise, forced sharing, and even lullabies. The end result, advocates say, is not just more competent and self-aware children, but a more peaceful world. This month, the method goes mainstream as RIE teaching materials arrive at 1,700 federally funded Early Head Start programs for families with infants and toddlers nationally.
So, what’s the issue? There’s certainly nothing wrong with cutting down on the baby industry — or world peace for that matter. We can certainly get behind the limited toy kit, composed of things like patterned scarves and simple kitchen implements; young children do not need fancy gadgets to stimulate their imaginations. And the babies improving their consciousness on their website are super-cute. It’s the “guidelines” that worry some critics: no singing and no rocking, for starters. And while some of it seems intuitive, other things just sound like something out of a Woody Allen movie, if Woody Allen’s characters cared about kids: