Babywearing Siblings

When we adults wear babies, we model for our other children that big people carry little people. Children and grandchildren are more likely to adopt the style of parenting that they received or witnessed when young. For example, our own children have sometimes "worn" their dolls in homemade baby slings because they have witnessed us wearing a new infant so often. The effect of role modeling on children's views of the mother-infant relationship was brought home to us one day when our then six-year-old daughter, Hayden, was asked by her teacher to draw a mother and baby. She drew the two as essentially one person. She recognized that, at least in the early months, mothers wear babies, and the two are inseparable.