A bit over two weeks has passed since The Wrap Show, which I was so proud and happy to be a part of (as a speaker on “Babywearing in the NICU?”), but attending another talk did gave me quite an eyeopener which I would like to lift in this blog, as an attempt to give and share the space.
I’m not a POC and neither I nor my family has had any outspoken tradition, history or culture to carry our children. The carrying or babywearing in my family more or less started with us carrying our now 7 year old daughter. My knowledge and experience therefore come singularly from the “western way” of babywearing and what I was able to find on the internet, at Facebook or Youtube, and with the representatives that were available. The big eyeopener at the talk was how one-sided the image of babywearing/carrying is, and have been since it got popular in the western world and how carrying/babywearing gets portrayed as if the Western world and essentially “non-POCs” invented it just a few years ago. From calling carriers and patterns by certain names without taking history into account to portraying the “western way” of carrying as the only way to carry kids and by creating, pushing and teaching a set of rules that was needed for “western” carrying but probably not for carrying techniques and practices that have been practiced, taught and tested for a substantially longer time from other parts of the world.
This was an insight accompanied with a lot of shame, pain and regrets, and we need a change. So educate yourself! Here’s three links that tells different stories and shows other images than the ones I’m able to share:
https://decolonizingbabywearing.tumblr.com/
https://notyourpodbutai.tumblr.com/#_=_
https://www.facebook.com/traditionalbabywearing/
