Babywearing and Walking
I have just approved the proofs for a paper to be published soon which will be open access so I will share when it is available. The focus of the paper is on babywearing and my own experiences of this during the UK National lockdowns. The paper is conceptual and highly theoretical but I want to summarise some of the ideas here and indeed, abridge some sections of the paper itself.
I was on maternity leave during lockdown and I really got emotionally invested in babywearing - finding new and better ways to do it. I spent a lot of time out walking (as many of us did) and the pram we had been given wasn’t really that suitable for the uneven paths and hilly streets of Prestwich (north Manchester) where we live. When I started back at work I started to write about walking with my baby and also walking with the other mums who came along to the walking group I started. As I was writing it son become apparent that the paper I was crafting wasn’t actually about walking but was about babywearing.
Babywearing, the practice of carrying your child in a sling or wrap might fall into notions of intensive parenting. The online trading of wraps is a whole world I was new to! There are a multitude of babywearing advice groups on social media leading to anxieties of ‘doing it right’ or using the correct sling/wrap.
Though the activity cultivates new assemblages in time and space by situating mothers and babies anew within the world and enabling greater maternal mobility, it also makes new demands of them. (Hallenback, 2018, p. 366)
Hamilton (2000) identifies that babywearing as a cultural practice has been conflated with western ideas of natural parenting. There are a range of carriers available from structured, buckles, half-buckles, ring slings, woven wrap, mai tai, onbuhimo, and all come with their own challenges, suiting different bodies or circumstances, and holding their own cultural meaning.
The process of babywearing, particularly using a woven wrap, reveals the unruly bodies of a baby and a post-partum woman. The wrap itself (or carrier/sling) and the child might not always co-operate with what the mother might want or need in that moment. I recall holding my son under his bottom to keep him inside the wrap as I hadn’t tied it off properly. I raced up the hill, sweating to try and find a suitable place to re-adjust but benches had been removed. I would obsessively watch YouTube videos to perfect techniques. Trying to master ‘the hip scooch’ method of getting my son onto my back (a method of manoeuvring the child around from the front of your body, over your hip and securing them onto your back in a safe way). My failure to back carry, felt, in that moment, a failure of my mothering.
My babywearing was (and is) about my emergence as a mother (and continued emergence…mothering is doing, not done). Through my babywearing practice myself and my son were learning - a co-knowing. Our bodies figuring things out - me becoming-mother. There isn’t really much research about experiences babywearing out there (beyond the explorations of attachment). I would like to revisit this work and examine the relations between the child, mother and wrap/sling/carrier in more detail. The carrier as ‘vibrant matter’ - what the fabric does. I would not have walked as far as I did had I not investing (time and money) in babywearing. I still carry my nearly 3 year old on my back (I conquered it you will be glad to hear…although never did master the hip scooch) and the dynamic shifts as he grows.
