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Swaddling Gets Unraveled: How Our Ancestors Did the
Wrong Thing for All the Right Reasons
Even in the Middle Ages, the top fashion ideas originated in Paris.
However, about three hundred years ago, these trendsetters goofed when
they declared, “Le swaddling is passé.”
Before the 1700s, all Europeans wrapped their babies. Swaddling
made babies easy to carry and kept them warm and quiet. Parents also
believed wrapping prevented their infants from accidentally plucking out
their own eyes or dislocating their arms.
Then two revolutionary trends became popular: science and
democracy. As wonderful as these movements were, they led to two
unfortunate misunderstandings that contributed to the abandonment of
swaddling:
Science makes mistake #1: In the 1700s scientists proved that
unwrapped infants never plucked out their eyes or dislocated their arms.
From these observations they wrongly assumed that swaddling was a
waste of time.
Democracy makes mistake #2: In the years leading up to the
Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers (and mothers) wanted
their children to live in freedom, but this attitude led them to reject
swaddling as a form of “baby prison.”
Within one hundred years, the combined pressures of science and
democracy convinced most parents in the Western world to stop

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swaddling. While these great thinkers were right that unwrapped babies
didn’t hurt themselves and that adults would feel enslaved by such tight
bindings, they were absolutely wrong to recommend parents stop
bundling their infants. They didn’t realize that swaddling had continued
throughout the centuries because it truly helped babies stay happier. As
parents stopped wrapping their newborns, the unexpected happened:
The number of babies suffering from uncontrollable crying dramatically
increased!
In their eagerness to stop this tidal wave of colic, scientists made yet
another colossal mistake. They concluded that babies were crying
because of pain, and encouraged parents to give their shrieking infants
the two most effective anesthetics of the time—gin and opium. Of
course, as soon as the serious side effects of those colic treatments were
realized, they fell out of favor.