Philobiblon

Parents have always played with their children, it’s “natural”, “essential”, normal… well no:

The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems….
To be sure, there are exceptions. Some African foraging tribes display striking examples of parental playfulness. And the Inuit make toys for their toddlers and get goofy — but they’re cooped up for months at a time in igloos, bored witless. Lancy suggests that the American milieu — caregivers stuck, without a community, in oversized homes — is not entirely dissimilar.

Well worth reading the whole thing…