We can shake our babies now.

you are right.

I did not title the thread to mean that I think it is ok to shake babies.

In fact, I said that in hopes that more information would be brought up about shaken baby syndrome.

I used my words to attract attention to a very serious problem. Shaken baby syndrome being a big sign of child abuse.

I thought the article had a great basis for removing alot of the fears parents have about simple play with thier child.
But I felt the article had an undertow of " Hey, its ok" that really botherd me.
That is where the thread title came from..

Good thing you explained it because-- having no babies in my house-- I was about to go ask the neighbors if I could shake THEIR babies!

We can still put goldfish in the blender though, right?

Without cooking first?

But unless my reading comprehension is seriously defective, the article doesn't say that it's harmless to shake babies. It says that contrary to previous medical opinion, when a baby dies and an autopsy reveals certain symptoms, it does not follow that the baby was shaken to death. Accordingly, it does not follow that the last person who was alone with the baby has probably shaken it to death and should go to jail for it.

In fact, not only does Shewolf's article not say that shaking a baby is harmless: It explicitly points out that you can indeed kill a baby by shaking it: because you risk breaking its neck. Only the specific set of symptoms dubbed `shaken baby syndrom' (lethal internal bleeding of the brain, no other symptoms) cannot actually be brought about by shaking a baby. Thus, the article does not really say much about the risk to a shaken baby of dying. Rather, it addresses the chances that a dead baby has been shaken. These are two separate question, and the article makes sense to me on the question it actually addresses.

Checked at work.

This study was known to the doctors there, I was told it was methodologially flawed, according to people upon whose work it was based, as well as others.

They do not believe the findings are valid...in part because it is so difficult to model the infant neck, brain etc.


(Apparently apes and other animals get used to look at this stuff...ewww....and increasingly sophisticated computer modelling, etc)




That being said, they said it would be very unlikely, in Oz at least, to come up with an opinion that a baby had necessarily been shaken, or deliberately harmed, because of one cerebral haemmorhage, with no other evidence....but that normally there WAS other evidence in some abundance.

They would be surprised if numbers of folk would have been imprisoned for abuse where no evidence other than a single bleed was present....though could not rule out it having happened in the USA, where "syndromes" seem to have more popularity in general.

Somebody shake the Wabbit, will ya?

That's what I wanted to say with my previous response ... having had some experiences in a couple of cases (as probation officer) myself.

My brother's always been rather heavy handed, and we'd all cringe when he'd shake our infant nieces out of playful adoration. They're teens now, and perfectly healthy. One is even in the top 5% of her class in HS, and is going to the U of T at A on a softball scholarship.