There are a lot of weird baby products. That was the lesson I took away from my trip to an industry trade show in Vegas. But even in a sea of urine-blocking sponges and monkeys that repeatedly ask to be taken to the potty, the Zaky stands out for its oddness.
The Zaky is a beanbag doll shaped like a forearm and hand that's designed to cuddle with your baby when flesh and blood are not available. To make it seem more like a human limb, parents can warm the Zaky in a dryer and scent it by wrapping it around their own necks for several hours.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Zaky is that it's a hit. At the online retailer Pregnancystore.com (which provided a sample Zaky to author), the Zaky is a best-seller, so popular the store has trouble keeping them in stock. It's hard to know why so many parents are buying the Zaky. The arm's comic value probably helps — the Zaky would probably sell even better repackaged as a novelty spanking device — but at $49.95, it makes for an expensive joke. And so presumably a lot of people believe the claim on the Zaky's website that the doll not only helps position babies but also "helps with pain management and sleep, provides a sense of protection, and assists with the physical and psychological development of the child."
The idea that a beanbag doll could contribute to psychological growth might seem a stretch, but to fully appreciate the claim, you have to go back much further than the Zaky itself. To really make sense of the Zaky — as well as a lot of other parenting products and trends — you have to go all the way back to 1929, the year a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge graduate named John Bowlby decided to put his medical studies on hold and spend six months volunteering at a progressive school for maladjusted children.
Bowlby had always had a strong scientific curiosity and the troubled students at the school presented him with an intellectual puzzle: What had gone wrong? What was different about these children that prevented them from functioning in society?
Bowlby suspected that some experience in infancy was as the root of abnormal psychology, and in that intuition he was hardly alone. At least since Plato, people have been guessing at how our infant years shape our grown-up selves. But which aspects of a baby's mental life were the most crucial to development was anyone's guess. Bowlby didn't claim to know, but when he discussed one subject, an affectionless adolescent thief, with school officials, he uncovered a clue: the boy had not had a stable mother figure in his early years.
If the idea that a baby losing a mother could lead to long-lasting psychological damage sounds almost obvious today, it's a testament to Bowlby's work. In 1929, only a small group of psychologists around the world were even interested in how a mother's love and care might affect a child's outcome. The behaviorists, fixated on proper conditioning, were more likely to see an emotional mother as an impediment to healthy psychological development. And the Freudians, convinced of the centrality of the infant's fantasy life and oral fixation, had little use for clinical data on mothers and babies. When Bowlby later reviewed the Western medical literature on the relationship between maternal care and mental health, he found fewer than thirty papers from the '20s and '30s.
In 1946, Bowlby, by then a trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, published a paper on forty-four juvenile thieves whose cases he had studied while working at the London Child Guidance Clinic. Among the forty-four criminals, Bowlby noticed that a subset of fourteen had what Bowlby described as a "remarkable lack of affection or warmth of feeling for anyone." When Bowlby searched for a common thread in the backgrounds of these affectionless teens, he found what he thought he might: twelve of the fourteen had experienced a "prolonged separation" from their mothers or foster mothers. Here was a first bit of evidence of the phenomenon Bowlby had first glimpsed at age twenty-one. When young children didn't have a stable mother figure, it seemed to damage them psychologically for years to come.
To Bowlby, as well as the handful of other researchers thinking along the same lines, the study of what he began to call "maternal deprivation" wasn't just another academic inquiry. It was a matter of life and death. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was still regular practice for hospitals, fearful of spreading diseases, to isolate sick babies from all visitors. And it was still regular practice for these babies to die. Antibiotics had eliminated most of the germs that once routinely killed small children in orphanages and hospitals, but they hadn't eliminated the high infant mortality rates. Otherwise healthy babies who had little contact with other humans seemed to wither away, as though literally starving for affection.
The tragic situations of these children became harder to ignore after World War II. The War had separated millions of children from their parents, and if Bowlby was right about maternal deprivation, the stakes for how these children were cared for were high. In 1950, the World Health Organization hired Bowlby to study the psychological impact of homelessness on children. In the revised popular edition of his report, which was translated into ten languages and sold 450,000 copies in English, Bowlby makes no effort to hide the moral underpinnings of his message. "The proper care of children deprived of a normal home life can now be seen to be not merely an act of common humanity," Bowlby concludes, "but to be essential for the mental and social welfare of a community."
By the time Bowlby published his report in 1951, he had little doubt about the effects of maternal deprivation on infants. The remaining question was why. Bowlby had plenty of evidence but still lacked a theory to explain why the absence of mother figure had such a powerful impact on the developing psyche. Over the next decade, Bowlby would find his answer where he never expected, not in the further study of institutionalized children but in the work of an eccentric monkey researcher and his terrycloth dolls.
Bowlby's interest turned to ethnology in the '50s, when he learned of the imprinting studies being done on birds, but it was the monkey studies of Harry Harlow that would have the greatest influence on Bowlby's thinking. By placing infant macaques in isolation chambers he called "pits of despair," Harlow showed that denying a monkey any social contact for a year essentially destroyed its mind. In another series of experiments, Harlow put rhesus monkeys in cages with two fake monkey mothers, one made of wire and one made of terrycloth. When Harlow would terrify the young monkeys (sometimes by placing comically psychotic-looking dolls into their cages), they consistently turned to the cloth monkey for comfort. More revealingly, the scared monkeys went to the cloth mother even when they had already grown accustomed to eating from a bottle attached to the wire monkey. And so never mind the behaviorists' obsession with food. What the frightened monkeys wanted most of all was the security of a soft, warm touch.
For Bowlby, the lessons of Harlow's experiment wasn't only that food could not be at the center of infant bonding. It was also that the longing for physical nurturing was a part of our evolutionary heritage. Just as infants who didn't seek food, for example, would never have survived and passed along their genes, so infants who didn't have a powerful desire to cling to and bond with a mother would also have been at a great disadvantage in the dangerous environments in which our ancestors evolved. The damage to the body when a baby's biological need for food went unmet was obvious. The psychological damage when the baby's need for mothering was unmet was less visible but devastating just the same.
In her book Love at Goon Park, the journalist Deborah Blum chronicles this chapter in twentieth-century psychology. And what Blum makes beautifully clear is that that while Bowlby was a typically reserved British scientist trading in terms like "maternal deprivation" and "failure to thrive," at the heart of his research and theorizing was raw emotion.
"What attachment theory essentially says is that being loved matters — and, more, that it matters who loves us and whom we love in return," writes Blum. "It's not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle. It's not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child's tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it."
As Bowlby's theory grew in fame, the attention of researchers, including Bowlby himself, moved away from the extreme cases of neglected infants to the attachment needs of babies in more normal environments. After all, if the absence of a mother had such a profound effect on a child, it seemed likely that the day-to-day differences in the maternal care could also affect psychological development.
In 1963, psychologist Mary Ainsworth, who had worked with Bowlby in the '50s, took the next step in attachment research. After a year of observing twenty-six mothers and their babies and then conducting a laboratory experiment in which she watched how the babies responded to being left alone and then reunited with their mothers, Ainsworth concluded that some babies were more attached than others. The securely attached infants, as she called them, were more confident and more willing to explore the environment around them in their mothers' presence. Other researchers following Ainsworth's lead would demonstrate that securely attached babies would show the same self-assuredness years later.
So, what made for a secure baby? Was Ainsworth just observing inborn personality traits? During her year of observation, Ainsworth had watched the mothers as closely as the babies, watched which mothers hurried to their babies at the first sign of unhappiness and which let their babies cry. She kept track of how the mothers played with their babies — whether they were smiley and talkative or not — and how often they fed them. It turned out that all the doting made the difference. The most securely attached babies were the ones with the most attentive moms.
Ainsworth's research had laid the groundwork for attachment parenting, a term later coined by Dr. William Sears. Attachment parenting simply takes the lessons of attachment theory to their logical extreme. And this is where we arrive back at the Zaky. Because if you believe in attachment theory (there is a now also a solid body of criticism of Bowlby, Harlow and Ainsworth), the claim that the Zaky can help your baby begins to sound at least plausible. Attachment theory was built upon experiments showing that young rhesus monkeys were comforted by terrycloth mothers. Perhaps for those moments when you can't give your baby your own hand (the Zaky was invented by a mother of a premature baby who couldn't stand not being able to hold her baby in the neonatal intensive care unit at night) a soft substitute hand really is the next best thing?
This isn't to say that babies are fooled into thinking the Zaky is a parent's hand. Attachment theory is certainly right about at least one thing: evolution designed babies to be extremely sensitive to human contact and for that very reason, no amount of warming and scenting is likely to make a baby mistake the Zaky's soft fleece for skin. And, even if you want to give the Zaky the benefit of the doubt, there's still the questions of whether the doll is superior to the rolled towels hospital nurses have long placed next to newborns to help them feel snug. A soft towel can also be scented and warmed.
There's also a strange paradox surrounding the Zaky. It's designed as a substitute for your own arm and yet stitched right onto the doll is a warning that says, " THIS ZAKY IS NOT A TOY. Keep away from face. Supervise child while using it."
Still, whatever its drawbacks, the Zaky's foundation in attachment theory makes it more than just another bit of parenting weirdness.
And you can spank people with it!