“Bye Bye Babying”

In 1979 the first printing of the RIE manual was published.  In the manual Magda is asked what kind of wishes she had for children.

Magda answered, “First, my wishes for children.  I wish they could grow according to their natural pace, sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry, cry when upset, play and explore without being unnecessarily interrupted.  To be allowed to grow and blossom as each was meant to be, not molded or shoved into some mode of faddism that confines like a violin case.”    We certainly are not following Magda’s wishes with these misrepresentations on news clips.

On Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 10:25 pm on CBS Channel 2 Chicago RIE was lumped together with the Waldorf method.  Nice, I guess if you want to be lumped together with “Bye Bye Babying” and the focus of the news blurb had to do with the fact that RIE uses glass cups and not sippy cups for drinking, no high chairs, and lets babies cry.  They re-broadcast partial clips from New York and Los Angeles with a quick sentence by Deborah explaining that in diapering we would not wish away an adult to another room why do it to a baby…..glass cups, leave them to cry, no high chairs, no baby talk and let them run around the house…that is what the news team here in Chicago took away from Mary Kay Kleis’s news blurb.  The anchors both looked at each other and said, “would you use this method?”  No, they both answered.  The glass cups, if you were a working mother you could never follow through with this method.

Experts are worried that RIE let’s babies cry and that is not healthy.  That is what the general public took away from this two minute (if that) explanation of RIE.

In an interview with Magda in 1981 she was asked how Emmi Pikler felt about people taking the philosophy to other countries.  Magda’s answer was very concise and to the point.  “What Emmi finds most difficult is when people pick up some of what looks like the philosophy, but not the essence.  Many people pick up some of it, but they do not quite understand the underlying principle.  That’s when Emmi would stop working with a family.  You can do it your own way if you understand why you do what you do.  You always help the child.  It is the way in which you help the child.  It can be very easily misunderstood.  I now can go to places and see exactly if people know the spirit and then they can things differently from the way I would.  Or they do things almost as imitation of what they saw me do and they have no idea why they are doing it.”

This is what is happening with RIE , Magda and Emmi’s philosophy…people are imitating what they think they see and they have no idea of why they are doing it.  The misrepresentation of the essence is just getting to be too much.  I wonder who in heaven’s name is telling people what the tenet of RIE are?  Who keeps focusing on glass cups, leaving children to cry and eating on the floor.  I guess the news people are just not listening to what RIE really is.

Post by: Roseann Murphy