One question is how accurate is it to sit and observe a very small slice of someone’s day on the street? It seems they are making a lot of conclusions that aren’t substantiated. If that was only a couple minutes of one child’s day, how can you draw any conclusions about how a parent is with that child the rest of the day? Presumably these kids aren’t in the stroller for 8 hours a day. How does it hurt a kid to have a few minutes or even half an hour in the stroller facing away from a parent? The comments from the observers are very negative, they are judgmental, acting like these are kids who are severely socially deprived.

I’ll look at it some more later, but it looks pretty inadequate at a quick glance.

Well… now that you mention it…. that explains so much! You’ve found the holy grail!

Tom too didn’t walk until 15 months (and wasn’t much of a crawler, either, but his pediatricians didn’t worry much about it and neither did I.) He did not like the snugli, and physcially fought being swaddled. (We figured it was the Irish in him, “don’t-fence-me-in syndrome”.) He prefers having someone in the backseat with him–and between Grams and Dad and me there was usually someone riding shotgun with him!–but one of his “things” is watching the world go by facing outwordk, prerably through a window, the faster the better. He enjoys it, and who am I to say he can’t or shouldn’t?

NB: I’m being totally facetious here. The point I’m really trying to make is that there’s no way they could definitively draw these conclusions. And, frankly, who the hell cares? Unless you plunk your child in the stroller and leave him there all day…then you’ve got a bigger issue to deal with!