The View from a Drawbridge

Okay, I just saw the most disturbing video I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I can’t even post a link to it, because Youtube keeps yanking it down. I had to stop watching after two minutes. It’s been viral on Facebook. In it, a Russian woman takes a baby who is too young to even support its own head, and swings it around by its arms, spinning it and twisting it. Then she does the same thing with its legs, often one leg. Then she flips it back and forth, its little head snapping on its tiny little neck. Then she tosses the kid through the air, catching it often at the last minute.

On Facebook it says the FBI is looking for this woman, but other sources say that this is not true. Apparently this is a trend called Baby Yoga, and its “practitioners” (for wont of a term that doesn’t make me sound like a drunken sailor) claim that these torturous acrobatics cause babies to walk and talk and, basically, develop faster than the normal child. Naturally, there’s no scientific evidence of this.

There’s another video going around that’s only slightly less disturbing, and that’s of a woman named Lena Fokina (pictured below) doing her version of this practice. The only reason it’s less disturbing is that she seems to really believe in what she’s doing, and isn’t getting off on the more torturous aspects of it like the other woman is. But just because you give child abuse a fancy name does not mean it stops being child abuse.

Here’s what disturbs me most (and there’s a great deal to be disturbed about) regarding this practice. First of all, there is plenty of scientific evidence for another phenomenon: shaken baby syndrome. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if while flipping a baby through the air it flies out of your hands or you drop it, the potential for injury is huge.

And Ms. Fokina’s practice often causes the children to scream and vomit. Yet she says it’s good for them. Give me strength.

Most of all, I’d like to know this. Even if baby yoga turns out to produce the master race, what parent in their right mind would be willing to take such an unbelievable, irreversible risk with their child?

I’m disgusted and horrified.