Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: I didn't take him.

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Mary Anne — (archived)

The doctor is not one I talked to only once. This is a small town. He treated my children too. We had many conversations about an assortment of child care issues, including persistent infections affected by diapers. Two of mine had chicken pox while in diapers.

Trauma is of a different nature for a newborn vs. a three-year-old. Newborns are recovering from the major trauma of birth. A lot of things get all blended into that, in much the same way that I have seen people suffering from the immediate effects of sports injuries inflict a little extra pain on themselves by forcing a dislocated joint back in place before the shock wears off. Trauma for the three-year-old in having such surgery would be an isolated event with ongoing pain afterward, without the masking effect of a major trauma. At three, a child is only able to understand that something is done to him which hurts, and is also old enough to remember it in detail, though not all three-year-olds remember things like this.

The opinion was, if the cure were circumcision, at that point the cure would be worse than the ailment, even if it were a persistent infection. The psychological damage to a child at the beginning of ego development and in the middle of toilet training would be tremendous.

Please also remember that I haven't actually stated, nor will I, whether we decided to have the procedure done on our own son. I only wish to establish that people who think about this for their sons might possibly have considered it in a different light than either social conformity or child abuse.

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