Piercing babies' ears: C or D

You know, I don't know of a single female relative of mine whose ears WEREN'T pierced when they were very little. Like I said, that's just what was done and I thought females who ears weren't pierced at a young age were the very rare exception to the rule. Actually, come to think of it, in my pre-k class I don't remember a single girl who didn't have pierced ears.

Did I drop in from some alternate universe or something?

:( My mom had to tape any hair accessories to my head until I was about eighteen months because my reddish fuzz was so (a.) short and (b.) sparse until that time. If I didn't have my earrings and hair accessories, I would have been mistaken for a boy because of my lack of hair and my dad's penchant for dressing me up in sports-themed attire such as the Dallas Cowboys onesie I was once snapped wearing.

OMG! A tiny child to whom gender means nothing at all being mistaken for a slightly different type of tiny child! How horrible! Not being snitty, Dee, but would it really have mattered? I think I and my sister just got dressed in practical dungarees and blow the possibility that we might possibly be perceived by strangers as boys. It kind of gets me that people will kick off a baby's life by applying irrelevant social constructs before they can possibly make any sense.

As an aside, I remember little girls and boys having their ears pierced at a very early age in Nigeria when we were living there. Mostly done with a bit of black thread because families couldn't afford metal.

Vaccinations

mmmmm . . . sage and onion . . . .

I can't see what's wrong with kids having their ears pierced, to be honest. Kids gonna get it done later, may as well be earlier. You can be all edgy and counter-culture if you like, but it's part of western tradition now.

(and i am someone who LOVES piercings and wants some more. when i was 6 i wanted my ears done but my parents made me wait til i was 11 or 12, they shoulda given in sooner but they should NOT have done them when i was a baby, ffs, whether to have holes made in yourself with metal stuck through should be a decision you make all by yourself. ugh. plus i would've missed out on all the fun of feeling them make holes in me. mmm needles, lovely needles. (i would be such a smackhead if i had not been brought up properly))

liz otm, so fucking what if you get mistaken for a boy? i was occasionally mistaken for a boy til i was 10 or so, and i really don't think it fucked with my head.

i'm a wussie.

I don't think you can understand how much it would matter. With the divisions between male and female being what they were in my hometown ca. 1980, it made a HUGE difference whether or not a baby or young child was viewed as being either male or female. Even with the more liberal-minded parents! Actually, the distinctions only really started if you were a male; at that point, your entire athletic career was at least imagined. Little girls were left to be whomever they wanted to be. But if you were a little boy, many people would imagine what you'd be like as a star running back (that's an American football term) or power forward (that's a basketball term). You were even expected to take more knocks than would a little girl, because you were supposed to toughen up, be ready for all those tackles or other defensive actions. So yes, it did make a huge difference, and I am pretty taken aback by the assumptions made here on the thread by those who just can't understand that there were still quite profound distinctions in play between the genders, even from very early on in a person's life.

xpost: Well, maybe not so much as an infant, but starting from toddlerhood. In infancy, the boys' professional athletic careers were being dreamed about and planned and the expectation was always there that the toughening-up process would begin when the child was about two or so.

xpost heh, pretty Finn.

i also had no hair for awhile as a baby. i was often dressed in pink so people wouldn't say "what a cute little boy!" but according to my mom, they did anyway. gender expectations aside, it's probably just annoying to have to correct people all the time.

Kirsten, what about cultures where this is traditional? What if you grew up earingless in an Indian-American extended family and you were the only girl without earings? You might like it or you might feel that the parents had left you out, no? Also, Candicissima, OTM. This is hardly likely to be the greatest trauma in a young person's childhood.

This is arguably worse than the earrings.

I just don't see much of a difference between a parent doing it and little Betsy aged 3 screaming for piercing so she can wear something sparkly. I've known plenty of people who had their ears pierced early on and the holes closed, so on the major scale of body modification, it's pretty low stakes.

OOHHHH, ZING!, etc. I am a bit drunk, sorry, etc.

It's not just you:

They do it in Spain. There is an unsightly scramble to see who gets to buy the baby the earrings. I disapprove.

-- Peter Stringbender (pjmiller6...) (webmail), July 4th, 2005. (link)

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OMG! A tiny child to whom gender means nothing at all being mistaken for a slightly different type of tiny child! How horrible! Not being snitty, Dee, but would it really have mattered? I think I and my sister just got dressed in practical dungarees and blow the possibility that we might possibly be perceived by strangers as boys. It kind of gets me that people will kick off a baby's life by applying irrelevant social constructs before they can possibly make any sense.

As an aside, I remember little girls and boys having their ears pierced at a very early age in Nigeria when we were living there. Mostly done with a bit of black thread because families couldn't afford metal.

-- Liz :x (lizd4ply...) (webmail), July 4th, 2005. (link)

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from that information that sounds like one dumb society, but that's a whole other debate.
regardless of those rights and wrongs, surely whoever was watching the kids while they were playing would know if it was a boy or a girl - you wouldn't leave your kid/s with someone who'd never met them before and didn't know if they were even a boy or a girl, right? and if it's just about being looked at funny, again - who gives a fuck?

also, we're now talking as though ear piercing were an inevitability - get it done young cos then you remember no pain - what if you don't want it done at all? it's more about choice, imo: however sweet it can look, this is still a form of mutilation and i think it's the sort of thing you should control yourself. if you get to 8 or 12 or 16yo or whatever and you still want it done, ffs, it only takes a second and it's not enough pain to cause you any serious trauma! unless you get infected but look after it properly and it won't, and i'd rather have an infection on a 12 year old kid than a 1 year old baby.

also yeh, i would be scared to death that said child would tear its ears in half fiddling with the thing or fighting/playing with another child, or get them infected and turned into huge oozing balls of pus and pain.

xxxxxpost

-- emsk (vomit.quif...) (webmail), July 4th, 2005. (link)

I had absolutely no idea that infant ear-piercing was common among black and Latino families until I read this thread, and any opinions I have about the practice have zero to do with this fact. In fact, when considering how infant ear-piercing is sort of tacky, what I'm picturing as an example is someone like Jon-Benet Ramsay, who's about as white as it gets.

WAS as white as it gets (got). Jerk.

I did notice that quite a few Indian babies, both male and female, wore heavy Kohl (powdered black eyeliner). I'm not sure whether this is strictly aesthetic, or whether it is believed that there are some health benefits.

I don't think babies should be pierced.

Tattooing babies, C or D?

(Circumcision, as mentioned above, is a separate discussion. I think it's one of those things that theoretically is easier to deal with pain-wise as a baby due to memory, etc. I'm not really a fan of it, though. So I really don't know.)

Easier than piercing ears?! U R st00pid.

As for mike h's (and perhaps others') post[s]:

I think there's a huge difference between piercings and tattoos, in that while you can take off the jewelry, you can never take off the tattoo. Me -- if I had a baby boy, I'd let the future teenaged or preteen male decide whether he wanted to have a piercing or not. With the males around here, piercings are still considered optional, whereas with females, piercings seem to be part and parcel of the whole early childhood thing. (My mom and maternal grandmother also got their ears pierced as babies, FYI.)

Anyway. If my future son would like to have four sets of piercings on his ears and sport a mohawk, I will let him go with that. All I would ask of him is that he be a good kid who does as well as he possibly can in school, who treats his peers with kindness and his elders with respect, who has strong personal morals and is filled with gentleness. Nope, nothing in there about a lack of piercings... or even tattoos, though I'd hope he'd wait until he was out of college and had the goal of scoring a career in the forefront of his mind while he decided on tattoo designs and sites.

I disagree with RJG here -- this is a GREAT point.

Definitely not easier than piercing ears! I just meant I think it's a different sort of cultural norm since no one claims they're piercing ears for hygenic reasons, most aren't for religious reasons, etc. These may be mostly excuses for foreskin chopping, but they're still a lot different from the completely aesthetic ear piercing.

A haircut is pretty functional and hair grows back. It's a pain in the ass to have a kid hold still and they HATE haircuts (I can still remember my first!) but it's more standard grooming. The alternative is what, letting it grow until it's long enough it breaks off?

With the males around here, piercings are still considered optional, whereas with females, piercings seem to be part and parcel of the whole early childhood thing

It's not that bad as a tradition, but just recognize it as such. I was definitely exaggerating on the tattoo thing, just throw that out.

Really I don't see the problem with it, the only reason I wouldn't carry on tradition myself is, well, fuck buying earrings for a baby and bringing a baby outside to some place to get pierced, I plan to hide my baby indoors and never bring it anywhere until it is like 7 or 8 and old enough to behave like a proper adult, that's for certain.

So you'll just wait with washing and feeding him/her until he/she is able to speak? ;-) Piercing ears has no real benefit, except adorning the body.

When did ear piercings become permanent?

Most of the time the hole does not close. I think only people who have not properly taken care of the piercing in the beginning will have closed ears. (You have to wait about two weeks to change the earring.) I didn't wear any earrings for about ten years and you could still notice the holes pretty well. For boys this can be a problem: if they have to work at a place which doesn't approve of piercings...

i have only ever seen one baby/toddler with pierced ears, it was a BOY toddler, hanging with his parents at a soccer match, and he was wearing SHADES too! man that was one cool kid!

Rhodia asked: Are there any good reasons for poking holes in little babies?

So they won't explode when you microwave them?

(SORRY...sorry...)

This thread remains my greatest contribution to ILX.