Parents 'should carry babies upright' Carrying your baby upright and facing forward may result in a more self-assured child. Prof Diamond spent 50 years working with traditional societies in New Guinea, and other western researchers have closely studied other groups including the Pygmies of African rainforests, the !Kung of southern African deserts, and the Piraha Indians of Brazil. He said: "We are struck by how emotionally secure, self-confident, curious, and autonomous the members of those small-scale societies are, not only as adults but already as children. That's surely the result of how they are raised as children. I think that we can foster those admirable qualities in our own children, by emulating some hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices. Techniques such as quickly comforting a crying baby, allowing them to sleep with their parents, having a lot of physical contact with them and carrying them upright and facing outward can help their development, he said. Much anecdotal evidence indicates that such techniques can also benefit our own children. We humans lived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. We moderns can learn from what worked well for such a long time. It is only relatively recently that some of these traditional child-rearing practices became unfashionable. I suggest that it's time to consider some of them seriously again.