Uppymama is a proud member of the Baby Carrier Industry Alliance. Learn more about the BCIA – Baby Carrier Industry Alliance and how to support their fantastic work here.
Babywearing is becoming more common in our culture.
The wrap you love to carry your baby in is not just fabric. It is a babywearing carrier and it important that we acknowledge slings and wraps as the tools they truly are.
We live in a culture of regulation, safety standards and quality testing. Children’s products especially are highly tested and monitored. In our culture children’s products must adhere to regulated standards of safety and design. Children’s products except -baby carriers that is.
Until very recently manufacturing and marketing a baby carrier in North America has required no standard of accountability to design, construction, safety or manner of use.
If we lived in a more traditional culture we may have grown up carrying our cousins and siblings from a very young age. We would have seen the mothers in our community carry, nurture and breastfeed their babies. We would have seen early motherhood everyday in regular daily life. But here in our western culture, early parenthood has been very private and separated from our public culture for many many generations. Many young parents have never seen a mother breastfeeding, latching her baby to the breast or carrying a baby in a fabric carrier.
As a result of the lack of traditional wisdom about intuitive parenting, baby carriers have emerged, evolved and infiltrated into our cultural wisdom in many different forms. Thus many different ideas have emerged about how to use a baby carrying device.
Because of the lack of concrete information and sound regulation the industry of baby carrier manufacturing and marketing has been in serious risk of elimination from the public market. Today we are able to do the work we love, making babywearing slings and wraps and fulfilling our passion of education because of a small and mighty group of individuals who worked tirelessly to campaign for standardization and accountability in the baby carrier industry. These amazing crusaders founded the Baby Carrier Industry Alliance and we owe them everything.