Someone has told you that you’re spoiling your baby.

Maybe it was a family member watching you pick your baby up for the fourth time in an hour. Maybe it was a health visitor who saw how you settle them. Maybe it was a well-meaning friend who told you that if you hold them this much now, you’ll regret it later. The message is consistent: you’re giving too much. You need to hold back. You’re creating a child who will be demanding, dependent, and unable to function without constant attention.

The concept of “spoiling” a baby through responsive care has been one of the most thoroughly studied — and thoroughly dismantled — ideas in developmental psychology. Here is what the evidence actually shows.

For the full context, see our complete guide to contact sleeping. For the biological explanation of why your baby needs this contact, read The Biology of the Fourth Trimester.

Where the ‘spoiling’ idea comes from

The advice to limit physical affection with babies has a specific origin point. In 1928, the American behaviourist John B. Watson — already famous for his laboratory conditioning experiments — published a parenting manual, Psychological Care of Infant and Child. His guidance was explicit: “Never hug and kiss [your children]. Never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight.” Watson believed that emotional responsiveness to children created weak, dependent adults. Babies should be handled efficiently and without sentimentality [1].

Watson’s influence was significant and long-lasting. The parenting advice of the mid-twentieth century — scheduled feeds, letting babies “cry it out,” limiting holding — drew heavily on his framework. The conviction that responsiveness equals spoiling was culturally embedded across a generation and passed forward.

What is less well known is that Watson’s own children did not fare well under his philosophy. His son Rayner Watson later wrote about the psychological damage of his upbringing. Watson himself, late in life, expressed regret about his parenting advice. The theory that generated the “spoiling” concept had already been abandoned by its own author.

The belief persists not because subsequent research confirmed it, but because it is intergenerational. Grandparents who were raised within this philosophy — and who raised their children within it — pass it forward as received wisdom, without awareness of its origins or of the evidence that has accumulated since.

What the research actually shows

The attachment research of the mid-to-late twentieth century — pioneered by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth — fundamentally overturned the behaviourist framework [2]. Their central finding: responsive caregiving does not create dependency. It creates security. And security is the foundation of independence, not its opposite.

You cannot spoil a baby. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the NSPCC, the WHO, and every major paediatric and child development organisation are consistent on this point for the first year of life: responsive care — including holding, carrying, and contact sleeping — does not harm infants. It supports them.

Securely attached babies become more independent, not less. Ainsworth’s Strange Situation studies, and the decades of research that followed, consistently show that babies who are consistently and responsively caregiving explored more, were more confident in unfamiliar situations, and handled separation more easily than their insecurely attached peers [2]. The counterintuitive finding is now a cornerstone of developmental psychology: meet the need, and the need becomes less urgent. Deny the need, and the need intensifies.

Kangaroo care research documents the physiological benefits of holding. Thirty years of skin-to-skin research with premature and term infants shows that holding — far from creating problems — produces better weight gain, more stable heart rate and breathing, reduced stress hormone levels, improved temperature regulation, and better breastfeeding outcomes [3]. Contact is not indulgence. It is medicine.

Cross-cultural evidence is unambiguous. In the majority of human cultures — and throughout the vast majority of human history — babies are carried, held, and slept in contact with caregivers as a matter of course [4]. There is no epidemic of “spoiled” children in cultures that carry babies extensively. The research consistently fails to find the predicted negative outcomes of high contact caregiving.

What ‘clingy’ actually means

When parents or relatives describe a held baby as “clingy,” they are observing proximity-seeking behaviour — a baby who wants to stay close to their caregiver, who signals distress when separated, who is not content to be placed independently.

In the behavioural framework, this looks like dependency: evidence that the holding has created an attachment that is too tight, a baby who has learned to need what they’ve been given.

In the attachment framework, this is healthy proximity-seeking — the expected and adaptive behaviour of a securely attaching infant. A baby who wants to stay close is a baby who has correctly identified where safety and regulation are. Their signal is accurate. Their expectation is reasonable.

The babies who struggle most with separation are, counterintuitively, often those whose needs were not consistently met. When a baby cannot predict whether their caregiver will respond — when sometimes crying brings comfort and sometimes it doesn’t — they remain anxious and hypervigilant, because they can never be sure the response will come [2]. This is the anxious attachment that looks most like “clinginess” in the clinical sense. It is not produced by too much responsiveness. It is produced by insufficient or inconsistent responsiveness.

Holding your baby consistently, responding when they signal, letting them sleep on your chest — these are not creating a clingy baby. They are building the secure base from which genuine independence later grows.

The bottom line

You are not spoiling your baby. You are building their security.

Every time you pick them up, every time you hold them through a nap, every time you let them sleep on your chest — you are teaching them that the world is predictable, that their needs will be met, and that they are safe enough to eventually venture out from the nest of your arms and explore.

That’s not spoiling. That’s the foundation of everything.

References below.