A few years ago I read an article stating that women were losing their hair at a greater rate than previously, and it was due to their increased representation in the workforce. Hair loss, it seems, was not just connected with male hormones. Stress had a lot to do with it too. Of course chronic stress is certainly an aetiological agent in a great many more serious bodily problems: heart disease, hypertension, cancer, and others.

Years ago life was hard - there was not the capital formation and creative engineering which has given us the comforts and novelties of the modern world, such as the remarkable machine on which you are reading this article. But if it was harder and less opulent, it was not necessarily more stressful as well. Stress has more to do with the continual complex demands which our work forces upon us, and which have increased in the case of all occupations, plus the insecurity of continuing employment, plus the sheer rapidity of changing societal roles and expectations for both sexes, and in the modern world all these have increased.

A baby's life, on the other hand, seems remarkably stress free. As children we probably all have memories of the arrival of a baby in somebody's family, often enough our own. How soft and pink and cuddly everything associated with the baby seems to be! Especially the baby's clothes. Even girls, a boy will think, wear plain, dark clothes quite a lot, but baby's clothes seem like pretty, soft girlish underwear at all layers, even the outermost.

And the baby gets lots of attention, too. Especially from women and girls, who are so delighted with baby, and cuddle him, and tease him, and love him unconditionally. But a boy will have to keep a certain distance from all this. He can smile at the baby, but he would be considered very much a sissy if he behaved in the happy, delighted way that the girls do. If he were to pay too much attention to a baby in a pram, wearing a soft lambswool bunny suit, and with his rattle and dummy, and teddy bear, lying under a pretty flounced coverlet, it would not be thought seemly for a boy. And yet he can't keep his eyes of the baby...wouldn't it feel so nice...

Years ago people thought that boys went through a stage when they were not interested in girls. Perhaps psychologists still think this. I disagree - boys may be very dismissive of girls at a certain age, but they still are in awe of them, are fascinated by them, and are rather frightened by them. If a girl speaks to a nine or ten year old boy, he will be shy, but secretly will be as pleased as punch. So much for the 'latent' period, and suchlike nonsense.

Even as a child, the boy is experiencing quite a lot of stress. Very probably more so than a girl, despite the social changes of the last twenty years or so. But the baby doesn't have the boy's worries of family, of school, and of the tough boy down the street who tripped him up when he was carrying home some shopping for his mother...and the baby gets all the cuddles from the girls which the boy, deep down, would secretly like, if only he could admit it to himself.

Being a baby, and especially being forced to be a baby for the delight of one of those awe-inspiring girls, would be a heavenly happiness that would melt away all that stress. A boy hasn't really taken his thoughts as far as that yet, but they may develop as he gets older. With girls being involved there is a soft, submissive, sexual side mixed in there somewhere too, but it is more that very special melting amandonment, that deeply-needed security, that makes the male yearn for what one writer (in a 'Madame' article that I will reprint in 2001) referred to as 'Mummy Therapy'.

Mummy Therapy is just that - therapeutic, healing, relaxing, and nurturing. It has a magical effect which far surpasses other methods of dealing with stress, such as alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs - or anger, which is probably the worst outlet of all for stress and anxiety.

An early writer referred to the craving to be treated like a baby again as 'psychosexual infantilism'. It's not really a very informative name, and don't imagine, that if you were to consult an fairly complete textbook of psychology, or psychiatry, or sexual practices, that you would find out very much about it. As far as my researches have taken me, in a number of medical libraries, very little is understood about it, and the majority of authors much prefer to simply pretend that it isn't there. One is reminded of Edward Lear's famous rhyme, so true in so many contexts, of the man he met upon the stair.

Readers of 'Petticoat Discipline Monthly' know that these babying desires do exist in the minds of many men. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for women to understand them, and, as I have said, the academic literature provides no guidance, right or wrong. In this essay I have tried to give some idea of their source, and, even more so, the benefits of babying for the man who feels these cravings. It is genuinely life-enhancing; an exquisite, almost heavenly, reliever of stress and worry, all responsibilities relieved, at least for a time, without the damaging effects of the 'solutions' I have listed above.

I realise that this essay is impressionistic rather than scientific. I make no apologies for that  - although I am a thoroughly down-to-earth and material person, unaffected by any religious beliefs or old superstitions, I think that if we are to understand something as subtle as nappy discipline and Mummy Therapy, then tables of statistics will tell us nothing. We need to start with deep seated feelings, which are as real as the desk you are sitting at now. If readers are able to offer any help of their own in understanding the attractions of babying, I would be happy to hear from you.
Susan MacDonald