BTW, Hal Briston, just so you know, my last post was not directed at you. I hadn’t read all the way through the thread before I posted, and now that I have, I just want to make sure you didn’t take it that way.
P.S. I think you should take your daughter to a large sporting event in her little outfit with her pink jeweled ears.
Bound to cause some confusion in the crowd. 
Same here. I’ve never seen anything other than gold. I’ve never heard of any problems with infant piercings either. I wonder if this overly protective tendency by Americans isn’t overreaction. I recently saw a news report where at some schools they ban many traditional childhood games such as tag.
I’ve known a few girls who had their ears pierced as babies (my cousins to be precise)*. The reason? So that they wouldn’t remember the pain. Because lets face it, odds were pretty good they’d want them pierced when they got older anyways. I had to argue with my mother to get mine done when I was 8, and at the time I’d wished that she’d done mine as a baby–I wanted holes in my ears dammit! 
Heck, maybe if she had I wouldn’t have had to have one pierced a second time.
So while I understand the aversion most of you seem to have to it, it doesn’t really bother me.
*Mom, she’s one and I’m seven, and hers are pierced, why can’t I get mine done?
I had my ears pierced at 18, by the family doctor. (No piercing booths in the malls back then–hey, malls were new!) He said that lots of his patients had their ears pierced as babies (mostly by family) & he hadn’t seen any medical problems. There were/are many folks of Mexican descent in the area.
Even at my advanced age, my grandmother thought pierced ears were barbaric! (Not very Protestant, that is.) But clip-ons hurt my ears & I wanted that bohemian touch. Yes, the first pair were simple studs–made of Gold.
I’m told that my mother taped a bow to my head when I was a baby, since she got tired of people complimenting her on the fine, big boy!
Babies with earrings do not upset me. But I do live in a Border state.
Over there too, eh? The last time someone tried to get that going in the school I attended as a kid, one of the other mothers said “does that mean we’ll be banning Phys Ed too? Because, you see, if we’re banning anything that can mean ‘violent physical contact’ my daughter would love to get out of having to play volleyball.” The motion got tossed out without even making it to a vote, but sheesh!
My parents had my ears pierced when I was a baby and I got sterilized thread for earrings. I got gold ones soon after the piercing healed. I don’t mind the holes now but as a kid I really wished I didn’t have them because I didn’t like being made to wear earrings. They always snagged on something.
If/When I have my own kids, I’d wait till they me they want it.
The excuse of do it early so they won’t remember the pain is a bogus excuse for the piercing. It’s not like it’s so painful that a person is going to be scarred for life mentaly. A person will experience more pain than the peircing during their life. Wait until mommy has to remove a splinter with a needle and tweezers.
They are banning tag and other physical activities at school, and considering doing away with recesses at some, all while the kids are becoming super fat and unfit. Now there are laws forbiding sales of pop and such after the schools signed exclusive rights to put the product in schools in the first place. School policy seems to be a multiheaded beast unable to make a decission that isn’t contradictive to it’s other decissions.
I won’t go farther on this and totaly hyjack it.
I was raised in Whitey-whiteville, USA, back in the '70s, where the only culture around was our own. Earrings on little girls were considered trashy. Poor, rednecky, uneducated, trailer-trashy. (Keep in mind that at that time some people thought pierced ears at all were trashy, on anyone.)
I understand now that it is a matter of culture for many and a personal choice for others. While I intellectually respect that, I can’t entire lose my visceral response, ingrained from childhood, which is that pierced ears on little girls is a teeny tine little bit ever so slightly [sub]tacky[/sub]. No offense to Hal’s little beauty or anyone else who feels otherwise, but that’s just part of my whitebread baggage.
Just adding onto Auntie Em’s post - I also had mine done at 5 because I asked.
I will NOT pierce a daughter’s ears as an infant - I don’t believe in it, and as others have mentioned, I worry about issues such as nickel allergies, swallowing, and safety issues with piercing. (I also didn’t circumcise my son, so I guess that makes me a rabid radical ). I do think it’s unecessary. And it’s usually easy to tell the difference between a girl and a boy infant - I’ve never really had any issues. (Of course, unless you’re a parent like me, who took the baby to the store dressed in a very boyish outfit of blue overalls, and then was puzzled why the pharmacist asked if he was a girl - reminded me to always check his pacifier to make sure it wasn’t that he was sucking on the pink and purple one that came in the pack with the green one - we’re not going to let a perfectly good pacifier go to waste because it’s the wrong color…we just need to remember to swap it for a different color before going out in public ).
E.
On the other hand, Chris Garver did a sweet dragon that wrapped around this guy’s arm and came up over his shoulder to the front. Gorgeous.
I don’t have a problem with infant pierced ears. Of course that’s rebellion from my father who didn’t allow the “barbaric” practice to happen to me; I could choose to do it when I was 18 if I wanted. I didn’t do it until I was 25, but then got three set in rapid succession. The one at the top of the ear I couldn’t stand and had to remove. Way too painful.
As someone else said, earrings like that have a screwed on back- not just that little butterfly thing you smoosh onto the post. Helll, I’m 20 and I still have problems getting the screwed ones on and off. So long as mom regularly cleans and checks the earring to make sure it’s secured tightly, baby will be fine.
And yeah, no cheap earrings from Claire’s for a newborn. In my family, grandma buys a good, high quality set of earrings from a jeweler for a good chunk of change. Solid gold, not gold plated whatever. Hell, I know mine were really high quality gold because my mom is allergic to 14 K gold and they were afraid I might have the same allergy.
Oh, I also don’t remember being totally traumatized because the doctor harpooned my ear after my long journey out my mom. I just remember being so happy at 4 because I saved up my allowance to buy a super cool set of earrings that were flowers in a pot.
I also can see where some people are saying it hurts, but for me it didn’t. Obviously I don’t remember being a newborn :p, but back when I got the second set done in my teen years, I didn’t even notice she had pierced me. No pain at all. Of course, I had a similar experience getting tattoos, so maybe I’m an odd one. The point is, perhaps it’s not OMGPAINFUL for all kids to the point that it’s being portrayed here in this thread.
Mine were soldered together…they were rings with a little pearl. The goldsmith cut them off when we went back to India when I was 5. Most children are given 22K to 24K gold over there (I realise the purity of gold like this is probably difficult to find here unless you stumble into an ethnic gold shop while following the fragrant aroma of curry or shwarma).
The pain and trauma haunts me to this day. Why, Baba, why???
I’m laughing trying to think of what you guys would think if you saw 5 year olds with nose rings. Having a nose piercing myself, I know that’s about a million times more painful.
anu-la is right. I only didn’t get my ears pierced as a baby because of the uncertainty of my birth, seeing as how my parents weren’t married and my grandparents were dead. And no one to give expensive gold jewelry, and you don’t give less. I asked for them around 7 or 8 and my mom ( a nurse) did them with a needle, and it hurt, but I barely remember it. I do remember the nose piercing, which I got at 18, and, yes, kids get those in India, too.
I don’t think it’s really a big deal. I’m not going to have kids, so that’s kind of moot anyway.
Its an interesting cultural exercise - want to fit in with a “well bred, WASPY, middle class America” - generally your daughters ears are pierced between six and twelve - maybe even not until they are teenagers - not as babies. That’s an “ethnic” thing to do. Then we justify it by talking about how unhygenic or unsafe it is - it probably is safer not to do it, but the risk of real damage is probably so low that its our own perceived superiority talking - it wouldn’t commonly be done in Mexico or India (in places far less hygenic than middle-class America) if babies were getting seriously ill from infections or injured from swallowing earings.
No sweat, auntie em – no offense taken by anything I’ve read here (well, except for Misnomer’s jab, but whaddaya want from someone from Redskins territory? ;))
Truth be told, I’ve never really had much an opinion on the matter. When we had Shayla, 100% of my exposure to the debate came from the episode of Friends where baby Emma’s ears were pierced and Ross threw a hissy fit. I never had much interaction with parents of young kids, so the topic simply never came up for me.
My wife is on a mother’s message board, and has become close friends with several of the local members – I was surprised to find that when I met all these little girls, every one of them had pierced ears.
From day one, my wife had wanted Shayla’s ears pierced – we just didn’t have the extra money early on. She had hers pierced when she was nine or so, and looks back at it as very traumatizing. She just figured getting it out of the way while the child won’t remember it at all.
So, that was a “yes” vote from the wife and an abstention vote from me. Ok, let’s get it done.
click click with two guns at once, 15 seconds of crying and then laughter when I handed Shayla her Elmo doll. Snag-free screw-on post guards, antiseptic twice a day, and all is fine. <shrug>
I wish to add that men wear piercings all over the US now, so I wouldn’t assume the baby was a girl.
OTOH, I literally fainted when I had mine done, it hurt so bad (I was 13). I fainted a second time when I had my second holes done at 22. Only two times in my life I’ve fainted. I’ve had three tattoos (one on the breastbone, one on the anklebone) and two children, and none of it hurt as bad as getting my ears pierced. So, yeah, I’d say YMMdefinitelyV.
WhyNot, I didn’t faint, but I do remember that it was very painful…felt like someone hit my earlobes with a hammer!
I guess I just don’t get WHY one would pierce a baby’s ears. I dressed my daughter up in pink all the time, and people still sometimes asked if she was a boy or a girl. So what, though? I said, “she’s a girl,” and the question was cleared right up!
My brother and I are a year apart and people would still ask if we were twins. Silly people.