A video of a Russian woman flipping a baby around like she was twirling a baton got a lot of reaction, even from YouTube which shut the video down. It is said that the video is absolutely real and that the baby-flipping causes no threatening injuries to the child.
It’s something called Baby Yoga, and the woman – Lena Fokina – gave an interview with DadWagon about it.
… in a certain milieu of alterna-Russians, the parents who do [baby yoga] are sort of like Slavic Tiger Mothers: hyperinvolved parents who want to give their child a leg up in life.
The baby is a girl named Platona Goryun, who lives in Khorol, Ukraine. Platona is, by all appearances, a healthy toddler, albeit one who still gets swung in the air quite a bit.
Lena Fokina, speaking from Egypt, runs courses there for kids and adults, including yoga, extreme developmental gymnastics, freediving, rebirthing, etc. She had this to say about Baby Yoga / baby-swinging / what-have-you:
- Baby Yoga came from the teachings of a man named Igor Borisovich Charkovsky.
- “This system has been used for over thirty years in Russia and the children are all alive and healthy.”
- “Americans should be able to do a lot of this themselves, in order to pass something on to their children. An immobile American loses their naturally given reflexes”
- There is a British documentary made about Fokina called “Children of the Wild”
The interview closes out with the editor wondering if Baby Yoga would take in the states. (it wouldn’t).
Thanks to Boing Boing for the story.