London - Gisele Bundchen's daughter, Vivian Lake, who turns eight months old next week, has fuelled the debate surrounding the piercing of babies' ears
In an intimate Instagram photo posted on Sunday, Vivian, who is cradled by her Brazilian-born supermodel mother on holiday in Costa Rica, wears a pair of gold studs and a matching beaded necklace.
Brazil-born Bundchen, who dated Leonardo DiCaprio for four years, now lives in the US with her husband, American football star Tom Brady, 35. They have another child, Benjamin, three.
On Twitter some said that she made the baby look “chavvy” while bloggers asked their readers to choose if it was “cute or creepy”.
British mother Victoria Rees wrote: “Let little girls be innocent? Don’t paint their nails, pierce their ears etc.”
For most Latina mothers it is simply a cultural tradition.
In many South American countries, including Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil, the ears of female infants are pierced in the hospital as a matter of course, much the way the circumcision of male infants is handled in the US.
Roxana Soto, co-founder of Spanglish Baby, explained to Today.com: “For Latina moms, piercing their baby girls’ ears has nothing to do with vanity. It’s simply a cultural tradition.
“So much so that I freaked out when I learned my first child was a girl because I had no idea where I would take her to get her ears pierced,” added the Denver-based mother.
Meredith Goodwin, a family practitioner in Florida, said there is no medical reason to wait to pierce a newborn's ears.
“But the procedure is not without risk,” she explained. “Not all ear-piercing operations have the proper equipment or staff trained to work specifically with young children.”
A baby's ears are usually pierced by a paediatrician, who carries out the procedure with a sterilised needle, rather than an ear piercing gun, which cannot be sterilised.
One mother, who had her daughter's ears pierced at four months, defended the practice on BabyCenter.com.
“The babies will never remember the sting of the pierce. And it wont hurt any less five years from now,” she wrote, adding, “Besides, did you ask your son if he wanted to be circumcised? That's a major ordeal, much less dramatic then getting ears pierced.”
But for Eleni Gage, who was made to wait until she was ten years old before she was allowed to have her ears pierced, the decision was more difficult.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to slap earrings on to my baby before she was old enough to express a desire for them,” she explained in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
She waited until her daughter, whose father is Nicaraguan, was six months old before their family doctor “shot the gold studs we had picked out into our baby’s ears.”
“Amalía cried for a minute or so during the procedure - less than she did for the flu shot that followed a few weeks later. Then she smiled on cue as we started snapping her picture,” said Ms Gage.
However Gina Crosley-Corcoran, feminist blogger and mother-of- three, said she is against piercing. “I'm not a huge fan of inflicting pain on my children with no medical benefit whatsoever,” she said. - Daily Mail
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