Chinese health experts warned parents in northern China Saturday against placing their infants in sandbags, a traditional practice they said may lead to mental retardation.
As a form of rural day care, peasant parents in north China have for hundreds of years put their children in large, stationary bags of fine sand, tied at the waist. The infants can stretch their legs somewhat in the sand, but cannot crawl out, and the sand acts as a diaper that is changed daily.The infants are removed from the bags only for feeding.
But the China Daily, a state-run newspaper, reported that experts from the China Children's Development Center had issued a warning against the practice after conducting a survey that indicated the sandbags can cause a host of health problems, including mental retardation.
The experts told the English-language newspaper that the practice has been found "extremely harmful" to infants, affecting their height, weight and intelligence. Many of the sandbag-reared children are shorter and skinnier than the general population, they said.
The research survey, conducted in Hebei and Shandong provinces in northeast China, found that 70 percent of the 400 "sandbag children" surveyed had been kept confined for as much as 20 hours each day before the age of 2.