Kangaroo Mom Puts Rambunctious Joey in Hilarious Time Out
I remember the first time I ever saw an actual kangaroo with a joey. The juvenile kangaroo was actually pretty big, nearly half the size of its mother, but it ran and jumped in her pouch as if was still a baby, and I watched her poor skin stretch and bulge as the joey wriggled its enormous feet and powerful legs around inside her, going from a head down to a head-up position inside its mom. Ouch!
Thanks to that moment, I’ve always felt a great deal of sympathy for kangaroos—indeed, for any marsupial. It was hard enough feeling a fetus kick inside of me. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a teenager still doing it.
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This kangaroo mother is performing what appears to be a universal method of parental correction: holding the baby still until it calms down. In this video, taken this week at the San Antonio Zoo, she lifts the joey up by his midsection, holding him in mid-air as he squirms around. That’s one joey that’s not going anywhere until his little bout with the zooms is over with.
Related: San Antonio Zoo Shares Video of Precious Baby Kangaroo Popping Out to Say Hello
Every mom sees this one and says: been there, done that.
“Air jail,” says more than one commenter, and though it’s not a term I’ve heard before, the mood is certainly one I’m more than familiar with. Maybe she’s just trying to keep him from jumping in her poor, abused pouch, or maybe she’s just trying to get him to chill, but either way, the joey is not pleased with her efforts, and won’t stop wriggling.
How Kangaroo Pouches Work
Kangaroos are marsupial mammals, like koalas and opossums. They have an extremely short gestation time when they are pregnant and give birth to undeveloped newborns, who inch their way out of the birth canal and up the mothers abdomen, where they crawl inside a pouch and attach themselves to a mammary teat to finish growing. In the case of the kangaroo, this pouch becomes a home to the juvenile kangaroo for up to a year.
Again: ouch.
Dealing With Temper Tantrums
Joeys, like all animal children, need proper training to know how to behave among others of their own kind, and it usually falls to the mom to perform these kinds of corrections. All animals are forced to correct their kids. With dogs, it may be some bared teeth or a warning nip. With kangaroos, “air jail.”
But when it comes to dealing with human babies, physical punishments have fallen out of fashion. Most parenting experts now advise gentler methods of rearing your children. In most cases, when a child is having a temper tantrum, the best thing to do is just ignore them, or even distract them with something else. The only time it is recommended to intervene (and even engage in “air jail” is when the child is in danger of hurting themselves or others, with biting, kicking, hitting, or running into traffic. Then, parenting experts say it’s okay to pick up your kid and hold them tight— not as a punishment, but merely as a safe and secure way to let them get control of their emotions without causing any more damage.
Huh. The things we learn from kangaroos.
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