The only weird one to me is the western way "do not hit your kids." Downvotes welcome.
Hitting a child is abuse and it's not effective.
The unusual ways Western parents raise children
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Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#12Western = Anglophone? I suspect cultural norms are quite different in Italy, Greece, Spain and other countries.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#13No,no it's not. Things can be different without being weird. Weird is a judgement while different is a fact. For example, I could say BBC opinion pieces are weird garbage but that would be an opinion. I could say "man it's weird this is so high up on hackernews with no comments and six points", that would be an opinion too.
I agree. How can it be weird anyway? Isn’t culture relative? I always get so confused by these things.
Culture is relative but Western (ie: white) culture is "weird." The cognitive dissonance is palpable.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#14Western culture is different in a significant way. Individualism is valued much more than in the east.
This is an established sociological fact.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#15We put the crib close to our bed, much easier for mom. Dad got ear plugs.
We had our baby in our bed between us and usually I woke up first when the baby wanted to be nursed and just gently pushed it so she could get nursed by her mother. Worked fine. We're in Austria.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#16We put the crib close to our bed, much easier for mom. Dad got ear plugs.
It's funny, human mothers have a unique trait through which they can identify the cries of their particular child, even at a playground where a lot of kids are making noise. Somehow, mothers are able to cut through all the din and identify the voice of their young child, at the exclusion of all others.
Nature does so much to bring mothers closer to their young, yet fathers do not possess this "talent." In fact, we seem eager to block out some of that natural closeness we feel towards our children. We use ear plugs now, but I am sure we used animal fur and cotton to achieve the same effect centuries earlier.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#17Definitely something that my wife and I struggle with. She's Vietnamese British, I'm Vietnamese American ; both of us current living in the U.S. Despite what our training classes recommend, we're co-sleeping with our 17 month year old daughter and it feels more intuitive.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#18Your kid doesn’t need their own room. In fact, neither do you. Everyone could live so much more carbon efficiently if we accepted communal living. Like dorm rooms. People all around the world rent small apartments with their extended families, and sometimes even other families. The only reason people in the west believe they need a single family home is because they’re entitled and have a weird focus on individualism.
Share a bed with your kids if you don’t want to be weird. Everyone else is doing it. Charlie and the chocolate factory style.
Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children
#19The only weird one to me is the western way "do not hit your kids." Downvotes welcome.
Hitting a child is abuse and it's not effective.
Hitting is abuse only if it's frequent and the child becomes fearful of it, but this is not nearly as sexy as hijacking the word "abuse" self-righteously.