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The unusual ways Western parents raise children

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Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#501

Post by christkv »

eurusdac wrote: post #345
JKCalhoun wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For myself, the risk SIDS didn't even enter my calculus. (I confess I am a little skeptical that it exists at all.) Regardless, I perceived the emotional bonding with the mother & father to far outweigh anything else and so we shared our bed with our children until they were perhaps 1 year old or so. And even after, they moved into their own small bed just a foot from ours in the same bedroom for another year or so.…

I think SIDS is a real thing and there is clear evidence that not using pillows or excessive blankets in cribs has reduced deaths. I think sleeping with or not with your kid, is a much more complicated question and probably one where your instinct is right. After all, with a baby in the bed you can't help but be aware of its comfort, needs and amount of movement.

We used sleep suits the first year to avoid the whole loose cloth issue

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#502

Post by InitialLastName »

carabiner wrote: post #329
carabiner wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My coworker did this with her son. She was spread thin with afterschool programs, sports, projects and so on. Well, the kid got into Caltech. Where he'll probably meet amazing people and receive an excellent education. So maybe it worked? How many YC founders had this overbooked childhood? I'd guess over 70%.

Hey notsureaboutpg just so you know, you're hellbanned and all of your comments are grayed out. Replies to you are disabled.

FYI (and not sure if this requires a karma threshold) if you click the timestamp on a comment you'll get a "vouch" option that you can use to resurrect non-problematic comments from banned people.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#503

Post by Ma8ee »

secabeen wrote: post #397
a2tech wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much believe SIDS is a real thing. I also think that many cases of SIDS are babies being smothered by soft cloth that bunches up and constricts their breathing and by accidentally smothered by their parents while they're deeply asleep. When kids are small I think co-sleeping is a great thing (where you have a small basinet or something similar next to your bed where you can reach out and touch your baby but th…

> accidentally smothered by their parents while they're deeply asleep This seems unlikely. 10% of babies share a sleep surface with parents, up from 6.5% in 1993, yet SIDS deaths are down over the same period: https://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20180212/baby-suffocation-de... https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm

Since the nineties they started advise parents that all infants should sleep on the back, which reduced SIDS a lot [0]. But it means that it is is very hard to draw any conclusions at all about other factors.

[0] https://safetosleep.nichd.nih.gov/research/science/backsleep...

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#504

Post by nathancahill »

grahamburger wrote: post #271
Clewza313 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, if the children in question are under 12 and going to any of those places unsupervised, they're likely to get the police and/or CPS called on them.

That's one cool thing about living in Utah: https://www.npr.org/2018/04/01/598630200/utah-passes-free-ra... The other cool thing is all the natural parks and outdoor activities (skiing, biking, climbing.) The downsides are the utter lack of nightlife (not really my jam anyway, but whatever) and all the damn Mormons (I am one.)

Username checks out.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#505

Post by sangnoir »

whatever1 wrote: post #496

The thing that I don’t get from the Western culture is what is the point of parenting? Both parents work and they immediately unload their baby to a day care. I was shocked to learn that 9 month babies are sent to day-cares. Is paying the bills for a human you barely see called parenting?

> The thing that I don’t get from the Western culture is what is the point of parenting?

Childcare in US is particularly shocking to any non-American, but it's a natural result of the rugged sort of capitalism combined with a threadbare social safety net.

> I was shocked to learn that 9 month babies are sent to day-cares.

9 months is actually on the older side, in the US. Daycares frequently enroll infants younger than a month. Maternity leave is ridiculously short in the US (IIRC, 3-weeks is mandated by the law, this includes pre- & post-partum). Some companies have started to go above and beyond, and even dropping the non-birthing parter a bone by giving them a few days :). Additionally, I don't think any person taking maternity leave is entitled to their full salary, and beyond 3 weeks, they are entitled to $0, which combined with at-will employment means you have to be get back to work ASAP. Childbirth itself is a very expensive endeavor - thousands of dollars for a vaginal birth with no complications, and tens of thousands for a cesarean.

From

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#506

Post by shirro »

Many of our civilisation's needs and desires have been created by marketers. Whether it is people selling expensive child care equipment or books promoting fads. You don't need most of that shit. There is some good stuff to know for health and safety but you have to think critically which is hard for a first time parent going into the unknown. We bought a lot of gear that never got used or which turned out to be less effective than simpler means.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#507

Post by hadlock »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #471
jqgatsby wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, wait, what is the advice to avoid drowning, other than not leaving them alone? Is there some subtle hazard I’m unaware of?

Not leaving them alone is enough, but to make people actually follow the rule, it is useful to tell them that kids are easily able to drown even in unbelievably small amounts of water, and also in situations where drowning seems almost impossible .

I learned something today, and ours is about to turn 4 months. None of this was communicated to us, probably because it's expected that you pick up most of this tribal knowledge via, pre-covid, other parents in your socio-age group.

We attended an infant cpr class via zoom, learned nothing. We at least got the message about SIDS, but the lack of tribal knowledge in the first six weeks was pretty brutal as first-time parents.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#508

Post by throwaway0a5e »

thebruce87m wrote: post #434
jqgatsby wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, wait, what is the advice to avoid drowning, other than not leaving them alone? Is there some subtle hazard I’m unaware of?

Never leave them for even a second in the bath (drowning) and never leave them alone with food (choking).

This is like saying "don't speed if you don't want a speeding ticket".

Yes, you can use absolute qualifiers like "never" and "always" to stupid proof general advice to a greater extent than you can with phrases like "common sense" and "where reasonable" but that doesn't automatically make the advice any more useful..

I'm perfectly fine with the size of the drowning risk that comes with spending ~1min removing something from the oven when the timer goes off and other reasonable allowances like that. Of course I'm not gonna stop and watch TV with an infant in the sink. And if traffic's going 85 I'm going 85 but I won't be the first person going 85.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#509

Post by paganel »

sangnoir wrote: post #498
gdubs wrote: post #171

One of the hardest thing about being a parent today is the constant shame and confusion about the “right” way to do it. We don’t live in a hunter gatherer society anymore, we just don’t. There’s lots of wisdom in that way of life, and sure we could learn from it — but there’s enough anxiety as it is, parents don’t need more of it. We have three kids and we sleep trained them. (Not a pediatrician, standard disclaimer.…

> For us, ‘extreme’ was the sleep deprivation we experienced with baby number one as we tried every ‘no cry’ method in the book. I was more generous in how I interpreted the article: the need for sleep-training is a consequence of the child having a whole different room to themselves. Parents in other cultures who share the room (or the bed) do not get the same level of extreme sleep deprivation and, as a consequence…

> Parents in other cultures who share the room (or the bed) do not get the same level of extreme sleep deprivation

That was my direct experience as a kid growing up in a non-Western society (I'm 40 now, am from Eastern Europe). When I first read about the Western tabu of parents not being allowed to sleep in the same bed with their children anymore I was a little surprised at first, and then saddened for those kids: "do you mean 3-year or 5-year old me should have slept all alone in his bed at night with no parent close to me? That is pure madness!"

More than that, one of my most vivid memories as a kid was sleeping with my brother and my two grand-parents in the same 3x4 meter room (give or take), my brother with my grandma and 6-year old me with my grandpa (there were two beds, a stove, a TV set and a small table in that room). I can still remember my grandpa peeling apples or pears and sharing them with my brother and me, just before we all went to sleep while we were watching some TV, very, very nice memories (in fact my nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series we were watching then [1]). Afaik neither me, nor my brother (who is 2 years older than me) were making any unwanted sounds while we were asleep at night.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#510

Post by NullPrefix »

thombee wrote: post #395
lqet wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure this is necessarily a western thing. When I was a kid in Germany in the 90ies, school started at 7:30, and ended at 13:00. Once a week you had afternoon school from 14:30 to 16:00, and my parents wanted me to have piano lessons once a week. But after 13:00, and on weekends, I was generally free to do whatever I wanted. I played computer games excessively and watched a lot of movies, of course, but I also…

Isn't Germany western?

Are we talking about west Germany?
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