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The unusual ways Western parents raise children

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Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#521

Post by hycaria »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #132
PebblesRox wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and I really dislike the undercurrent of fear that's present in a lot of parenting advice. The message (implicitly or explicitly) tends to be "do it this way or you'll damage your kids." But the truth is we're never going to be perfect parents, we have no guarantees over how our kids turn out, and there are a wide range of approaches that will lead to good outcomes. I like to do research to discover options I…

There is damage and there is damage. Some can really change kids trajectory. Some become a funny anecdote for the future. I am a newly minted parent and we had a visitation from a parent, who now has a 4 year old. She already introduced him to Starbucks and McDonalds. Now I have to ensure that she stays way way down on the list of people we would consider babysitting. There may not be wrong way to parent exactly and…

Thank you for your comment. I feel the same way about food and I'm rather shocked at the response you get.

And I didn't eat fast food as a kid myself, and that didn't make it attractive to me. Although we went to McDonalds every wednesday after going to the library to get a fresh orange juice.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#522

Post by toxik »

leokennis wrote: post #423
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.…

To me, it’s very simple: I work and my wife works. After some maternity/paternity leave, we both need to get to work again to earn money to provide our kids with food, shelter, a future etc. To be able to work, we need to sleep. For us to sleep, our kids and the baby needs to sleep. So we put the baby in his own room on day three. Always had him sleep in his bed in his room. Didn’t let him sleep anywhere else (or whe…

It sounds like you had an easy time. Good for you. Many, many parents suffer hell with babies not sleeping and being upset. It seems a bit dismissive to just say “oh just do X and it’s all good”.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#523

Post by notsureaboutpg »

beart wrote: post #447
Aunche wrote: post #340

One thing that I find weird about the Western (perhaps just American) way of raising kids is that the retired population is surprisingly uninvolved in the raising of their grandchildren. It seems like an economic inefficiency when parents are spending so much money on childcare while old people are feeling increasingly lonely.

I am from the U.S. My mother has my kids at least two days a week. It saves me money, gives her an excuse to come over, and the kids love it. After I finish working we will typically make dinner together. I did not have this sort of experience growing up and I'm really glad things have worked out this way for my kids. If only I could get her to stop cleaning everything while she's at my house and filling my fridge wi…

Does your mother prefer to live on her own? Seems like you both like having her around the house!

I'm asking because in my culture parents living separately from their adult kids is rare.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#524

Post by gnicholas »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #45
jokethrowaway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What your doctor / nationalised health care system is recommending sounds like a good approach

Honestly doctors can spread a lot of disinformation on things not biologically related. For example, our pediatrician recommended we wait until 3 to potty train our son... who at the time was already potty trained. Potty training is also something that differs widely between developed nations and rest of world.

Some medical professionals also spread incorrect information regarding medical information. For example, an RN gave us incorrect info regarding something she claimed was necessary and was CDC-recommended. We asked for more information, and lo and behold, the CDC specifically said it was not necessary (and there were no other sources recommending it).

Doctors and their staff have an incentive to perform more procedures/tests because they get paid to do so. Because the patient often does not bear the full cost of procedures/testing, patients often do not do much diligence to see whether these are actually appropriate. While I don't think that the RN we were talking with was being malicious (surely her individual comp would not have been affected), I do think this is a symptom of a system with a principal-agent problem.

Of course, doctors can be an incredible source of information. But with all things, consider any potential conflicts of interest when taking advice.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#525

Post by hycaria »

rootusrootus wrote: post #156
nomdep wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So - if you don't mind the question, sorry for asking if you do - how/when you have sex?

Isn't that sort of an old joke? Before you have kids, put a jelly bean in a jar every time you have sex. After you have kids, take a jelly bean out of the jar every time. At the end of your life you'll still have jelly beans left... Obviously it varies a lot, and that is just a joke, but man it has been very true for me. My wife had a poor experience growing up, walking in on her mother having sex (they lived in a ti…

You don't seem very happy about the situation, do you even have a say in your home?

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#526

Post by faitswulff »

voisin wrote: post #519
faitswulff wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smothering is a much bigger problem if the parents in question drink alcohol before cosleeping.

This! My wife did a lot of reading in this when our kids were babies and her takeaway was that alcohol/drugs are responsible for most smothering events and that SIDS is actually reduced by co-sleeping - something about the mother’s breathing training the baby to breathe rhythmically. I believe she found a study on this point - I’ll try to dig it up and if I find it I’ll edit this comment with a source.

Please do, I’d enjoy reading that.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#527

Post by leto_ii »

kkwteh wrote: post #428
leto_ii wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would explain why autism seems to “cluster” in upper class homes, where the parents work nonstop. This is an unexpected observation for me. Do you have any references you can point to? I would be interested in knowing more about this.

I got that from the Wikipedia article on the Epidemiology of autism, citation 78. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism#cite_no...

thanks!

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#528

Post by toxik »

knolax wrote: post #390
nsxwolf wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An informal application of #1, the Ferber method. On 4 kids. Worked great. Or seemed to, anyway. You can't know if anything actually works or if the baby just decided to start sleeping on his or her own.

> You want to continue to check on your baby at preset intervals but never feed or rock them to sleep Sounds like childrearing done by a robot.

While you aimed for a flippant remark, robots helping with child rearing is absolutely going to happen. It’s already happening to the extent that it’s possible. What’s so bad about it?

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#529

Post by sethammons »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #351
rootusrootus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potty training is also something that differs widely between developed nations and rest of world. And between kids. My daughter just up and decided at around 18 months or so that she was done with diapers and would use the big girl potty. Not one accident. My son was more apathetic about the whole thing, and it was sometime past his third birthday before he finally started using the toilet to poop in. The piece of…

What you're saying goes to the heart of the article: Why are things so different in western nations compared to developing nations w.r.t. child raising? Potty training is one of the many places where we diverge wildly. Take for example Vietnam, where kids are out of diapers at around 9 months[1]. Even in the US the age at which children are potty trained has crept up slowly from 1 year to 19 months to 27 months today…

I think it is less kids running around naked outside. Honestly.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#530

Post by alistairSH »

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #315
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%.

I think your guess would be wrong, but I also don't think overbooking is a problem. As a child who had lots of free time due to living in a place with a lack of structured activities for kids, I really envy kids who can take advantage of such resources enough to have a packed daily schedule.

It's not so much that kids shouldn't have structured activities; it's that these activities shouldn't be thrust upon them by parents.

Yeah, the smaller the kid, the more direction they're going to need. But a 5th grader should be able to pick their activities within reason.

I mentioned it in another thread, but when I was coaching youth sports, I saw two huge (IMO) problems... first, kids specializing at a young age - 5th and 6th graders playing a single sport 9+ months of the year (vs mixing it up). Related to that was a disturbing frequency of overuse injuries in younger athletes. Baseball players coming back from summer with stress fractures in their spines from too much pitching practice and things like that.

And also a whole lot of straight-A students being forced to attend extra-curricular tutoring. I'm sure in some regions, it might be necessary to learn advanced subjects, but Fairfax County schools have robust GT/AP/honors programs and allow dual enrollment at the local community college - very few kids are running out of available maths classes, etc.

And with a robust state college system (UVA, W&M, VT, GMU, JMU, and on and on), the "penalty" for not getting into Stanford isn't much (for the majority of subjects).

Anyways, all anecdotal, but of my son's peers, the kids with the overbooked schedules didn't really go to colleges any more prestigious than anybody else. Most just ended up at one of the several excellent state colleges.

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