The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of th…
From the outside, American culture around child-rearing seems like there is an adversarial relationship with tinges of resentment when it comes to how parents see children.
A lot of the tough love type of parenting seems to come from a place of pacifying parents, giving them what they want, over their burdensome children with "problem" behavior. You get things like in the OP, corporeal punishment, wilderness therapy, conversion therapy, using aversives[1] to literally hurt and shock autistic kids into complying with the behavior their parents want to see, etc. Some parents even seem to enjoy and take pride in it, and there are some who wish they could send their 11 year olds to go work in the coal mines to build a work ethic or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...