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The unusual ways Western parents raise children

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Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#671

Post by mleonhard »

exporectomy wrote: post #542
kinghtown wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Father here. I agree. So much of the parenting advice I see dips into micromanaging and min/maxing to an almost paranoid degree. Just learn about what could kill them in the first year and avoid that. Really, six months and under is the true window for SIDS with freak occurrences. Definitely be on the lookout for any poisonous cleaning products While you’re at it and put them high off the ground. The pro parents who…

Trusting your instincts is how intergenerational cycles of abuse and neglect happen. If you were raised well, then yes, otherwise you have to work consciously to reject your harmful instincts.

Yes. I am a victim of intergenerational abuse. My grandmother consistently beat my father to force obedience. Then he and my mother consistently beat me and my siblings to force obedience. I even believed that it was the best way to raise children. Many years later, I realized it is abuse and a source of emotional problems.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#672

Post by mleonhard »

ineedasername wrote: post #576
hadlock wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My first two kids (and especially the first one) we left hospital with a feeling of "why on Earth would they just let us walk out with a baby? That seems crazy, we have no training at all in this!" The feeling was incredibly surreal with my first one. For my third, they made us watch a series of videos on a range of topics over about 2 hours, which made me think "Yes, of course, this should be the absolute minimum re…

The process for getting authorized to care for helpless adults (nursing assistant) requires months of study and a thorough exam. I think children will have better quality of life when all parental guardians pass a thorough parenting skills exam before they are allowed to care for children.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#673

Post by lucideer »

phabora wrote: post #370
lucideer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cultural norms might be less widespread in Italy, Greece, Spain, but I would say they're closer to being norms in those countries than outside of Europe. Especially with younger parents. They're certainly norms in most of the non-anglophone EU. That said, I guess a lot of that could potentially be connected to outsized anglophone/US influence in developed countries.

Do you have a lot of experience with multiple EU countries?[1] Or are you just using “outsized influence” to extrapolate that non-English speaking countries can be neatly categorized as being a homogeneous contrast to English-speaking countries? [1] The only anglophone EU country is Ireland.

> Do you have a lot of experience with multiple EU countries?

Yes.

> The only anglophone EU country is Ireland.

Technically, though I would still tend to think of the UK here too given the recent-ness of its membership.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#674

Post by exporectomy »

mleonhard wrote: post #671
exporectomy wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trusting your instincts is how intergenerational cycles of abuse and neglect happen. If you were raised well, then yes, otherwise you have to work consciously to reject your harmful instincts.

Yes. I am a victim of intergenerational abuse. My grandmother consistently beat my father to force obedience. Then he and my mother consistently beat me and my siblings to force obedience. I even believed that it was the best way to raise children. Many years later, I realized it is abuse and a source of emotional problems.

Sorry to hear that. There were a lot of best practices just a couple of generations ago that we see as harmful today and I sometimes wonder how humans could have existed for 100,000 years and only in our lifetimes finally realized how to not abuse kids.

Perhaps they really were the best ways to get some kind of outcome like an aggressive man for fighting wars or protecting himself from violence or a hard worker able to tolerate tedium and not be too aspirational despite the personal emotional cost. Or perhaps even the emotional problems wouldn't exist if the rest of society was compatible with those ways?

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#675

Post by mleonhard »

exporectomy wrote: post #674
mleonhard wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I am a victim of intergenerational abuse. My grandmother consistently beat my father to force obedience. Then he and my mother consistently beat me and my siblings to force obedience. I even believed that it was the best way to raise children. Many years later, I realized it is abuse and a source of emotional problems.

Sorry to hear that. There were a lot of best practices just a couple of generations ago that we see as harmful today and I sometimes wonder how humans could have existed for 100,000 years and only in our lifetimes finally realized how to not abuse kids. Perhaps they really were the best ways to get some kind of outcome like an aggressive man for fighting wars or protecting himself from violence or a hard worker able…

I think most of our ancestors were miserable. That didn't stop them from having children.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#676

Post by mbalex99 »

Though I was raised in the US. The one thing that I noticed that was weird was when my friends called their parents by the first name.

Also it was weird how kids and parents were friends with each other. Not in my house! Parent and child had only two things of conversation school, not getting sick, and making sure I eat the food before it got cold.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#677

Post by Dumblydorr »

rajin444 wrote: post #194
Dumblydorr wrote: post #136

The only thing I feel certain of is that hitting children or abusing them is a sad unnecessary practice. Adults need the wisdom and sense to handle problems with logic and words. Physical violence is simply bullying and using superior size and strength, which is irrelevant in the modern world and which predisposes your children to violent behaviors.

What makes you feel certain of this? I may be wrong, but a majority of human history seems to point to (roughly) "spanking is ok, anything more is not". Children do not understand logic the same as adults.

Humans also owned slaves and treated women as domestic property for the majority of human history.

I was an elementary science teacher for 3 years, I found superior logic and intellect and explanation was better than any punishment I could dole out. Nevermind that causing physical suffering by violence is wrong.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#678

Post by iimblack »

shard wrote: post #630
iimblack wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The struggle we’re having is the baby scratches himself nonstop. No matter how much we trim his nails, if we leave him alone at night he’ll be bleeding everywhere. Other than that he sleeps relatively well.

Have you tried baby mittens? It looks like a pouch, there are no individual fingers on the mittens. We put those on our baby to avoid the scratching problem. Here is an example: https://www.amazon.com/RATIVE-Newborn-Scratch-Mittens-9-pair...

Yeah. He eventually figured out how to take them off. We switched to using socks because they stayed on tighter. Then when teething started he would suck on them and rub his face giving him some bad rashes.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#679

Post by zamfi »

plutonorm wrote: post #608
zamfi wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting them down to sleep away from you and then expecting them to suck it up and deal with it when they get distressed is one of the most idiotic things that I hear otherwise intelligent people say This is exactly the kind of "common sense reasoning" put-down that makes parenting so challenging. Do you actually know -- I mean, have actual evidence of harm? Obviously it "sounds idiotic". But bloodletting to reduce…

Fine, don't use common sense. My parents and my parents in law were against breast feeding. I mean literally against breast feeding. Why? Because psychologically it was impossible for them to even think that they might not have done the very best for their kids. You are probably caught in the same trap. And as the evidence comes in for sleep training or separating from your child at night, as it did for artificial mi…

> And anything that deviates from what we have adapted to over millions of years is likely to be a bad idea

That would include agriculture, urbanism, clothing, and living outside of Africa. Are you fighting those too?

Times change, the world changes, our physiological processes are not in sync with our current lives. We have tons of hangovers from our biological past that we suppress for modern society to function. Whether that's good or not is an open question, but unless you plan to raise your kids in a small-group tribal culture on the savannah, you will be deviating from what we have adapted to.

Oh, and: > And as the evidence comes in for sleep training or separating from your child at night, as it did for artificial milk, you will probably adopt the same psychological defence

The evidence for artificial milk is quite mixed, actually, but the harm of making mothers who can't breastfeed feel absolutely ashamed and guilty is very real.

It's not about "common sense" -- it's about making tradeoffs, and everybody has to. For some, that's sleep training, for others, formula, for others, giving up a career to care for children, etc.

It's one thing to believe people are making a mistake in how they raise their children. It's another thing entirely to shame them, or assume ill-intent, incompetence, or cognitive dissonance as the reason they make different choices than you.

There's way too much lack of empathy in this thread, from people who are sure they know better -- and the harm from that is very, very real.

Re: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

#680

Post by zamfi »

krageon wrote: post #622
zamfi wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting them down to sleep away from you and then expecting them to suck it up and deal with it when they get distressed is one of the most idiotic things that I hear otherwise intelligent people say This is exactly the kind of "common sense reasoning" put-down that makes parenting so challenging. Do you actually know -- I mean, have actual evidence of harm? Obviously it "sounds idiotic". But bloodletting to reduce…

> I mean, have actual evidence If you go to a psychologist with a pretty broad spectrum of issues it turns out a lot of the problems are created when you are very little. An unsafe bond is hard to quantify and by stubbornly demanding that it is quantified I think it is more clear that you don't want to entertain the idea than that you are actually skeptical. You already know you value the parents more than the child,…

I am happy to entertain evidence on all sides of the sleep training debate, and I would love to know whether it is long-term harmful or beneficial. And to be clear, I’m actually not making a claim either way about harms around sleep training, only pointing out that there are tradeoffs in every decision, that it’s hard to really know whether sleep training is harmful in any particular circumstance, and that strangers shaming parents for choosing something they think is harmful without considering context is one of the most obnoxious parts of parenting.

That said, I’m aware of work showing that a poor attachment is harmful, you are making the leap from sleep training to poor attachment, and then claiming that, because I’m requesting evidence that is hard to provide, that I’m arguing in bad faith and not interested in the truth.

Your attitude in this post, as has been repeated ad nauseam elsewhere by many others in this thread, implies that if one doesn’t accept “common sense” explanations of harm and question what others consider obvious, that one must have already made up my mind. I have not, and I don’t consider common sense arguments very strong.

In your post, you are making assumptions about my beliefs, questioning my motives, implying that I’m requesting evidence merely as a dissembling technique, and putting words in my mouth. That is bad-faith arguing.

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