Best parenting practise - ignore most advice from people you don’t know. It tends to be totally subjective, contradictory, and faddish.
Give your kids loads of love, in whatever way feels right to you and your family.
Give your kids loads of love, in whatever way feels right to you and your family.
[EDIT: I went back and realized the original ask wasn't just about newborns, but about parenting all different age levels. I'm not sure that changes much of my opinion, but I do think it makes a collaborative project more interesting/useful]
People say this all the time even though it ignores the fact that virtually anyone has parents even if they don't have kids. Having a kid doesn't make you better at parenting. At best, it forces you to think about parenting but there was nothing stopping you from doing that before.
Holy cow, this is so untrue. Having a kid is pretty much the _only_ way to get better at parenting, saving maybe babysitting someone else's kids for long periods of time.
Given that no one even came close to saying this, this comment seems very disingenuous.
Speak to them. Listen to them. Read to them. Play with them. Don't try to over manage things. Don't over protect them. Let them fail. Let them fall. Don't be too pushy with things you want them to like.
They are not mini you, they are them :)
E.g. what does "over protect" mean? Is it ok to let your 2yo climb on the climbing things at the playground, even if they are for bigger kids? Is hovering to catch him/her in case of fall overprotecting? What about climbing on trees? And Fences? At what age exactly is it ok to let your kids go to school or come back on their own?
Or, "read to them". Is one story at evening enough? one booklet per kid maybe? 2 each seems better, but then, probably it's better to read them something in the morning too etc.
Going back to the original proposition, most likely it won't matter too much if you read 1 book a week or ten stories a day to your kid, s/he will love you anyway, and as long as you are not abusive and keep them fed and clean, you'll be a good enough parent, which is the best one can hope for.
I did kind of a poor job at this at first, and it resulted in me getting completely burned out from trying to maintain work, side projects, community engagement (ie. the user group/meetup I had started), etc etc etc ... once I re-evaluated my priorities, I realized that for the next few years I had to cut back on that other stuff a bit to focus on my family (and work of course, gotta bring home that bacon after all ;) ). Resulted in a significant QoL improvement for me ... and the kids eventually got older, which opened up more time for "stuff" again :)
As long as you bear in mind what they are - just individuals' ideas - not advice, the right answer, gospel, etc.
Talking to babies more helps them learn language faster.
Reading to children helps them become stronger readers.
spanking children makes them more likely to have problems with aggression. Later in life it's a risk factor for criminality and problems with mental health.
I don't spank, but up until 30 or 40 years ago, spanking was a perfectly acceptable form of punishment, and probably most kids were spanked at one time or another. And it wasn't like society was significantly more aggressive than it is now. So I don't know how you can make that sweeping generalization -- at least post links to some studies.
Here is one study that found that the link between spanking and aggression is greatly determined by the context in which the spanking occurs: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED415019.pdf
Yes it was. Much, Much, Much more.
Murder and violence, domestic violence. Society 40 years ago was radically different than it is now, and most of the 20th C. was a very violent time.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-c...
It isnt merely accidental. Of course it isnt the explanation for WW2, or the 1970s murder rate. Neither is lead.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/30/5-facts-abou...
Violent crime rates both in America and within the developed world at large are way down. This is usually overlooked because we've now become hypersensitized to remaining acts of violence - a "mass shooter" that kills nobody but themselves is now all over the Internet in real time, while when I was a kid in the 80s, everyday violence within large swathes of American society would just be a "just another homicide in a blighted urban area, don't go there". But by the statistics, America today is a lot safer than 30 years ago.
Now, I have no idea whether this is because of spanking or not, and drawing a causal connection is much harder in the face of all the conflating changes within society since then. But it's factually incorrect to say that "society wasn't significantly more aggressive than it is now", because it was.
Except they're still higher than they were in 1960 (and kids raised in the 1930s and 1940s certainly got spanked).
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/americas-faulty-perceptio...
There's a wider context, though, where violent crime during 1940-1960 was abnormally low compared to the earlier part of the century (which had violent crime rates similar to today), and then it shot up in the 1970s. And the 1900s in general has been quite low to historical homicide rates in colonial times.
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/docu...
All of this fits my point that you can't really draw conclusions one way or another from the crime rate.
From the Wiki
> Proponents of the lead-crime hypothesis argue that the removal of lead additives from motor fuel, and the consequent decline in children's lead exposure, explains the fall in crime rates in the United States beginning in the 1990s. This hypothesis also offers an explanation of the rise in crime in the preceding decades as the result of increased lead exposure throughout the mid-20th century.
The Abortion hypothesis: kids who would've otherwise turned out to be violent criminals were aborted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
The Broken Windows hypothesis, that cracking down on minor petty crime reduces major violent crime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
The Economic Development hypothesis, that tough times create crime:
https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/09/puzzling-relationship-b...
And probably a bunch that I haven't heard of.
Really, I doubt we'll ever figure out what causes an increase or decrease in the crime rate, because there's likely more than one cause. Because of that, I don't think it's good evidence on either side for a debate on spanking. (Which, BTW, has just validated the point everyone's been making that any collaboratively-built parenting encyclopedia is likely to generate more heat than light.)