The unusual ways Western parents raise children

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 did it all before you are super annoying. I’ve had to politely listen to questionable advice many times. I much prefer people like you who get it. You got to trust your instincts about your own kids. There is broad advice which applies to everyone but everyone’s kid is a little different from the norm as well and as a parent we know our kids better than anyone else.

Seatbelts... yes. Choking first aid... yes.

Healthy eating, talking to them frequently... probably?

Lots of sunlight and fresh air... maybe?

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 guess that was my "instinct". Although we received a crib as a gift, it just sat in another room, empty.

This is misleading. You're correct that there is not conclusive scientific evidence either way, but there are decent studies that support the cortisol theory. Not necessarily that it will "damage their brains", but that cortisol levels spike during sleep training and remain elevated even after the baby learns to stop crying at night. We know that, in general, elevated cortisol levels are bad for humans.

The studies that claim to support sleep training are all terrible, unless there are new ones I haven't seen. The most-cited ones use self-reports from the parents themselves to measure "wellbeing" of the infant, which is plainly ridiculous.

I'm not downvoting you but I strongly disagree. You have an obligation to do an adequate job of this. I think it's also important not to become a slave to the idea that you must always do more because it's "supposed to be hard." Doing a great job of raising kids doesn't have to be a grueling slog, and I suspect that people who think it does aren't doing as good a job as they think they are.

Counter data point. My wife is Argentinian.

I'd say the values you see in her family primarily is "love does come first" and strict boundaries on kids. E.g. the adults are talking, go away.

When I compare that to my own nieces and nephews, they have little boundaries, are quite lethargic and can be quite arrogant. Yet their parents would all describe themselves by your standards.

We also tend to put our elderly in homes, an idea that is abhorrant to my wife.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is ideals are nice. But it's purely theory, mostly to serve your own sensibilities.

This reads like an expectation mindset that with high probability will end up hurting you, your kid and your relationship. Somewhere here belongs the put-oxygen-mask-on-yourself-first metaphor

But this comment makes me think of what is more likely familiar to members of this forum, where parents use their children to serve their own ego, trying to do everything to yield the best "Success" for their child where success is defined by the parent. For so many of us (professionals in the tech industry), the "wellbeing of your child" is not really a question--we know we'll be able to provide food, shelter, etc. People will say they do other things for the "wellbeing" but what they really mean is living out their own failed life goals by putting that baggage on their kid.

So yeah, you got downvoted. It's possible you meant to make a more sympathetic point, but my first impression is that the comment espouses an actively harmful idea about the relation between parent and a child.

GP is trying to survive in the world in which they find themselves. Will sniping some guilt at them summon up some hidden parenting strength?

The problem I have with this attitude is the pronoun. If you have some standards, great but please try to keep them to yourself. There's a lot of toxic "you should do this, you should be like that" type of talk in parenting circles, a lot of which is frankly condescending and non-actionable and add a lot of unnecessary stress, especially for insecure people.

People like to armchair-coach about what a parent ought to be doing, while completely ignoring that the parent's emotional well-being is a pretty big component in a healthy relationship w/ their kids.

This is exactly why others are saying to ignore unsolicited advice: because a lot of it isn't actually advice.

Sounds like you have no clue. Try looking after 3 babies then come back an talk to us.

(To avoid possible confusion, I am shaming the society, not you.)

The problem is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses

You forgo a lot to keep up with the Joneses. Family time gets cut.

If that's the choice you really wish to make, OK. If not, cut costs until you can live a different sort of life. Hints: entertainment, restaurants, high rent, excessive travel, single-use items, services, the expenses due to that extra job, etc.

3. billions of parents have gotten through this before you, you will too.

Children in the West today already spend more time with parents than at any point in the past:

https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...

Quality time with parents is important, of course, but we have become so focused on parental time that children are sacrificing solo time where they learn independence and initiative, and peer time where they learn to create their own identity and cooperate. Also, this places an unsustainable burden on parents who are expected to work full time as well as be parent, teacher, playmate, and cruise director for their kids.

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/

Some kids are just nuts. Ours both were. We went from an hour-long party of rolling, chanting, screaming, head-butting the wall, pulling the hair of any nearby parent, multiple times a night, to... asleep in 10mins. It felt bad at first until we saw how much his mood improved in the daytime because he wasn’t exhausted.

> the most extreme version of which involves leaving a baby on their own to "cry it out", in an effort to encourage their babies to sleep for longer stretches so their parents can get some much-needed rest.

I'm not a parent but that sounds pretty sensible to me. Odd of the BBC to call it "extreme".

Mileage varies, know of one couple who did sleep training and had success with it.

Other couples shared a bed with their kid until it was about two and when they moved to a different apartment they took the opportunity to explain: hey you have your own room now.

It’s not like you’re releasing your child to be raised by the experiences of the village.

With that in mind, many parents are probably struggling to not have their kids consumed by the web during free time, esp during COVID lockdowns.

“You don’t want to do this anymore? You need this for college, you shouldn’t quit everything you do, I wish I could have done this” etc.

Eventually it’s just easier to passively suffer whatever activity you dislike and just recognize the starting cost to trying new things is extreme.

> “ I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in.”

I’d start with asking them about what their parents are like.

Which seems the other side of helicopter parenting; kids don't get much of a say in deciding what they fill their free time with, so they don't develop an opinion in things like that.

Plus (and I'm going to sound old here, give me my cane so I can shake it), there's a lot more casual entertainment lying around the house nowadays to fill the voids in people's time. "doing nothing" is not much of a thing anymore, because people will casually browse their phone or turn on the TV or something. (I'm guilty of that as well).

In the previous generation, there would be a TV but not everything on there would catch the interest of everyone.

My son (now 26) always had summers free at minimum. While he was younger, he did go to a YMCA outdoor "adventure" day camp at a nearby lake park. Once he was in middle school, he stayed home. Sports 2-3 seasons, but he got to pick which one he played and never the crazy travel league stuff. In high school, he was free to do what he wanted (football for 2 years, guitar all 4, and a mix of rec league basketball and volleyball when he felt like it). Always plenty of time to ride his bike, play at the park, run around with friends. Starting in middle school, he'd often disappear across town on bike of skateboard for hours at a time. School was 2.5 miles away and he often opted to ride his skateboard instead of the bus.

I see kids today where every free moment is booked with stuff. All in some sisyphean effort to get into Harvard or something. I mean, sure, I get a desire to go to a top name uni, but the changes of little Johnnie getting in, regardless of extra-curricular, is so small that all the effort seems mostly wasted to me. I "only" went to UVA and turned out fine, IMO, so maybe I'm biased. I dunno.

Or to put it another way, teenage apathy prevalence is probably pre-teen survivor bias.

On a more general note, I can recommend Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday' - it covers similar topics to the bbc article and more.

So I would ask. I mean, idea that 16-17 years old goes for campout without asking parents strikes me as wtf.

When I was in school, very few kids specialized, even through high school. The top football players were also the best wrestlers or basketball players, and most also played baseball or track or lacrosse. Few of them did school basketball and then AAU the remainder of the year.

My son stuck to club/rec basketball (instead of the school team) and volleyball (school team, but mens volleyball prior to high school isn't really a thing in DC).

And, like you said, there's always cycling, martial arms, or track/field (typically takes all interested).

I also agree with keeping kids active/engaged. But, to me, that means supporting them as they pick their own activities, not scheduling every second of their non-school time.

Edit - many of the kids specializing before high school are pretty obviously NOT destined for scholarship athletics. There's really no point to it, IMO. I coached football and basketball for much of my son's youth. Of all the kids I coached, 1 went on to NCAA D1 sports (and that was to W&M, where he still had to meet stringent academic standards).

In the breadth phase, you instruct the kid to study the topic of interest at a distance, collect information, attend events casually and give some reports explaining what they like. Make the thing of "pursuing an interest" just a little bit academic and intentional on their part. With a lot of topics they'll have their fill and loosen their grip pretty quickly, and when that happens, allow them to go on to the next thing.

If they can't shut up about it, that's when you go towards the depth phase and push them towards a more intensive effort, to take the class, read the book, join the club. Set modest goals that still take a committment, and indicate that it's very likely that some kids will be ahead or pick up the material faster. They should still report how things go and get your feedback so that you can spot issues, or teach them how to seek out good feedback where you lack competence. But there's a definite thing here of getting them to see the struggle itself as something rewarding, not the outcome like "being the best" or "making a career". Because if they get a feel for that, they will reach adulthood with some sense of balance and intention to what they pursue and why and a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

You're a good parent to notice and think about these things.

The only thing I'm really jealous of from spending time around people who've grown up with more money is that, assuming your family are basically nice, it's much easier to brush over any cracks or for the children to mentally seperate themselves e.g. The house I grew up is fairly miniscule, the first thing I noticed visiting a large house was not only that they had (say) a music room [so separation] but also that the children could hide within the house outside of earshot of their parents.

The students gaining admissions to top unis are largely self-motivated, extremely smart, and would have chosen high-quality activities on their own.

Looking back at my own childhood, I chose my sports, music, and other activities. My parents enabled them, but never forced me into them. Would forcing me to play an additional sport, or forcing me to attend after-school tutoring made the difference between UVA and Harvard? I doubt it. And what did attending UVA instead of Harvard cost me? Hard to say for sure, but I'm inclined to say "not much" as I'm happily upper-middle-class as it is.

And considering my high school peers who did attend Ivies and similar, most of them either smarter or harder working than me.

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.

I couldnt imagine not letting my own child not do these things if they wanted to.

I think the number one thing you can do for your kid is to live in a neighborhood with lots of other kids.

I'm guessing "summer camp" for most other kids is of a longer duration?

I would read the books on permissive parenting not to convince myself that it's right, but to find techniques and strategies which work.

Potty training is also something that differs widely between developed nations and rest of world.

The bigger issue, in my social circles at least, is that Americans don't live near the grandparents. The economic opportunities exist in a certain few areas, and either the parents aren't willing to take the economic/quality of life hit to leave near their grandparents, or the grandparents can't afford to come live near the grandkids. Especially in the "good school" district areas.

The best situation I've seen is from Everybody Loves Raymond, grandparents nearby, but still in a separate house. But few grandparents will be located in the same neighborhood as the kids. Typically, similar size/price houses are located near each other, and the more expensive homes in with access to better schools come with higher property taxes/maintenance, which older people might not want to pay.

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

When you have a kid that was intentionally burned as a toddler by a grandmother as punishment for crying, and another that was left strapped to a car seat with a box of cereal so his mother could go on a meth-binge, it's frustrating to see upper-middle-class mother's calling each other abusive or neglectful for allowing increased screen time during quarantine.

They'd say like "Sure, breast feed if you can but if you can't that is totally a-ok too. Get some formula, get some skin to skin time. Your baby will be fine". I liked how much effort the classes were putting in to not pressure people to breast feed when it wasn't always an option.

There's no need to feel, as a parent, that you've failed your child if you're not breast feeding.

I'd say this advice doesn't really go far enough. I'm not a scientist but I have read a number of these studies and the biggest takeaway is that in many cases effect sizes are really low and it's hard to say whether these effects are real or the result of some hidden uncontrolled variable. This applies, at a minimum, to breastfeeding v. formula, and also to alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Back to sleep has real and significant effects. Screen time's harm is severely overhyped given the quality of the evidence we have available, but too much sugar is definitely bad for you.

My advice to new parents is basically that in most cases we don't have good evidence for one thing being much better than another. As far as food, baby should have formula or breast milk, but which one doesn't matter all that much. As far as sleeping, the sleep area should be firm and free of blankets, but as far as I'm concerned the evidence about where baby should sleep is minimal. I'm not aware of any strong evidence that sleep training has an effect other than teaching the baby to sleep.

One other commonality I see in a lot of this stuff is there is zero consideration for the costs that the various treatments impose on parents, and particularly on the mother. If breastfeeding gives junior a 0.5% increase in IQ, is that worth a year of suffering and untold hours spent feeding? That's a value judgment, for sure, but it seems to be left out of the equation entirely when people are giving advice to mothers.

Breastfeeding, apart from being cheap, convenient and natural, has been shown to have numerous benefits, not just to intelligence but overall health, even for the mother. There is such an abundance of evidence for this that it's just silly to even question, but you can always research it for yourself.

Regarding women feeling anxious. Since refraining from breastfeeding is a significant risk factor, similar to not properly medicating, I think it's reasonable to view it in the same light. I.e. if you refrain from breastfeeding without a very good reason, you are increasing health risks for your child.

Some interesting statistics can be found here for example. Formula-fed children have about twice the risk of vomiting or diarrhea during their first year. Breastfeeding is about as efficient as antibiotics in preventing ear infections. Etc.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2998971/

General references:

https://www.who.int/health-topics/breastfeeding#tab=tab_1

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I am a medical student and we have been told at uni from professors (paediatricians) that breast feeding _is_ better than formulas I think with regards to asthma or some other allergic stuff. There are reasons that mothers should not or cannot breastfeed and it's not the end of the world, but in general I believe they should.

And really the weight of proof rests on the baby formulas to prove that they're OK. Even common sense suggests breast feeding is better, it's been the way people have been growing up for millenia all around the world.

A compromise is to purchase human breast milk, perhaps mix it 50/50 with formula if your budget is tight. Still, you are often viewed as a failure for doing such.

There may not be wrong way to parent exactly and each parent is entitled to damage their kids ( within reasons prescribed by the society ). My line clearly starts with food and I can already see I people won't like me in school, PTA and like meetings. Joy.

You can probably even leave this one out!

Our sex life has probably never been better in either frequency or quality.

We typically do it in the living room on the couch in the morning before they get up, or same location during their naps, or in my work-from-home office also during naps. Or where-ever we want when we have a baby sitter, although with the pandemic that's pretty rare.

I'd say about 75%-80% of our sexual activity is essentially scheduled at least 4-6 hours in advance, sometimes more. This works great for all involved. Occasionally if we miss our window because one of them wakes up early, we just reschedule to the next soonest window. We'll occasionally even stay up late after we put the boys down to makeup a missed session.

I also think breaking the habit of only having sex in our bed at a particular time when one or the other kind of vaguely expects it is a big contributor to the improvement in our sex life.

Instead we have explicit communication about when and where we're going to have sex. There's still some room to be spontaneous, but it's very limited with kids.

My answer would be that you do it while the baby sleeps, and you do it less. Otherwise on the odd occasion you’re away from the baby. It’s a drag. Though in my experience I was always so tired, it was generally a lower priority.

Others might have had a different experience though.

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 tiny apartment, so most of the space was shared), and so she has no interest in sex at all if there are children in the house. Anywhere. And it's a 3000sf house, not a tiny apartment.

Doesn't help that the kids (8 & 10) routinely choose to sleep in our room rather than their own (they do not sleep in our bed, however, we nixed that after they were a few years old because it was too disruptive to my sleep).

Middle-of-the-afternoon is a good time. Older kids can be occupied with Legos while the baby naps and the parents sneak off.

The theory goes that children are programmed by nature to prevent more offspring. A sort of incentive here.

Looking online there are mixed reviews of whether co sleeping hurt the adult relationship.

Peter Blair, based at the University of Bristol, has done some great work studying deaths caused by co-sleeping and found some very important factors, mainly the health of the child, any modifiers of the parent's sleep and the sleeping position. For example, drug use by the parents (including alcohol, cigarettes, over the counter & prescription medicine), making them sleep heavier. Also falling asleep on the sofa or a pillow near the child.

So much parenting advice is one-size-fits-none and it takes quite a bit of effort to work out the reality. Luckily, with a baby in arms there's often a lot of time available for reading the many opinions out there. ;)

Even after having one kid, I too no longer care about the criticisms. We're all just trying to survive.

How do they even know you're co-sleeping in the first place?

    Parents -> Grand parents -> Guests -> Kids/Servants

Growing up the youngest of three siblings in a 3 bedroom home, I usually slept on the sofa in the living room. I was supposed to share a room with my teenage brother, but he wouldn't tolerate me to be in the same room.

Or if you have a baby who fusses but doesn't actually need anything.

See eg this from Buttle: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45017513

[1] The only anglophone EU country is Ireland.

I find this sentence interesting in comparison to the phrase "dumb people talk about people, average people talk about things, smart people talk about ideas" that I've seen in various forms on the internet.

Hot take: People are over-optimizing for grand impact, while neglecting the more profound impact on the local level. Most people will not be senators, but I think many people, with some work, can run for office as an alderman, mayor, or county representative.

Would be interesting to see parent's response.

Totally spit-balling, but I guess the larger point is there are a lot of possible explanations for what OP describes (if it's even true, diagnosis may just be more likely in those families)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism#cite_no...

That's a pretty broad and inaccurate generalization of autism spectrum disorders. If anything I think people on the spectrum are far less likely to be convinced to buy products through advertisement. Autism is a sort of innate stubbornness.

We don't have to select for that, the vast majority of people are already brainless consumers. And most of them think they are not.

The reality is that increasing the supply of workers doesn't necessarily mean increased competition for jobs. More people available to work means that more can be produced across the board; each additional worker can create opportunities for further additional workers. The pie can be grown at the same time that it's sliced more ways.

If you’re buying a house with two incomes, you can outbid a couple with one income by a factor of two-ish. You don’t need more houses to keep up with more workers per house, so you just see prices get bid up. Eventually a house costs 1.7 full time incomes because that’s what the couple you’re bidding against probably has.

"If you are: 1. A nonsmoker 2. Sober and unimpaired 3. A breastfeeding mother

and your baby is: 4. Healthy and full-term 5. On his back 6. Lightly dressed

and you both are: 7. On a safe surface

Then your baby in bed with you is at no greater risk for SIDS than if he’s nearby in a crib."[0]

A safe sleep surface means the mattress is not too soft (we tested our adult mattress to make sure it met the standards for crib mattresses), no gaps by the wall that the baby can get wedged in, bed only (no couch or recliner), light bedding, sleepwear without long ribbons or drawstrings that can strangle, etc.

It's important to do the research and not be cavalier about the risks, but I think it's worth learning how to work around them so everyone can get great sleep.

[0] https://www.llli.org/the-safe-sleep-seven/

We’ve all seen the American TV show/films where some Mega Loser has failed to move out the year they become eighteen and graduated the year they become twenty-two. Maybe it comes off as a trope for non-Americans.

It was no more effective than just telling me no.

People use spanking as a crutch, it really has no place in the child raising toolkit imo.

[0] Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: a meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological bulletin, 128(4), 539.

[1] Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of family psychology, 30(4), 453.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_A._Straus

- It's easy to find people who were spanked that are in favor of spanking, people who were spanked that aren't in favor of spanking, and people who weren't spanked that aren't in favor of spanking. People who weren't spanked that are in favor of spanking seem almost non-existent.

- Just perusing Google Scholar and reading abstracts, studies of spanking much more often than not link it to negative outcomes, most commonly "externalizing behavior". And while some studies find it not meaningfully linked to negative outcomes, no study I have seen links it to positive outcomes.

- Children not understanding logic the same as adults does not entail that physical punishment be necessary in child rearing.

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.

The adult domestic violence was also accepted a lot.

That has nothing to do with being a mother and everything to do with spending a lot of time with that child. I'll bet that anybody who spends enough time with a child will be able to do that, regardless of that persons gender or genetic relation to the child.

First off, I thought it was a lot more conventionally understood that mothers' bodies undergo permanent hormone-driven changes during pregnancy - and that these changes yield some more-or-less common outcomes across cultures and locales. [0] One of those outcomes is the following:

> The researchers found that the mothers had surprisingly consistent responses to their crying babies, “and in a very short amount of time from the start of the cry, five seconds, they preferred to pick up and hold or to talk to their infant,” Bornstein said.

I also thought it was much more conventionally understood that fathers do not exhibit the same changes as mothers do. [1] Nevertheless, I want to make it clear that I do not have children. My understanding of this phenomenon stems from my background in psychoacoustics, not child-rearing.

Second, though, and perhaps more importantly, I am pretty disappointed in this community for laboring to interpret my points as misogynistic, out of touch with modern norms, or whatever, when a simple google search would have easily brought my points into context. Perhaps I failed to follow the conventions of citing resources to learn more about these things, but as I already indicated I didn't do this because I thought the majority of those commenting would have already been aware of this research. I apologize for not including it and I will try to do better in the future.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/23/health/moms-babies-crying-res...

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/womens-mens-br...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

This headline does represent the article. The article talks about different cultural practices but is questioning if one of them is weird because it doesn't conform to other groups practices.

Do you normally call people or groups of people weird in a newspaper because they don't conform with what you consider your 'normal' cultural practices? Would you consider that a feature of an inclusive society?

The internet would be a better place if opinion pieces were kept on separate websites from news, and people wouldn't need to criticize how they're written. Then there'd be a lot less worry about if it was weird.

If they want to point out potential harmful behaviours, they should do that, and then they would get called out on doing so with little to no evidence. Instead they went with "weird" because they have no argument per se.