The ties that bind: Cradling in Tajikistan | Hacker News Reader

The ties that bind: Cradling in Tajikistan

journals.plos.org

32 pointscom2kid18 comments

I feel a bit sad that the authors needed 'machine learning' to identify those three patterns...

Who’d have thought this could happen either during the day, during the night, or during both? We definitely need the best buzzwords to gain such profound insight. I look forward to the follow-up with blockchain in it.

can I get peer review of my NFT of a Tajik cradle?

I really should make a NFT for each of my articles, that's a great idea!

"20% of 12- to 24-month-olds spent more than 15 hours bound in the gahvora"

This is shocking lol. I was initially like 'this is just a swaddle' but up to 2 years old?? My 2 year old daughters are already running and dancing all day. Seems like literal torture.

It's way more than a swaddle. It's up to 20 hours of very restricted movement (except head with slight side to side movement. They pee and poo from this immobilized position through holes in the cradles.

As an adult, I would think it would be at least mildly traumatic, like what would you do to relieve an itch or feeling of being bound?

But, I guess there doesn't seem to be long term PTSD associated with it? So... I would still not want to be a baby bound like that.

Perhaps I'm a huge outlier, but i don't remember almost anything before the age of 5 or 6...

I guest this practice may leave some subtle trauma, but it's for sure something that is adjusted later, leaving no or little trace.

I have been to Tajikistan, working in education (university): the kids are doing fine.

Conscious memory is a tiny portion of the mind, like the place-setting at a dinner table. This is screwing with the boards in the walls of the house.

It is well-known that neglect during early infancy has a strong life-long negative effect. The argument that one doesn't remember much from before age 5 doesn't impede early infancy having a huge effect on emotional and physical development. If cradling would have a net-positive effect on children, evolution would probably have spread the practice world-wide.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702123/ [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/06/neglect

cradling is not neglect, two very different things

The paper indicates that Tajik infants are hardly neglected: they are attended to quickly if they cry, and are considered a very important part of the family and overall community and are interacted with accordingly.

I don't think poster is claiming it's neglect.

What they seem to say is while one as an infant rarely can consciously recall neglect, it does not mean that neglect has no long term effect and that a similar thing _could_ happen here. We just don't have studies one way or another, though anecdotally there does not seem to be any long term negative effects with cradling.

This would be the opposite of neglect. What we do is, comparatively, neglect since we let kids run around. Good knows a certain number of our children under two injure themselves getting into trouble while parents are distracted, sometimes fatally.

Yeah, I feel a bit bad for sticking my 15-month-old in a 2m x 1m playpen with his favorite toys so I can attend to something else for a few minutes. He also apparently hated being swaddled, managing to break loose by about six weeks old.

Babyproofing, like IT security, is best approached as layers and can never be absolute. And toddlers are hackers. Mine even has what I call his “reverse-engineering noise”.

According to the article only about 7.5% of babies seem to have negative reactions (are agitated), and most mothers say that their children like the gahvora. Far from being neglected, they receive a lot of attention and care from the entire family.

Calling it torture is probably projecting our western values to a different culture. We encourage our kids to run and dance, and they do, and we are happy, and they are happy. Tajik mothers do things differently, so it is normal that babies react differently, they are staying still, their mother is happy, and the baby is happy. The article is short on details about long term effects but they don't look as bad as expected.

https://imgur.com/a/e9p1vSx

I purchased the wooden smoking pipe looking device in the image at a Bazar in Tajikistan a few years ago. It's used for bundled male infants to direct urine out of the blankets.

This is really interesting. Shows the diversity of human experience and how very different methods of child rearing can result in healthy, happy children.

This is called "Besik" in most other Central Asian countries. Gahvora is just the Tajik specific name for it.

(use your favourite translation tool on this) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BA...

It's deemed a normal practice, similar to swaddling or baby wraps etc. Although Its a bit out-dated now and more "traditional".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com