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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend parenting books that are either from other cultures or from a long time ago? When I read articles like this, I nod along and agree that it all seems rational. But then I get a creeping feeling that all this over-optimization is a trait of contemporary Western culture and not necessarily the “best” advice for raising healthy kids, whatever best is supposed to mean. (I’m not sure.)

I think it would be insightful to read parenting advice from different cultures and eras and think about it from first principles.

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It is also worth checking actual stats for those other periods and cultures. Things like violence rates, youth criminality issues, alcohol abuse by minors and so on. People often idealized past, but when you check above, you fairly often find out current kids are not all that bad.

In my culture, kids used to be beaten a lot. So did women, for that matter. And guys getting into drunk fight with nearby village were also something fairly normal. It is improvement that all three happen less nowadays.

I don’t think there’s any reason to believe other cultures or time periods had parenting more figured out than us… But I do believe in a first principles approach. Basically, be good to your kid, use natural consequences instead of punishment and rewards, and model the behavior you want to see.

If you’re curious about that approach, check out RIE parenting or Respectful Parenting.

The Anthropology of Childhood might be interesting to you: https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/anthropology...

As well as this article: https://aeon.co/essays/why-runa-indigenous-people-find-natur... (Amazonian childcare)

This isn't really a parenting book, but rather an analysis of parenting advice from different cultures & eras, and their outcomes: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/29101505 I enjoyed it particularly for its critique of modern Western parenting.

Thanks, this looks insightful.

Perhaps:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/wiki/recommended_reading

This all seems pretty recent and by American authors. I'm asking for more of: how do Indian/Chinese/Japanese/Mexican parents raise their kids? How did 19th-century American parents raise their kids? And so on.

You might be interested in Hunter, Gather, Parent.

I will check that out, thank you

How much do you enjoy coaching books ?

We have pletora of business and self-help books, a ton of them are about management, and we're talking about adults being litteraly paid to be there getting managed. If you see tremendous value in these current books, I'd argue reading current parenting books will be of the same quality.

If you're looking for older books to compare, wouldn't any "best seller" book be a good comparison point on what was seen as acceptetable advice at the time ?

Danish: https://via-ritzau-dk.translate.goog/pressemeddelelse/nordis...

I sympathise with the sentiment, but I would still prefer to take advice from scientists and psychologists and doctors, than absorb fucked-up value systems from yore.

Thinking from first principles is the opposite of "absorbing" ideas.

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