The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures | Hacker News Reader

The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures

bbc.co.uk

282 pointsdrucken185 comments

This is very funny for someone who lives in Minnesota. My wife grew up in Taiwan, and didn't see snow for the first time until she was twenty-one years old. When we moved to Minnesota a year after we were married over in Taiwan, she then got BIG TIME acquainted with snow, as we moved in February (about twenty-eight years ago today, now that I think of it).

Our four children all pile outside in Minnesota winter weather with very minimal clothing on--indoor wear even when there is snow on the ground, and light jackets even when the temperature is well below freezing. My wife spent years being horrified at seeing her half-Taiwanese children going out lightly dressed in temperatures that were unimaginable to her when she was growing up, while I just smiled and said, "Our children are just reflecting their Norwegian ancestry." Today we've all learned to deal with the cold.

My wife and I had a very enjoyable walk to the public library (one mile out, one mile back) yesterday, and I reflected that she has proved her adaptability by living so much of her life in weather that she never experienced at all in childhood. Personally, my second stay in Taiwan (1998-2001) seems to have permanently reset my body's thermostat, so much so that I NEVER feel hot anywhere in the United States, but now feel cold from time to time during winter in Minnesota. I'm probably more adapted to Taipei's semitropical climate now. But whatever the weather trade-offs, it's a delight to be outdoors, and I encourage our children and myself to get out of the house every day, in all seasons, wherever we live. When we do that, we have the children WITH us, because we want them to experience the different sights and sounds as we are on the move. I have not tried what the interesting submitted article specifically mentions, leaving a baby carriage (pram) outdoors while the baby is immobile. That sounds a bit radical to me, but apparently it works in its cultural context.

When I go to Taiwan in the winter, everyone's wearing thick coats, and its only about 50-70F, that's perfect weather in California, and there I was just in shorts and a t-shirt. I stopped and conformed to wearing at least a jacket after I kept getting odd looks everywhere I went, also my grandma kept yelling at me to wear more than just shorts. But I'd probably die in minnesota.

I remember once as a kid trying to setup a sprinkler to ice a hill at ~(-15c/5f). I spent around 45 minutes puttering around out there in what was soon a wet shirt and long pants. I would then warm up for a while inside and then try again.

PS: Next day, I wanted to try again, but the hose ended up freasing that night. I remember my Mom being less than pleased with the idea I did not want to ware a jacket because it was just going to get wet.

What's the humidity like in Minnesota? When I lived in CO (very dry) it had to get very cold before it felt cold as opposed to living the south where humid 50Fs feels really cold.

I would assume that humidity in the 'land of 10000 lakes' is fairly high.

EDIT: ~76% for February: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/avgrh.html

Yes, the humidity here is usually high. It makes the summers feel warmer than they otherwise would and the winters colder (though the wind definitely plays a part in the latter as well).

The summers can get miserable, but the winters are pretty dry actually because when temperatures drop so low it takes the excess moisture out of the air. It doesn't feel anything like a Seattle or London piercing cold at similar temperatures. Of course that's a bit like Phoenix residents saying "yeah, it's 115°, but it's a dry heat"

It's not the humidity in Minnesota and upper plains winters that gets you, it's the wind. 15-20 degrees is chilly, but perfectly manageable. However, add a stiff breeze to that and it becomes truly cold. Add wind to <0 F temps and it becomes downright dangerous. It quickly moves beyond feeling cold to feeling pain, like sharp needles being poked into your skin.

Fresh air is absolutely the vital glue for a happy life. Teaching our kids to just go for a walk each day is probably worth two MBAs in life success and happiness

A co-worker of mine and his wife adopted a baby from China, he said when he and other western people went there, and occasional trips back there, they were shocked at the heat!

Not the outside temperature but inside he said anywhere they went whether inside a bus or a hotel it was boiling hot all the time, thermostats set at 25C or even 30C!

Uh!? Your friend probably hasn't been to southern China. Heating is rather uncommon in Guangdong or Guangxi for example, even inside apartments or restaurants. I recently traveled to Guilin (Guangxi) and usually had to keep my winter jacket on when eating in restaurants. My Shenzhen apartment doesn't have heating as well so when it gets close to 0, better have warm clothes.

I figured it would be the other way around people in the south art of China, which I think is where my co-worker went, would be hot so people would be accustomed to heat.

My cousin married a guy from Australia and it was funny to see the reaction to certain temperatures. My cousin is used to winters here which get to about -25C but in Australia (Canberra I think it was) she said people wore winter coats when it was +20C, to them it was bitterly cold she said.

It makes sense that you acclimatize to a warm climate I wish I could live someplace warm :(

"There is no bad weather, only bad clothing."

Love that. Growing up with Patagonia clothes (family works there) we had constant proof. Skiing in sub-zero temperatures was always fine for us, just put on more layers. Meanwhile everyone around us was freezing their hands off. The other secret is that gloves are always cold because the fingers are separated; wear mittens instead.

Exactly. I commute to work by bike, and though it doesn't get too cold here, it does rain a lot, so a large fraction of my rides are in the low 40s/high 30s and rain. Most people do everything they can to avoid going out it the rain, but if you wear the proper gear it's great.

I grew up in Oregon, and did a lot of riding in weather like that. With proper gear, you stay dry and warm about an hour, and then you start getting wet and cold anyway, because with enough rain, it seeps through pretty much anything. 5 degrees C and rain is way worse than snow and -5C for staying outdoors for long periods of time.

There's a saying among sailors: "Waterproof means that once the water gets in, it can't get out again."

This is the thought I have about chilly/damp weather.

If the extent of your time outside is going from one building to another then (at least until the temperature actually drops far enough to become dangerous), less clothing is better.

If it's in the mid-30s and slightly drizzling outside, but it's only a 20 minute walk to work, then a t-shirt and jeans are the way to go. The instant you step into a building you'll be warm and dry as a bone while everyone else will be damp and chilled for some time. My jacket only goes on if I perceive a hypothermia risk, and gloves only get used if I think frostbite might become a risk.

Well, at least it can warm up that way. Indeed, neoprene is pretty effective for bike riding in that kind of weather, even though it gets kind of heavy and sloppy.

Which is why you dress for being warm and wet. I'm commuting by bike every day in London and it's usually been between -2 and 2 deg C in the morning/evening the last few months (with occasional milder spells).

I use arm roubaix backed lycra arm and leg warmers. They're not waterproof and they get wet quickly in rain but you soon warm up the water that gets trapped and then you're fine. It's the same principle as a wetsuit.

Getting the number of layers right is tricky. Too few and you'll be cold. Too many and you'll soon start to overheat. The ideal is starting off feeling cold but warming up within 10 minutes of the ride. Warming up much sooner than that usually means you've got too many layers on.

A waterproof jacket is good but don't expect it to keep everything out, so a tight base layer (e.g. Skins) on the torso can be good.

I've done several 24+ hour rides in constant rain with temperatures below 5 deg C using this strategy with no problems.

The best trick I learned while skiing is to do large arm circles when your fingers start getting cold. This forces blood back to your fingertips and instantly warms them back up.

Or, as you suggested, mittens.

Ah! Thank you for the gloves vs mittens tip. I have always found gloves futile, they never warm my hands. I will try mittens next winter.

You absolutely should! It really is true. Plus you actually have more dexterity—you can't really hold anything with gloved fingers anyway. Mittens > gloves!

The Swedes can say that because they don't worry about tornadoes. Is there clothing that could stand up to an F-5?

It's called not being in a tornado zone. :P

Or I'm sure some of the suits ordinance disposal techs wear are probably tornado proof.

A freight train car is not tornado proof. There is no clothing that is tornado proof.

If I wear a suit designed such that I had an air supply, sufficient protection from cold, a filter system for external air and enough padding (and or other measures) to ensure I could survive a fall at not-insignificant speeds and impacts from other debris, would this qualify as tornado proof?

Is it possible to do that and still call it "clothes"?

Are spacesuits clothes?

Sure. For one, even on Earth, astronauts are able to walk in them. Diving suits are also clothes. Even atmospheric diving suits, like the Exosuit from Nuytco Research, are clothes.

So are the various efforts of Hurtubise, like the bear-proof armor suit and the Trojan Ballistics Suit of Armor.

I acknowledge that a powered exoskeleton can be a grey area, but I don't think a hypothetical tornado-proof suit would come anywhere close to this grey area.

Here's vehicles which are meant to survive tornadoes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Intercept_Vehicle . How do you make that into clothing?

I think you're right in that by the point you've made a tornado proof suit, it is actually a vehicle.

If it can survive being dropped from half a mile or having the end of a two-by-four strike it at 500 mph, and you can still call it clothing with a straight face, maybe. To say the least, I don't believe it exists today.

Swede here, 4 kids, all of them have been sleeping outside down to -15 C (at least).

1) The kids are dressed more like a astronaut, wool clothing, a isolated dungaree, stuffed inside a kind of extra isolated bag. One problem is that the kids turn to overheat if you don't undress them when going indoors.

2) Sweden is very rural, there is probably bad to sleep outside in Stockholm/Gothenburg compared to sleep outside the rest of the country.

3) Sleeping next to a street is probably a bad idea regardless temperature (the picture was taken in Copenhagen which is not in Sweden, and I didn't see any snow in the picture so no winter there)

4) Swedes are obsessed with safty but we tend not to calculate threat from other people as a safty matter. Around every kindergarten there are fencing keeping the kids inside but not to keep bad people out. That some evil person should take a child has the same threat level as if an alien should come by. There have been some cases of mentally-ill patients stabbing kids but that hasn't really changed anything.

5) There was someone in a thread calling out for Vitamin D. That's true enough but every single infant/kid in Sweden gets free Vitamin D anyway.

6) I think its a very cultural thing, my kids have slept longer outside, stuffed in that sleeping bag if its cold, than they ever do when napping inside. Swedes like to think of ourselves as very outdoor, into the wild, sports, activity and health so you as a parent are supposed to be outside a lot, if you have more kids some of them are going to be tired and take that nap, wherever you are.

Note that their sub-zero is Centigrade. Without wind, -5C or 23F is generally considered a nice winter day in most snowy places.

From experience, I'd like to add that the myth of "once it's below -X it doesn't really matter" is just not true. -50F feels WAYYYY colder than -25F for example.

That's one thing that's nice about coastal Nordic cities: much warmer than you might think, certainly compared to places like Eastern Europe or inland Canada. Even in February, the average daytime temperature still gets up to 31 F in Stockholm, 36 F in Copenhagen, and 29 F in Helsinki.

interesting, but can't we use the metric system as well, plz?

Eh, I tend to just go with whatever the person I reply to uses, or whatever majority usage in the audience I'm talking to is, which is why I used Fahrenheit here despite the fact that I live in Copenhagen and my own thermometers are in C. I'd use the metric system for scientific purposes, but for daily life I'm pretty comfortable with whatever mixture people want to use among such old friends as F, C, pints, oz, mL, cL, stones, kg, lbs, megabytes, mebibytes. They could hardly be weirder than the Danish numbering system!

How is the Danish numbering system weird? I ask as a curious Dane.

Well there isn't anything weird with the counting or mathematical usage, just the names for them seem not to use a typical decimal system. For example, in English and Norwegian, 75 and 82 are straightforward compounds of "7,5" and "8,2". In English, seventy-five, eighty-two; in Norwegian, syttifem, åttito.

But in Danish, 70 isn't syv-something. Instead it seems it's halvfjerds, which sounds like half a fjerd, except a fjerd is not a number. ;-) And even more confusingly, 50 sounds awfully like half-60.

From what I've read, it used to be "half four twenty" (halvfjerdsindstyve), where "half four" is an archaic way of saying 3½, so 3½ 20 = 70. Which later, I suppose, got contracted into halvfjerds. Admittedly you can just treat them like opaque symbols to memorize, so I doubt anyone thinks of 75 as "5 and 3½ x 20". But the Norwegian numbers seem more orderly...

Ah, yes that is weird once you start thinking about it. As a native speaker I've never given it a second thought, but I can certainly see how it would be confusing.

That's sort-of similar (though even weirder than) French[1], where, where you sometimes count in twenties instead of tens. So instead of sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, it's (the equivalent of) sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven. And eighty is really four-twenties, so ninety-five is four-twenties-and-fifteen, etc.

Of course, English used to be like this too — thus "three score years and ten". And many languages still retain non-decimalised words for eleven and twelve (and sometimes powers of them, like a gross or mass.)

[1] Well, French French. Swiss French and Belgian French are much more sensible.

We still have halvanden (half second or 1.5), but apparently half third, half fourth, half fifth, etc., used to be common too.

yes -- I was chucked out, and I'm not Nordic. Actually my mother told our new neighbours when they got kids, that it doesn't harm, at all.

That being said, I've been in Stockholm and Tallinn with temperatures between -15 and -30C in Feb. Coming from the west coast, that was an interesting endeavor.

Measured temp is one thing, wind chill is another.

For Stockholm and Copenhagen below -15 C would be very rare (but looks like Talinn is rather colder). The record low in Copenhagen is -18 C, and in Stockholm -16 C, at least as measured wherever their official weather stations are (probably near the coast). In Copenhagen, -3 to +3 are more typical; older Danish apartments' relatively poor insulation is barely capable of dealing with -10 C!

But it is indeed often quite windy.

The record low in Stockholm is -26, not -16 C. At least according to wikipedia.

Was about to say the same, Stockholm surely sometimes gets colder than -16°C. Without looking any stats, probably -16°F (which is -27°C). For Helsinki, which not much further to the north, but closer to continental Russia, the record lows are -34°C / -30°F.

And I slept outside in temperatures colder than this, my children did, and their children eventually will. It's a matter of proper clothing.

> -50F feels WAYYYY colder than -25F for example.

My experience is that this is true in the long-term, but if you're only outside for a few minutes, you won't notice the difference unless it's windy.

Properly dressed for it, I noticed it mostly in that I coughed instantly upon taking the first few breaths outdoors. Never had experienced that at as low as -30F or so prior.

Yes, wind... enough wind can ruin your day at any temperature.

-20C is a nice day if there isn't any wind, a bit of humidity helps too.

Today it was -3C but very windy and dry it felt like -50C after coming out of a warm office!

I was raised for the first three years of my life in a mountainous region. I have been put to sleep outside on the balcony every day. My mother told me that once my grandmother visited she was panicked to find out I was MIA, to which Mother calmly replied "the snow has made a drift out of the stroller again". What is left from all that is the habit to sleep every night on wide open window (winters usually I am single ... may have some correlation) and the inability to catch cold or flu for more than a day. Getting out of the warm bed on -17 C in the room is unique and highly recommended experience.

So it is perfectly normal in lots of places in the world.

Seriously?? -17C? Have you done it? Im totally tempted to try...

Yeah ... although for almost half an hour before that I tried my best to convince myself that my bladder will cope just fine with pressures more suitable for combustion engine. I couldn't so I had to get up.

Is there a correlation between getting cold and catching a cold? I didn't think there was?

The notion that getting cold causes illness is basically discredited, and in fact the reason that people get sick more during cold seasons is because they tend to stay indoors in closer contact with other people. That supports the nordic practice of having babies spend more time outside in fresh air even when it's cold.

While the cold doesn't cause illness, it seems to have the potential to reduce immune response which can then result in more illness than if one hadn't gotten cold. From Wikipedia's page on the common cold: While colds are caused by viruses and not cold temperatures, there is some controversy over the role of body cooling as a risk factor for the common cold; the majority of the evidence suggests that it may result in greater susceptibility to infection.

It may have been coincidental but I fell ill with colds a day or two after both times I got caught out in the cold with inadequate clothing this winter so I had to look this up.

In addition to what DavidAdams said, indoor air is typically less humid when a heater is running. This can improve virus survivability. Spending time outside keeps your sinus moist.

What I found most interesting about this article is that parents felt so strongly about having their kids nap outside, despite the fact that the scientific evidence presented in the article that this is actually better than napping indoors is mixed at best.

The article cites a survey of parents who say their kids nap better outdoors, (with a broken link), but surveys are far less convincing than experiments. In this case, parents should not use this survey as a reason to have their kids nap outside, because the survey is just a reflection of their own opinions. Following it would be like eating their own dog food.

As for more scientific evidence, according to the article "Paediatrician Margareta Blennow says reports from the Swedish Environmental protection agency show conflicting results."

So from the article, it doesn't appear that there is substantial scientific evidence that sleeping outdoors is any better for the children. Why do parents continue to do so anyway? I think it's just a cultural thing. I think many cultures have basically random opinions along the lines of "Doing X is better for your health". As long as X isn't actually very bad for you, people will continue to do X despite the lack of evidence that it's actually good for you.

Both my kids have slept outside, also in temperatures down to -10C. I don't know whether they slept better, but they certainly slept for longer - giving me more time to get other things done. I suspect thats probably the real reason for it!

I used to go on camping trips regularly. I always found that I woke up exceptionally well-rested in a tent. I attribute that to a combination of the fresh air, the possibility of a gentle breeze, and the difference of outdoor sounds vs. a 60Hz hum in the house. And it's not about sleep length, either; I would always wake up earlier in a tent than in my bed.

I think the phenomenon is worthy of more in-depth scientific experimentation, but I wouldn't ignore my own experience; even with no control group and a sample size of one.

Kids sleep longer outside. If you have a child, every hour your child sleeps is an hour of your life you won back.

My baby loves the cold (must be because she was born in Chicago in winter...) The thing that frightens me about the article isn't the leaving the baby outside in the cold, but the leaving the baby out where it could be stolen...

My relatives keep mentioning the possibility of my son being stolen, which seems absurd to me. I was very curious what the real odds of your child being stolen by a stranger in the US are.

EDIT: The post motivated me to do some quick Googling... one article I found said there are roughly 40 children abducted by strangers or slight acquaintances in the US annually which would make your child "700 times more likely to get into Harvard than to be the victim of such an abduction".

Keep in mind the general state of fear in the US. If a danger even exists, it's cause for concern. Unless it involves an automobile.

--d, US Citizen

There are few others besides the car that American citizens seem (italics would be ideal here) blinkered to. It seems obvious to an outsider - who is possibly indoctrinated the polar opposite way. however the topics are all so inflammatory that even HN can get uncivil.

You can italicize a word by adding an asterisk directly before and after the word without spaces.

Thanks.

(I'm an American.) I'd be interested to hear what dangers Americans seem to be oblivious of.

Touchy ground! The two I had in mind were the lack of effective gun control and the problems associated with a lack of socialised healthcare. I would characterize these as both being partly due to an us/them 2 party government system, which encourages exclusion. I should add that New Zealand isn't free of gun issues, healthcare system problems or political parties playing BS games, its just they seem to pale compared to US paper headlines. I should note that prevailing views here on HN, are vastly different to those I notice in US papers and TV.

No matter the topic, some Americans will be worried about it. Still, the list might include:

Many western countries have a state television service, funded by a TV fee or a special billing system. The goal is to have a news source which is (nominally) independent of the government and which is not beholden to advertisers. The US was once worried about this, but the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

Most of the citizens of the other western countries are agog at the US for insisting on privatized medical care. (As lostlogin also pointed out.)

My experience in visiting Europe is that nationality and ethnicity are much more closely tied. A second generation Arab in France or Turk in Germany may still be considered a foreigner. Apparently we are more oblivious to the need to regard the grandchildren of immigrants as still untrustworthy. (At the very least, xenophobia in Europe feels different than in the US.)

GMO restrictions are much, much higher in Europe than the US. Apparently Europeans believe in this concept of "freedom of choice to the farmers and consumers", and insist that GMO foods be labeled as such, while the US does not require that labeling.

Privacy laws are higher in Europe, in part because of strong memories of how "World War II-era fascist governments and post-War Communist regimes" used that information.

Someone from Bhutan might say that the US and most other countries are too interested in their country's Gross Domestic Product and not in Gross Domestic Happiness.

The main problem with the Fairness Doctrine is it's a limitation on freedom of speech. This is something that Americans can be quite sensitive to, more than Europeans, if we'd like to talk about people having blinkers on. :)

The Fairness Doctrine was designed in 1949 to "provide adequate coverage of public issues", and when challenged in court it was judged constitutional specifically because the radio and television airwaves were limited. With expanding sources of media, including cable television and the Internet, the availability of broadcast airwaves no longer presents a substantial limitation on Americans being able to access any given point of view.

Modern attempts to revive the fairness doctrine are led more or less exclusively by partisans who favor the Democratic Party and preferred the content of political speech under the old system. (For example, Bill Clinton stated that he supported it "because essentially there's always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.") Many of these partisans would like to apply the doctrine to cable television and other non-public-airwave broadcast media. However, court rulings made it quite explicit that if they ever found that the doctrine was limiting political speech, it would be found unconstitutional, so it is likely all of these attempts will fail even if legislated or regulated.

Neutrality and "fairness" is, of course, impossible to judge objectively. Just ask any Wikipedia administrators dealing with edit wars. ;) Government regulation of "fairness" and government domination of the media have the potential to present significant limitations on political freedom - look at various South American dictators' and their forays into controlling the media and bullying opposing points of view. It is the fox guarding the henhouse. Of course, sometimes you may have relatively benevolent foxes (I hear the BBC's okay!) or you may just have suicidal hens who fawn over the latest bit of personality-cult politician voluntarily (no further comment on this topic, this post is enough of a digression).

I remember reading Pipi Longstocking, where she's asked why she's walking backwards. She replied 'Why not? It's a free country.' It was rather a surprise to me since I used to think of that as being an American reaction, not a foreign one. But Sweden (where I now live) is rather proud of its free speech heritage, and you can see its history in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Sweden . The Press Freedom Index rates it much higher than the US for its freedom of the press.

This does not apply to all of Europe. I do not like several ways in which Germany restricts speech, including its 'blasphemy against religion' laws.

In any case, it's true that I did mix up two different points to make a comparison. The BBC model, used also in the Nordic countries, does not have a monopoly on television broadcast. Other broadcasters, including commercial ones, can and do exist. The Fairness Doctrine does not apply, no, if others can and do broadcast? (Though on the other hand, radio here is not that diverse. I miss listening to odd-ball student radio.)

The Swedish view is that an independent news source, independent even of the advertisers, makes for a more informed public. Notice please that I'm saying "independent" here and neither neutral nor fair. Italian public television is part of the government, and not run by a (mostly) independent organization.

This also different than the US model, where public television is sponsored by its own viewers and by various grants. In the BBC model, the funding comes from the TV license fee, and the rates are under review by the legislature and subject to a charter. (I actually don't know how the Swedish equivalent works here.)

So, in the US we think that the news should be funded only by the people who watch it, either through voluntary membership payments or indirectly through its advertisers. In the Nordic countries (and others), they think that leads to a less informed public.

Great comment. Your comment on GMO. I had always thought that Monsanto had huge sway in American political circles, although I have no idea where I got this from. Unfortunately the big stick seems to be used to get other countries to accept Monsanto friendly labeling - American backs its businesses in a way not all other countries do. This doesn't have to be a bad thing though.

If a gun exists, it's only for killing. <== another irrational (on some people) fear

Yeah, they make really good hammers. And I once saw someone open a beer with one. They have sooooo many uses other than killing things.

I think it has something to do with wide spread circumcision.

Once in you life you've felt like a god and then one of your subordinates came and cut off part of your penis. You can never feel safe after such event.

Here are some statistics about it: http://www.ncmec.org/en_US/documents/InfantAbductionStats.pd...

The kid is probably more likely to be struck by lightning while you're walking around in the park on an overcast day than being abducted by strangers.

But parents of newborns are rarely sensible about their risk assessment, and obsess over amazingly unlikely scenarios while forgetting about the plausible and common ones.

I've really enjoyed talking to my family and strangers about their irrational fears that exist around children. It's incredibly fascinating to me. That said, I have been totally terrified to board an airplane for the last 3 years (use to fly once a month) so I don't have much of a leg to stand on.

Risk analysis isn't just about probability. It's about the cost of prevention relative to the probability of a bad outcome multiplied by the cost of a bad outcome. Parents worry about children because the cost of losing a child is ruinously high to a parent. Meanwhile, little preventative measures like not leaving them outside are cheaper than putting them in little baby Faraday cages on cloudy days. Hence why parents worry about child abduction and not lightning strikes.

Baby Faraday cages, that's the best thing since sliced bread! :)

Not that long ago some friends were mid argument when we turned up. She was saying that, hypothetically, if she ended up in a river with her baby she would hold it up, save it, and drown if it required that to save it. Her husband was saying save yourself first, you're no good dead and if you drown, the baby drowns too. And they wouldn't shut up. I hadn't seen anything like it before, but now we have a child, and strange crap happens.

Yes, but they aren't so careful about things like drowning or road safety. I'm not certain about the actual risks (digging through the data is kind of depressing), but in general people tend to over or under estimate risks based on a few factors: malice, familiarity, how dramatic it seems. A crazed gunman is scary. Not looking in your mirror when backing out of the driveway isn't.

Cost of being afraid about possible abduction of your child is extremely underestimated as this fear twists your world view, possibly world view of your child and prevents your child from some things that could be beneficial for him/her.

Conversely cost of not having a pool or a gun is much lower and does more for the actual safety of your child.

As a parent of two small children, I can assure you I obsess over the plausible and common scenarios as well.

If you look at it rationally, having kids is utterly terrifying. We have logically evolved to care very deeply for our offspring. So you have this tiny living organism whose health is critically important for your own happiness. And this organism is physically separate from you, mobile, frail, loud enough to draw attention to itself, unable to protect itself, inquisitive, and completely unaware of danger.

As the father of a three-month old girl, you've captured my feelings on the subject beautifully.

Best wishes to her. Fatherhood of a daughter is an awesome responsibility, which I have found often turns into sheer delight. (My daughter was born after we had three sons beforehand. We like them all, but there is definitely something different for the dad about having a girl in the house.) Did you know that the current projection of cohort life expectancy is that a girl born in the developed world since the turn of the century has a better than even chance of living to age 100?

>Did you know that the current projection of cohort life expectancy is that a girl born in the developed world since the turn of the century has a better than even chance of living to age 100?

If I don't drop her on her head. That's the "awesome responsibility" part!

I shared these worries but we parents really need to get over it. It is actually dangerous for kids to have worrying parents. Kids need to build self-confidence, mostly copying yours.

So here are some tips that helped me and my wife to hide or diminish our worries.

kids, even newborns, are actually more resilient and solid than their parents in many respects. If I got half the knocks on the head my boy got this week at school, I'd be in hospital.

Worries and fear are contagious, don't spread it. If your wife is a bit sensitive to the sight of blood, ask her to go in another room when your kid has a little nosebleed. Seeing worries on her face well not help in any way.

Trash immediately all those culpabilizing books on parenting: the best gift you can do to kids is culpability free parents.

Having a newborn that just came off of 9 days on life-support, I can say without a doubt that having children is the most terrifying thing you'll ever do in your life.

Watching our 3 year old discover his physical limitations is an amazingly ulcer-inducing activity and I find myself constantly expecting the worst.

After witnessing the many falls, bruises, scrapes, and assorted damage that kids endure, I'm constantly amazed they survive into adulthood.

Depends on the country and how much the population is mixed.

Yes, it may sound evil or anti-immigrant, but it does not matter where, if the location has people of uniform ethnic identity, they tend to treat everyone around them as distant cousins (and there are biological reasons for that) and some negative actions people don't feel like doing it.

In places with lots of random ethinic identities mixed, leaving your baby outside is BAAAAAAD idea.

Nordic countries are just as diverse as the US.

I do not mean specifically the US.

And Sweden is NOT diverse as US, Sweden has as the "biggest minority" the Finnish (that are not that different from Swedes), any other population is very small except on some specific cities.

US has a great population of people from several backgrounds.

Also the same is in my country (Brazil).

Here, I see people being much more lax with their security when everyone near them are of the same ethnic background, be it white, black, native american, whatever.

It is just that everyone is born to not trust strangers, foreigners, etc... And "race" is a very quick way to assess that.

Not that I think we should go hating each other or anything like that, but it is how it works, and it is very visible, the more mixed a place is, the less people trust each other, with some specific exceptions (ie: places that are truly cosmopolitan like Universities or some workplace cities).

The Finnish minority is followed closely by immigrants from former Yugoslavia (166k vs 155k). Sweden has accepted a large number of refugees from Iraq & Iran, together they outnumber the Fins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

As shocking as it may sound, I noticed the same thing in the caribbean where population is very mixed. It's not about racism - it's more as if a shared group identity encouraged cooperative behaviour.

Even weirder - there seems to be a trigger effect : until the non visible minority reaches 5% the cooperative behaviour keeps working.

Funny thing - it seems to works even if you account your own ethnicity - i.e. when you are in the <5% you will get more cooperation by people with a different ethnicity than you !!

Cross the 5% mark and it won't work as well - apparently even with people of the same ethnicity as you. Weird.

Some may call that parochialism. I find that interesting.

I've been quite puzzled by this (it contradicts all the mainstream thoughts about diversity) and I would love to know more about such issues (scientific research - can anyone with a sociology background give more details about that?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

Here. Why shouldn't something like education, and generally doing a great job at not being completely depraved by consumerism, lead to less stupidity, and therefore also less stupidity in the form of racism? Why assume instead they're just as racist, but it's just they're all the same, so they trust each other? You can't just latch on to the first random thing that comes to mind, to me there is zero indication that any of this has to do with racial diversity, and pointing out differences in said diversity, even if I accepted them, would still be a non-sequitur, correlation ain't causation.

Maybe these people have simply realized there isn't any point whatsover in stealing random babies, which is not rocket surgery. Kidnapping? Sure. But stealing babies because you care less about people because they have a different skin colour? WTF. That's such a brainfart if you ask me.

Heck, in Brazil your baby isn't safe even if you are keeping it in your womb !

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mother-reunited-with-ba...

Do you have some stats to back that up? What is the non white population in Norway? The cia worldbook seems to say it is over 94%: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Cia Factbook on norway:

Norwegians + Sami 94.4%

Other europeans: 3.6%

Sweden according to wikipedia (and CIA factbook) has most of the population being Swede + Sami

Cia factbook on United States:

79.96% are white, but this include some hispanics.

Brazil the most recent census (I will find the link to IBGE site later) is about 45% of the population being white. almost 50% being mixed race (usually between black and white) 5% black (and some below 1% minorities).

As irrefutable proof I give you Fox News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2qTdFX6thg&t=0m13s. ;)

I live in Malmö and IMHO FN didn't quite live up to it's "fair and balanced" motto here. :)

On a more serious note I'd say the nordic countries are much more homogeneous than the US, ethnically and politically.

Politically? I moved to Göteborg a few years back. The day after I arrived was May Day. The Socialists, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Social Democrats, Leftists, and Red Front political parties each had their own march. Then of course the Christian Democrats, the Moderates, Center Party, and the Green Party are 5 of the 8 parties with representation in Parliament. (The Pirate Party has 2 people representing Sweden in the European Parliament.)

In the US there's the two major parties, and Bernie Sanders as the only self-described socialist in Congress. In non-national offices there is a handful of Greens and Libertarians. When was the last time you saw people who were self-described as something other than Republican, Democrat, or independent as a regular commentator on a political discussion show in the US?

That seems like a lack of political diversity in the US, compared to Sweden.

parties each had their own march

Sure, but they were all Protestant Social Democrats, nevertheless. I mean, they may call themselves Marxists or Sweden Democrats or Red Front or whatever, but still they'll fundamentally believe in a society where everything's lagom.

But of course there's been political diversity in the Nordics; however e.g. the likes of Arvo Kustaa Halberg were a bit too politically diverse to live in Finland so moved to the U.S.

All Protestant Social Democrats? Here I thought only the Social Democrats were Social Democrats. I think you mean 'social democrats', meaning the belief and not membership in the party named 'Social Democrats.'

To think that the Christian Democrats, which were founded out of the movement against removing religious education from elementary schools and is most strong with the evangelical Christians, has the same idea of "lagom" as the Left Party is like saying that the US parties are the same because they all support a free market.

All Protestant? Given the number of atheists in Sweden, that's also unlikely.

I looked up a bit about Arvo Kustaa Halberg. As far as I can tell, he never lived in Finland or any of the Nordic countries. "Hall was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in 1910 to Matt (Matti) and Susan (Susanna) Halberg in Cherry, a rural community on Northern Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range" says Wikipedia.

I see no evidence that he moved from Finland to the US, much less that the move was based on a lack of diversity, so I fail to understand your point.

Well, what I meant is that fundamentally, Swedes are - or at least have been - very homogeneous, when compared to Americans. Even where people have labeled themselves with various extreme political affiliations, their way of thinking has been not too different from each other.

Some of my pronouncedly Atheist friends who have worked in Saudi Arabia have told about this. There, when you apply for visa/work permit, you have to state your religion in the application. There's no box to tick "Atheist" or "Agnostic". They ticked "Christian", and later said that this is where they realized how deeply they are products of Evangelic Protestant culture.

Gus Hall of course was born in Minnesota - he couldn't have stood as a presidential candidate unless he were born in the U.S. But he inherited his political affiliations from his parents, who came from Grand Duchy of Finland, where they were indeed too diverse to be palatable those days.

My comments are not about ethnic diversity. You said 'nordic countries are much more homogeneous than the US, ethnically and politically' and I objected to the term 'politically.' (I reserve the right to object to 'ethnically', but I don't wish to have that argument.)

In order for me to understand your views better, could you explain how the US is less politically homogeneous than Sweden, and also how ethnic homogeneity necessarily implies political homogeneity?

I look at the nationalist politics of the Sweden Democrats, the democratic socialism of the Left Party, and the liberal conservatism of the Moderate party, and see three quite different political philosophies with independent party representation in national politics. The Sweden Democrats think immigration has been a failure, the Center party wants more immigration. The Christian Democrats with their anti-homosexuality position, were the only party to decline to participate in the Stockholm Pride parade.

I look at the US and see only two real national parties, with planks which are moderate for one and conservative with the other. While there are certainly a wide range of differences in the people who make up the party, the obligation is to support others of ones own party, and the voting patterns reflect that homogeneity.

You wrote "But of course there's been political diversity in the Nordics; however e.g. the likes of Arvo Kustaa Halberg were a bit too politically diverse to live in Finland so moved to the U.S." Then you wrote that it was actually his parents who had to make the move, due to their political viewpoints. This makes me feel like you are having difficulties in explaining your point. Could you elaborate?

As far as I can tell, his parents were Wobblies. The IWW started in 1905 in the US and Gus Hall was born in 1910. That's very little time for the movement to make it to Finland, his parents to become Wobblies, feel like they have to leave Finland, and migrate to the US.

In any case, Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire until 1917. As best as I could tell, socialism was not an oppressed political viewpoint in Finland in and around 1900. Eg, the Finnish Labour Party started in 1899 and changed their name to the Social Democratic Party in 1903, which remains as a party. The Communist Party of Finland was banned in 1923, but that's well after Hall's family moved to the US, and it still had behind-the-scenes influence on Finnish politics.

Would you please elaborate on how his parents' political viewpoints lead them to leave Finland for the US? And elaborate on how politics in pre-independence Finland reveals insight into a lack of modern political diversity in the Nordic countries? (Though I would prefer that you stay with Sweden, since that was my point.)

Nixon famously tried to get John Lennon deported because of the singer's involvement in the anti–Vietnam War movement. The courts eventually decided against selective deportation for political reasons, but Lennon also had the money and connections to fight that battle. Does this show a similar lack of enthusiasm towards political diversity in 1960s US?

The political systems in U.S. and Nordics are different, much of it coming from election systems. The U.S. "first past the post" guides to a two-party system where the different views are merged to one political party and battles are fought within the parties, while Nordics have many parties - even if social democrats have been quite dominant - and voters choose between these. But the parties however overlap a lot. Your average Sweden Democrat is not much unlike your average Social Democrat, really. In fact, he's probably just a disillusioned Social Democrat. So number of parties is not a very good measure of diversity one way or the other.

The U.S. can produce, even within one political party, such diverse politicians and policies as Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Zell Miller, Eleanor Smeal, Ben Nelson. Anything from trade union militants to radical feminists, cow farmers and vegan activists, conservative businessmen and firebrand racial demagogues.

Regarding Gus Hall's parents, they didn't just become IWW members when moving to America; I'm sure they and many others like them actually created the IWW as it was. And yes, socialists were not entirely free to operate in Russian Empire. Many decided to emigrate to U.S. and Canada precisely because they sought to escape what they perceived as oppression.

As best as I could tell, socialism was not an oppressed political viewpoint in Finland

Well, it was, a bit. The Tsar's secret police, Okhrana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana ), was set up in 1880 to combat political terrorism and left-wing revolutionary activity. Not everyone who called themselves socialist was rounded up and sent to a camp, the Tsars being more reasonable than their successors, but people like Halbergs must have felt they'd have more room for their ideology in America.

So they left Finland, like many of their comrades left Sweden and Norway, in search of a better life in America. It wasn't all roses there either, and many moved on for the workers' paradise in Soviet Union in 1920's, only to find a few years later themselves rounded up as suspicious elements and meet their end at the construction site for Stalin's Canal. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sea_%E2%80%93_Baltic_Cana... )

Yes, I know that the political systems in the US and Sweden (as representative of the Nordic countries) are different. That is part of my thesis. The US system for the last 200 years discourages multiple concerted voices at the national level. The Swedish system does not guarantee diversity - the Social Democrats held majority power in Sweden for a long time - but your statement is that the US has more diverse politics than Sweden, and I want you to justify your statement.

You pointed out, correctly, that there are internal politics as well. How often do you hear from members who self-identify as members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus? Can you name two other caucuses, off the top of your head? Unless you are a politics wonk, I doubt that you'll be able to do so.

There's one self-described socialist in national politics. Where are the others? Where are the leftists on the American stage? Why aren't anti-war vegans like Dennis Kucinich in more of the news shows?

In any case, there are internal politics in the Swedish parties too, so I don't know what your point is supposed to show.

You say that Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Zell Miller, Eleanor Smeal, and Ben Nelson are examples of diversity. Neither Sharpton nor Smeal are politicians and Smeal has never run for public office, so you've opened up the field to include a very broad range of politics. Sweden of course also has a broad range of politics, once you get to individual people. There are omnivores and vegans, trans-sexuals and cis-sexuals, believers in 0, 1, or multiple gods, pro-kronor and pro-euro, and every category you mentioned.

At some point the US wins just because it has more people, so is your measure of diversity roughly the same as saying that there are more people in the US? I thought you were making something more substantial observation.

As for Gus Hall's parents, I again ask how you are sure about what you know. I found no mention that opposition to their political beliefs was a factor. I couldn't even find out when they moved to the US. My strong suspicion is that they, like other Finns during the Great Migration, did so for economic and ethnic reasons. This was the period of Russification, when the Russian government was forcing its language and customs on the Finnish people.

This includes the February Manifesto of 1899, which declared that Russian is the official language of administration, only Russian currency was allowed, the Orthodox Russian Church is the church of state, and the Finnish army is conscripted into the Russian imperial army.

It's easier for me to assume that his parents, like many others at the time, did so because of improved economic conditions and reduced social oppression in the US, and not specifically because of their political beliefs - beliefs which were also held by many Finns who remained in Finland - were under specific persecution. Can you point me to any evidence that the main reason they left Finland was because their ideas were "too politically diverse" for the country?

And it's all very odd, because you're using Russian imperialism and oppression from 100 years ago to color your views on Nordic politics now. How does that logic work?

I can't help but think that any logic you can come up with would apply even more to the US. The suppression of Communism in the US was done by its own government, at all levels of government, and 50 years more recent than Hall's parents.

This is getting long and probably not interesting for anyone else. Sure, much of the more extremes in the U.S. is simply that with a larger number of people, the extremes are also further away. But the extremes are there. Why there are not so many socialists in U.S. national politics is surely because of the first-past-the-post system, not because of lack of diversity in the electorate.

As to evidence about Gus Hall's parents, that again winds up a bit too far away from the point of this thread, so suffice it to say that I just read some memoir where this was covered, can't find a reference. But his parents came from politically active Tampere, and were founding members of CPUSA. (Incidentally, Tampere was also the place where Lenin and Stalin met for the first time, in 1905, but Okhrana was on their trail and Lenin fled soon after the Halbergs. This is just an anecdote that I find funny, not something that's really evidence about politics today).

I'll concede that I can't measure political diversity well enough to convince you without spending too much time and boring anyone. The ethnic diversity was already commented by someone else with some demographic data which is more readily available.

No one else is reading this thread. I'm enjoying it though. It's encouraged me to do more research about topics that interest me.

> Why there are not so many socialists in U.S. national politics is surely because of the first-past-the-post system, not because of lack of diversity in the electorate.

That can't be the sole reason. I suspect it isn't even the main reason. Who is the modern equivalent to Eugene V. Debs in the national debates? Where is the modern Victor Berger or Meyer London, the only two members of the Socialist Party to be elected to Congress, even with the first-past-the-post system? Is it just Bernie Sanders, an independent, unaffiliated with any party?

(Debs, btw, was arrested for violating the Espionage Act of 1917; a violation of the First Amendment if I ever heard one, Schenck v. United States to the contrary.)

My understanding is that have been decades of concerted effort to suppress the power of labor, for example, by denigrating anything related to socialism, communism, marxism, or even liberal. I agree with the view that FDR could push through the New Deal by pointing out that the socialists and communists wanted much more. To that extent, I think Coughlin's denouncement of FDR as being allied with Wall Street was exaggerated, but generally correct.

(And who is the modern Coughlin, and modern equivalent of the Social Justice movement? The US revoked the second class mailing permit for the Social Justice weekly, under the Espionage Act. Not as harsh as the Russian secret police, but still effective at suppressing political diversity, no?)

I therefore see McCarthyism in part as a deliberate effort to undermine labor - child labor laws and women's suffrage being held up as examples of communist influence in US politics, don't you know.

I agree that Gus Hall's parents have nothing to do with the thread. I thought so when you brought it up. :)

As I said, I don't want to get into the ethnic debate. Sweden's history there is much different than the US history. Sweden's present is also much different than Sweden's history.

It's called World Factbook, not worldbook, "white vs. non-white" has nothing do with it as far as I'm concerned (skin color is related to sunlight, not culture), and last, but surely not least.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_State...

"nearly 15% of Americans were foreign-born in 1910, while in 1999, only about 10% were foreign-born."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden

As of 2010 however, 1.33 million people or 14.3% of the inhabitants in Sweden were foreign-born. Of these, 859,000 (9.2%) were born outside the European Union and 477,000 (5.1%) were born in another EU member state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Norway

At the beginning of 1992, immigrants and Norwegian-born to immigrant parents totalled 183,000 persons, or 4.3 per cent of Norway’s population. Twenty years later, at the beginning of 2012, these groups had risen to 655,000 persons or 13.1 per cent of the population.

So, my bad; at least these two nordic countries are even MORE diverse than the US. Which is hilarious because I was totally gambling with my initial post, thanks for making me look for confirmation. Of course you might say the real problem is that many US-born citizens have dark skin, while many immigrants to nordic countries have white skin, but that's the point where I leave the discussion.

At any rate, there are differences between the US and those countries, but immigration does not seem to be especially prominent. So no, that can't be it.

>"white vs. non-white" has nothing do with it

Yes they have an amazing diversity of Nordic people.

That has nothing to do with anything I said, try to respond in context. However, they have an amazing diversity of people in Nordic countries, and there is also amazing diversity among "whites", as well as similarites to "non-whites".

>amazing diversity among "whites", as well as similarites to "non-whites".

I'm not sure why you persist with this laughable line of argument. I have yet to visit Sweden but I hope to eventually as I have free lodging with family friends. I am quite sure they would get a good chuckle from your assertions.

20 years? Try going back 400. 99.1% of the US population are descended from immigrants. Ignoring genetic differences and only going with cultural, you are really talking about how quickly immigrant groups homogenize to a standard culture of the country (or region when talking about America). The answer is it varies. A lot. Take any major Scandinavian city. How big and old is the china town? Japan town? Little Italy? German town? Irish population? Puerto Rician population? All the many flavors of Hispanic populations? Asian populations? Slavic populations? African populations? Many American cities have long standing examples of most of these. China town in San Francisco, for example, started shortly after the gold rush. There are many Chinese there who are multi-generational Americans but have not homogenized to the standard culture (if such a thing exists in SF). I have known families in the central coast just south of the silicon valley who can trace their Spanish descendents to pre-gold rush and even have some Ohlone descendents in their past, the people who originally inhabited this part of California. They are very Hispanic culturally.

I read an article a while ago about problems teaching immigrant kids English in the Alum Rock school district. This is just a single school district out of many in San Jose. If you are unfamiliar with San Jose, think south Silicon Valley. They typically have to deal with students who speak 40 different languages. Now that is diversity. Anything similar in Scandinavia?

As I have never been to the Nordic countries, I think it's possible but highly unlikely they are anywhere close to the diversity of the US. I would need to see a lot more than 20 years of immigration statistics to believe it though...

I did a very basic search for racial demographics of Sweden, the US and Brazil (since someone else mentioned it), then calculated the Shannon diversity index (lower essentially meaning less diversity) and the Pielou evenness (a number between 0 and 1 - higher means less size variation among groups). I didn't find great numbers to work with in the few minutes that I looked. I used these:

US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

Brazil: http://www.indexmundi.com/brazil/demographics_profile.html

Sweden: http://www.populstat.info/Europe/swedeng.htm

And got:

US:

With Hispanic/non-hispanic breakdown

Shannon: 1.258355 Pielou: 0.5064

Without breakdown

Shannon: 0.9705 Pielou: 0.4987

Sweden:

Shannon: 0.4498 Pielou: 0.2795

Brazil:

Shannon: 0.9509 Pielou: 0.5908

So in terms of diversity, US >= Brazil > Sweden.

Do you have any evidence or other basis for this belief? Or is it just a hunch that you share as if it was fact?

Robert Putnam's research confirms that ethnic diversity reduces trust levels and civic engagement, even when the ethnic diversity is as risible as Norwegian vs Swedish Americans in, say, Minnesota. If I recall correctly he's a Harvard faculty member in either sociology or political science. He wrote Boewling Alone and he sat on those results for like, three years because his political preferences are typical for his position. The explanation the grandparent offered may be wrong but the phenomenom is real.

That kind of statistical hand waving is irritating. First, it's 40 abductions where parents are characterized as being paranoid about their child being kidnapped. The statistic says nothing about how leaving your kid on a sidewalk might affect the chances of abduction. Your chances of getting hit by lightning aren't as slim if you're a golfer.

Also, 700x more likely to get into Harvard as an applicant or just a US born child? Does that include post-graduate Harvard institutions? How is 'getting into Harvard' a useful benchmark for acceptable risk?

Clearly leaving a child unattended is going to have an effect, and so are many other factors going to have an effect on admission to Harvard.

Furthermore, the hand waving statistics are off by an order of magnitude as far as I can tell. 40 * 700 = 28,000, but the cohort of births in a given year result in a student body closer to 2,800 than 28,000.

It probably came from comparing accept percentage of Harvard (6% now but 7% a couple years ago) with a kidnap chance calculated for the whole of children born in the US. Of course applicants are already a selected subset and not representative of all candidates born in the same year. It's a pretty useless comparison.

e.g. 40 kidnaps per year for 10 years = 400. 400 * 700 'times more likely' = 280,000. Divide that by 4mil children born in a year to get 7%.

I can't say for certain since I don't live there, but a cursory search for baby kidnappings in Sweden pulled up a famous guy and that baby was stolen from a crib. Baby kidnapping isn't an issue for them, otherwise I imagine they would not be leaving their kids outside. It's like if no one steals stuff, you don't have to always keep your door locked.

We personally have a closed garden (Canada), so we don't have to worry about this. In Europe, most people have closed garden.

> In Europe, most people have closed garden.

Do you have any statistics evidence to back that up? As a European, I disagree.

In Canada, they think all Europeans are the same. :)

I've noticed that England tends to have more walled gardens and restricted access than where I've lived in Sweden. Then again, Sweden's right of public access is also stronger than England's right to roam.

This is the direct result of the news. The news reports things like child molesters and terrorists when your child is far more likely to be hit by a car or something.

I'm sure theres a name for this kind of thing.

I've always found the following saying a good rule to live by. "Theres no truth in the news and no news in the truth."

That was my favorite takeaway from the article, that there is not the irrational paranoia of child kidnapping that exists here in the US.

I mean what would someone do with a stolen child anyway? Unless you are rich there is little odds of ransom, and the risk/reward of selling or keeping the child for your own seems high. If people really wanted to steal babies, they would do so at gunpoint as well, which I've never heard of happening.

I believe one of the common fears is pedophilia.

There are instances of people stealing babies out of maternity wards. Sometimes this people just want to steal the baby just to raise it as their own. They want a child, and the easiest way seems to be stealing someone else's for whatever reason (e.g. maybe they are infertile).

Hi from Denmark here - the neigbour country to sweden. Where we do the excact same thing... Anyway there was a danish woman who moved to USA once and left her kid outside a cafe while she was inside. I think she was arrested or something. It made a great deal of fuss in Denmark, since no one steals kids here (of course thats an understatement - probaly it has happend)

What would someone even want with a baby anyway?

  - Lazy, won't go look for a job.
  - Loud and obnoxious.
  - Not very tasty, smells bad.
  - Black market? Good luck finding a fence.
  - Sexual deviant? They don't go for babies. Adults dressed as babies, maybe.
  - Crazy person? Okay, that's in the realm of possibility, just because you don't
    know how they'll behave. But that's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction
    of a probability.

I get that parents have irrational fear and want to protect their kids. And if the risk isn't worth it, yeah, don't put them outside. But worst case you can crack open a window.

That was the first thing I thought too. But then I realized maybe this is more of a fear (rational or not) for those of us in the US.

However, leaving the strollers that close to a road (as in one of the photos) just seems like a bad idea no matter where you are.

If you wanted a child to be abducted by a stranger, you'd have to leave him alone for something like 7000 years on average before it happened.

Almost every "child abduction" report is actually a custody dispute. Fearing that your child will be stolen by a stranger is ludicrous.

I recommend reading the "Free Range Kids" blog/book, by the way. It may help you see past the media distortions.

Fearing that your child will be stolen by a stranger is ludicrous.

Well, almost. I remember one case in Finland where a stranger took a baby who was sleeping in a pram outside.

It was such an uncommon occurrence that it made national news, although the episode took only a few minutes and no one was harmed. Touching someone else's baby who is sleeping out is just a no. (Looking at it to make sure it's well is OK, of course). But some fear about this is understandable. Parents worry about everything, sometimes not very rationally.

Mostly this is about trust within society. Finland is still very homogeneous, people share the same values, and the level of trust among citizens is high.

Funny to read this since me and my girlfriend do the same with our baby in Quebec city, Canada.

Its all about good cloths and making sure the hands, feet and head stay warm.

You would be amaze by the quality of cloths and stroller our baby has to face the ever changing Quebec temperature, she got a cold baby sleeping bags, a bear fur cover, and many different cloths, ...

We used to take our kid out in the cold when he a had a cough (Alberta). The cold air definitely helps with breathing.

BTW, quick English tip: you should use "clothes" instead of "cloths" for 'vêtements'.

Seems hard to imagine it's beneficial for the kids other than in situations where there are fewer germs outside but as cultural idiosyncracies go it makes a lot more sense to me than the fear of sleeping with a running fan in Korea.

In Germany there's an obsession with stale air in rooms, during the day you "auslueft" the room but when you're in the room you close the windows and doors to prevent uncomfortable or even unhealthy drafts.

Irrational health beliefs are very stubborn, like many Germans my mom and her sisters believe that sitting on a cold surface can lead to bladder infections, here in the US nobody seems to know about this.

> or even unhealthy drafts.

I'm pretty sure there is no such thing. (unfortunately, most people I know not only believe in it, but are also afraid of such drafts; the result is that, for example, I find it uncomfortable to work in any office because of stale air most of them accumulate throughout the day).

Having someone visiting from Africa, there is apparently the inverse belief in some areas (sitting on a too-warm surface causes bladder infections/UTIs). There is definitely a European obsession with "fresh air". I'm not sure how warranted it is, I think most people (if being honest) agree that it's more of a "Ok, time out - I want to go somewhere quiet because this situation is wearing me down" and wanting "fresh air" is a good reason if you don't smoke and don't have a dog.

But stale is really annoying. I get an head ache if the air is poorly circulated.

My wife lived in Germany after HS and remarked that her physician host father would always tell her she was going to catch a cold because she wasn't keeping her kidneys warm.

I can't believe there's not a single mention of Vitamin D in this article. People with normal levels of Vitamin D are healthier than people who are deficient. There's really no mystery there. I'm sure it's even more important for developing babies. The health effects of getting some sun > negative effects of being cold for a while. Or cold thermogenesis could actually have beneficial effects [1].

[1]: http://www.jackkruse.com/cold-thermogenesis-6-the-ancient-pa...

Leaving kids to nap outside a coffee shop in winter...I'd love to see the horror on people's faces in the US. Makes perfect sense to me, and I do this outside my house from time to time (secluded backyard of course), but I'm pretty sure child protective services would be hauling me off before I finished my latte.

A Danish mother did that in New York: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/nyregion/toddler-left-outs...

..and that article is from 1997. I wonder what the response would've been today. Not better, I fear.

Being a Dane myself I can't help smiling when seeing the parent story. I've got a 15 month old daughter, and throughout her entire life she's slept outside for daytime naps. Besides the random playing kid making too much noise, it's been completely uneventful. As a bonus, it means that you've got 1-2 hours of lovely silence indoors before hell breaks loose again...

My brother in law is from Denmark and he told me about this practice many years ago as a way of relating to me just how neurotic and afraid parents are in America.

I asked him why he moved here, and he said "America is where you get rich". I often meditate on whether he made a Faustian bargain or not.

I spend a lot of time trying to understand the country I was born in. What's the right approach to this place? Is this a community or a marketplace? Newt Gingrich says marketplace, and that seems to be the opinion of the owners in this country.

Is this place so far gone that a reasonable man will try to extract as many resources and expatriate his money and his family to Norther Europe?

Hunter S. Thompson called America a Kingdom of Fear and then shot himself. Al Giordano tried to help through activism but concluded this country is psychopathic and moved to S. America.

N. Europe beats the US on almost every quality of life metric. The towns, cities and trains in Europe I see on travel shows just look prettier than the sprawling pattern of chain restaurants and gas stations I see here. Sprawl bothers me on a very base and fundamental level.

I overpay for crappy broadband and healthcare and my neighbors are irrationally afraid and half our tax dollars fund a bloated war machine. For the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, things kind of suck here.

I've moved to some of the best cities this country has to offer and I found them lacking. In Austin and Boulder my girlfriend would be repeatedly harassed by schizophrenics let loose on the streets.

I spent an hour conversing with a mentally unstable tattooed skin head in Austin armed with a claw hammer for protection from other homeless. If he is to be believed, and he seemed sincere, the police bound and gagged him to a chair and beat him for an hour while denying him his anti psychotics.

The homeless in Austin know not to ask for much. In Boulder a street kid with dreads will sneer if you give him any less than a $5. The wretched of Austin just ask for quarters. They feel lucky that they aren't scheduled for lethal injection on felony murder charges.

I was in Austin when the state executed a homeless kid that not even the prosecutor thought killed anyone. Four homeless kids take LSD. One snaps and kills two others. Texas executes the one kid that didn't hurt anyone on felony muder charges. The actual murderer was given a life sentence because he took a plea.

The only silver lining I can take from all this is that because things suck and the US is a huge unified market, it is a great country to innovate and solve people's problems with technology.

I used to spend a lot of thought time getting political or philosophical about my complaints above, I have come to realize if we are to be saved, our salvation will only come through technological innovation.

Don't believe everything you see in travel shows... I live in The Netherlands, and I can tell you we have out share of ugly sprawl (look up The Bijlmer near Amsterdam on wikipedia or google maps for instance). We have homeless people too, health insurance is mandatory but more expensive than in the US, a fair share of issues with immigrants, and a huge tax burden. It's not all peaches and cream here!

The cure for what ails you is travel.

My father travelled around the world in the early 80's and concluded that there is no place like the US and came home.

One of my questions is have things changed? Has the rest of the world improved and the US declined in the last thirty years?

You are right, I will have to go and find out for myself.

Actually, I believe is to be the case. As late as the early to mid-90s, I'd say there was no place like the US of A (even though the Nordic countries were very nice also then, they were behind on certain aspects). Today US has noticeably declined (compared to some world benchmark, at least) while some countries have clearly progressed - the Nordic countries very much so. Visit the new Old World, with open and honest eyes (not every single thing is perfect, or even better than US, I'm talking broad strokes), engage the people and hear their opinions (they will have many, because the US is still dear to a lot of people from Europe who would very much like to see US step up its game as a true world leader in all areas - everyone wants a role model, and it's sad to see the hero waste his life away).

As a refugee from Amerika, I agreed with you all the way until your conclusion. What makes you think technological innovation will provide salvation?! It seems to me exactly the opposite. Increasingly, technical innovations are being used by the government against the people, and the people are becoming increasingly degenerate through their indiscriminate use of technology.

> What makes you think technological innovation will provide salvation?!

Optimism, and a few radical theories about the possibilities of genetic engineering.

Touché. I hadn't discerned the true darkness of your vision of the future!

Horror on people's faces? They just call the police: http://www.thelocal.se/35592/20110817/

As for born in Siberia my first thought was "Isn't it normal for every child to have a nap in -35C or so?" It was rather normal for our schools back there to be closed once or twice per winter because of extreme cold, but kids where just playing hockey on the school grounds instead =)

I can personally attest to the fact that sleeping outside is not as ridiculous as it might seem at first. As a skinny, 80-90lb Boy Scout in Alaska, I camped outside overnight many times every winter, in temperatures that got down to -30F. It was cold, sure, but a little preparation and it's fine.

The most annoying part about sleeping outside isn't the fact that you are cold, it's that everything around you is - we had to keep our water bottles in our sleeping bags at night so we could make oatmeal in the morning.

Didn't know about the napping. at the pre-school we have in Ottawa, children go outside to play everyday unless it's colder than -15C.

I'm in Ottawa too and our daughter will often nap in her stroller at temperatures of -10C or more while we're out for a walk. I probably wouldn't specifically stick her outside for a nap but in general the cold (or indeed sleeping in the cold) is no big deal for kids as long as they're dressed well.

We live in the snowy mountain town of Park City, Utah and our kids have a long recess break during school where they play outside no matter how cold and snowy it is. The only time they have to stay inside if if it's warm enough to rain. So there are places in the US where people aren't neurotic about kids being cold. But we're big into winter sports and being outside here.

You'll probably find that in most cold places.

Here in Minnesota, the preschool and kindergarten I'm familiar with have the kids play outside at recess at least 2x a day unless the temperature is below 0F (I think; it might be -10F). Considering that the temp here can stay below freezing essentially continuously from mid-December to early March, it makes sense. Otherwise the kids would never get to play outside for months.

This reminds me of a funny behavior I noticed when I visited Iceland - parents would simply leave their kids outside in a pram when they went into a cafe or a restaurant. Struck me as something you would never see in the States but I guess other places just have higher levels of trust.

Here's a blog with a little info on the practice: http://reykjavikdailyphoto.blogspot.com/2008/10/could-not-be...

Normal stuff in Finland, I have been sleeping outside when I was baby, so was my wife and our children sleep.

Same her, and enjoyed it in the Finnish army as well (except for the survival camp without any blankets). Sleeping outside just makes you a lot more rested.

http://www.wtftoday.eu/wp-content/2010/03/meanwhile1.jpg

I was baptized during a pretty bad cold snap in Trysil in Eastern Norway. The outside temperature was -40C/-40F, and the caretakers were able to heat the church up to 5 degrees Celcius inside. I've been told that I slept in the stroller outside, even though my parents did check on me quite often. Was also supposedly wearing an incredible amount of clothes.

The same sentiment exists in Russia.

Napping on balconies is indeed popular. But few people would leave a stroller with a baby on the street in a Russian city.

True... I was referring to the concept of babies sleeping in the cold.

Sounds like pretty sloppy, old wives, random cultural reasoning to me (for example in other countries people think being cold gives one a cold).

> Paediatrician Margareta Blennow says reports from the Swedish Environmental protection agency show conflicting results.

"In some studies they found pre-schoolers who spent many hours outside generally - not just for naps - took fewer days off than those who spent most of their time indoors," she says.

"In other studies there wasn't a difference."

If it isn't backed by some serious data - one probably shouldn't risk one's new born child on something so tenuously supported and specifically in an area which is subject to large random statistical effects and various psychological biases.

I propose that the purported risk is tenuously supported as well ... :)

I live in southeast Alaska, where winter temperatures are a steady 30-34F. It's really hard to stay warm, because you're always getting wet. It's easier to stay warm when it's 20-25F, and you know you'll stay dry.

We took my two-year-old to the beach last week when it was 38F. All he wanted to do was play in the water, and he did so for half an hour without ever getting cold. He had waterproof boots and rainsuit on, but his hands were in the water for half an hour and he only asked us to hold his hands in ours a couple times. It's fun to watch him grow up here, totally acclimated to this environment.

I find this fascinating. And a bit surprised they don't get some sort of frost bite but if it works, hey it works.

I'll admit though when I read it I was wondering if this was parents with cranky children trying to trigger some sort of latent hibernation reflex :-).

Reminds me of the Danish couple that got arrested in NY years back - http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/nyregion/toddler-left-outs...

OK, serious question: what about dry throats, vocal cords, etc., and the damage caused from that?

For dealing with the NYC winter, buying a humidifier changed my life. I have friends who have a "winter cough" that never goes away, because they live in a drafty apartment. When I grew up in far upstate NY, there were certain winter days below 10°F where, just being outside for 10 minutes, you could hear the effect in your scratchier voice the rest of the day.

It boggles my mind how this can be healthy from a respiratory point of view. Is there any science on this?

You get dry throat if you take cold air from outside and heat it up. This air is not dry a outside temperatures. In fact is as humid as it can be. But if you take this air and heat it up then there's much more room in the air for additional water. And water from your throat gladly evaporates to fill this room leaving you throat dry. If you spend your time in temperatures clse to outside temperatures your throat doesn't get dry.

My wife used to put our little one on the balcony when he was a few months old at around zero celsius temperature. I admit I was a bit scared by the idea. Not only that it was cold (but I could understand that good clothes help) but also that in case he was in distress or needing something, nobody was outside to hear. Eventually, I spent the nap times sitting next to him, reading a book until he wake up and nothing wrong ever happened. He always was a healthy kid and still is.

I don't know if there is any relation to this idea, but some diseases that babies catch are alleviated by cold air.

For some infants with croup, cool air alleviates the symptoms.

Wow this is really interesting. I read the title and honestly didn't know what to expect from the article when I clicked on it. My mind was wandering towards some kinda sci-fi setup or something.

Hooray cultural ignorance! The more you know.

I see the exact opposite where I come from. My kid wants to go out and play when the temperature is close to 40c (which is normal BTW).

I think kids just adapt to the weather and we just get old!

yep, a little fresh air never hurts anyone - true in Minnesota !!!

Well, I am from Sweden with 2 children but I have never and would never leave one of my child sleeping unattended in a prom on the sidewalk. I reacted on the photo of the cafe.

Reminder to us wacky Americans and our archaic units - this article is talking about sub zero in Celsius, which is not quite as bad as sub zero in Fahrenheit.

Pediatricians in Russia recommend taking babies outside for at least thirty minutes every day too, partly because the freezing temperature kills germs.

Not viruses. Just bacteria. And bacterial infections are rare and usually easily treatable with antibiotics.

TLDR: More fresh air is good for kids; the fact that it's cold outside is irrelevant if they have enough clothes. Well what do you know?

What I think is particularly interesting is that anyone doing this in North America would probably be tried and convicted of child endangerment purely due to unfamiliarity and outrage at the practice.

It wouldn't matter whether someone presented evidence that it was a norm elsewhere. We are just wired that way.

Next: Kids are outside in -15C wearing only jackets!

My kids routinely go outside in sub-zero temperatures with just sweaters on. I can't keep clothes on them for love nor money... every time I turn around they're missing socks and shoes. When I try and put a coat on them they're like "but we wanna be freezing"... I swear, kids are born without pain or cold receptors. Insane really.

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