Psychobabbling Assault on the West

Timothy Birdnow

But what is more successful? The West has advanced science and engineering and produced enough food to feed the world. We have been doing something right, it seems to me. I notice the article brags about parenting in India and Indonesia and such places. Given that the Third World is poor and unhealthy I do not think they are the model to emulate. (I rather suspect much of the parenting strategies employed there - like bed sharing - come from that very same poverty.)

Is the Western Way of Raising Kids Weird?

From the article:

This isn’t the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. From napping on a schedule and sleep training to pushing our children around in strollers, what we might think of as standard parenting practices are often anything but.

Parents in the US and UK are advised to have their babies sleep in the same room as them for at least the first six months, but many view this as a brief stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery.

In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 reviewthat looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal.

Debmita Dutta, a doctor and parenting consultant in Bangalore, India, says that despite Western influences, bedsharing remains a strong tradition in India – even in households where children have their own rooms. "A family of four has three bedrooms, one each for each child and for the parents, and then you would find both the children in the parent's bed," she says. "It's that common."

Communal societies are always poorer and less flexible than independent societies like the U.S. That's because everyone comes to lean on others and rely on others to meet their needs rather than learn to take care of themselves. It is why socialism fails.

The West teaches children to be self-reliant, which should be the goal of any parent as they will not always be there and it may be there won't be family around. Liberals have been pushing smaller family sizes for generations out of fear of overpopulation. So how do you rely on an extended family if every family is a one-child family as was the case in China?

You rely on the government, of course! Which is what this article is not saying but is clearly promoting.

The article continues:

But Rashmi Das, a professor in paediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, and author of a review on bedsharing safety, says that a lack of high-quality research on the topic makes it difficult to say whether bedsharing itself increases the risk of SIDS in the absence of other risk factors like smoking and drinking. "We could not tell whether bedsharing is actually increasing the risk of SIDS," says Das.

Studies on the topic mostly come from high-income countries, where bedsharing is less common. But low-income countries, where bedsharing is traditional, also have some of the lowest SIDS rates in the world.

It doesn't seem to be a simple issue of geography: when someone living in the West has imported their cultural practices from elsewhere, they bring the lower SIDS risk with them too. Families of Pakistani origin living in the UK, for example, have a lower SIDS risk than white British families – despite mothers commonly sharing a bed with their baby.

Or is it that the Pakistani parents don't go into that when they take their dead kids to the hospital? I believe this happy horse hockey about as much as I believe in the Tooth Fairy. You will notice no mechanism is postulated to explain why Pakistanis don't have higher rates of SIDS than do other British, except to say they don't smoke or drink. This is purely anecdotal; the article did not supply any hard factual evidence to prove this assertion.

This is just one more piece of psychobabble designed to rebel against Western culture and traditions in favor of orientalism. It is another attack on our way of doing things, the most successful way of doing things in human history.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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