Posted on 01/06/2013 11:42:22 PM PST by nickcarraway
Parents should carry their babies upright instead of pushing them around in prams because it aids their development, a new book claims.
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist, said children could benefit from basic parenting methods which have been abandoned in the west but are still used in more traditional societies around the world.
Indigenous people living in the African rainforest, for example, use a variety of behaviours which developed over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, but which have recently become "unfashionable" in the modern world. In his new book, The World Until Yesterday, Prof Diamond argues that readopting traditional child-raising methods could help parents raise children with good qualities like confidence and curiosity.
He said: "It would be impossible, illegal, or immoral to carry out rigorous controlled experiments on Western children, in order to test outcomes of different child-rearing methods.
But a huge variety of different methods has in effect already been tested by natural experiments: different societies have been raising their children differently for a long time, and we can see the results.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Bunk. Pure bunk. Anthropologists try this crap all the time. We are supposed to feeeeeeeeel that these others cultures are better than we are for one reason or another. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my culture and they can stick with their jungles.
Keeps 'em occupied with their addled minds for a few hours an' prepares them for future LSD experiences
Except there’s something to be seen here: the [everyday] carrying of babies upright is, on its face, safer than laying down — this is due to where the pressures [think head & neck] are placed.
Jared Diamond is also the man who said that the development of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history. We would have been better and happier if we were still hunter gathers.
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
He lives in a different world than I do.
My rotator cup, however, prefers the baby buggy!
Agriculture is simply a stratification of pre-selected vegetables. A totally wild environment will eventually do all that it can to maximize use of available warmth, water and sunlight.
Yeah, screw those people and their belief in God, being against gay marriage, etc.
So we should wrap the babies to a board and let the women folk wear them on their backs as they work the fields?
You got a problem with that?
So the virgin forest babies are somehow better developed than USA’s?
“So the virgin forest babies are somehow better developed than USAs?”
Depends. They grow up to be independent farmers living in shacks while we have imbeciles glued to TV’s watching the Kardashians.
Bollocks!
Yes, babies do like to be carried around so they can see what’s going on. But I agree with you, it gets tiring.
My daughter was really like that. I always remember the day she learned how to climb out of the stroller, while I was pushing it! So right away I went into a little shop and bought one of those harness things.
That lasted one city block. By the time we got to the next corner she was climbing out harness attached.
So I carried her, and carried her, and continued to carry her until she could really walk on her own.
I’ll tell you this - I’d have been hard pressed to do that if I was 40 years old!
My wife bought a thing called THE BLUE CARRIER and the grand daughter’s father can carry her around now ~ facing forward with him. She loves it. And, he can do whatever he’s doing and keep her occupied. It’s like a reverse papoose.
Worked, too!
I AM against letting a baby vegetate in a carseat/carrier in front of a television, but packing them around all day can be rough, too. Been there, done that. It isn't so bad when their legs get long enough for them to sit on your shoulders--mine have ridden there while we were on a bicycle. (I know, bad Papa!)
How have we survived as a species? Now I have to live with the stigma of under development?
This guy ought to be forced to carry a young child around all day and all night for weeks on end, and see if he doesn't change his tune then.
” legs get long enough for them to sit on your shoulders”
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30 years ago when I had a daughter, she started out in a “Snugli” (snugli.com). It was a denim bag, over my shoulders, that had her facing me, and her legs hanging out the bottom.
When she outgrew the Snugli, she rode on my shoulders as we hiked across my 200 acres to our pond on the back.
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