Responses to parenting choices in different cultures - your stories!

[dodi1978]

I had a similar thread on this a few years ago, but will try to give this one a slightly different spin.

So here it goes: I am German-born, but have lived in the UK for a long time and am raising my two kids here. DS2 has just started weaning, and we do a mixture of finger foods and purees / mashed food, same as for DS1 really.

Spoke to my parents last week and my dad very excitedly told me that there is a new trend amongst German mums of feeding babies only finger food. Yes, I say, this has been known here for a long time, and it is called baby-led weaning. When I weaned DS1 in 2014, BLW was hardly known in Germany. I spoke to a German friend at the time who is a sort of health visitor (although her role profile is a bit different) and she had never head of it, despite having two kids herself.

After the phone call, I started looking for articles on BLW in the German press, and lo and behold, they started appearing in 2015. What intrigued me is that the main critique of BLW is that babies may not get the right amount of nutrients with BLW. This seems to be taken very seriously.

Now this may be because BLW is so new in Germany and quite established in the UK. But are there other parenting choices two which responses in other countries were quite different?

[Penhacked]

I find in Italy they have very very set ideas of how it should be done and there is a lot less debate about it all.
The rules are:
Bedtime is around 9pm ideally. 8pm is considered early.
Babies should be spoon fed on a diet of 'minestra' (soup, specifically veggie soup puréed, made at home only with fresh veg), breakfast should be Plasmon biscuits with milk.
The Paediatrician should be consulted at every and any opportunity.
In spring, the baby must still wear a proper coat, scarf, hat, blanket. Never mind that it is hotter than any English summer day.
Sun cream in summer only, and even then only at the swimming pool have I seen it applied.
Co sleeping and breastfeeding is great but anyone who doesn't always has a solid medical reason certified by gp Ditto c sections. Nothing wrong with these by the way, but I always chuckle at the earnestness of these very very slim women saying their hips were just too small for child birth. C sections much more common here (50%)
Slings are becoming popular, it fits with the child centric approach here.
Best bit is that they are super accommodating of kids. Not in a 'we have a high chair and a changing mat' way, in the true sense that children are welcome, tears, tantrums and all. You can take them for a coffee, almost any restaurant at any time, no special sectioned off areas for them, they are the centre of the action, not an inconvenience.

[claraschu]

I travelled a lot when my kids were tiny. One of the baffling things was different medical care in the US and the UK. Lots more interventions, tests, check-ups, and very specialised prescription antibiotics in the US, as you can imagine.

Different attitudes to nudity... I felt most comfortable in Europe, where kids would run around naked even when you could see they were getting close to puberty. I don't like the British and American attitude to nudity in young kids. Also kids walk and bike to school alone from a very early age in such of Europe, whereas in the UK that would have been shocking.

In the US, people were more relaxed about car seats, so taking a baby on your lap occasionally on a short trip on a safe road, or piling a few extra kids in a car very briefly- also not a big deal. In rural Italy, riding a motorcycle with a small kid and no helmet- not a big deal. In Italy- handing small kids around to be cuddled by strangers- sometimes while riding in a car without seatbelt- also not a big deal.

[MissShittyBennet]

Yes scrumptious you seem to have assumed the data remark was in reference to earlier weaning per se, rather than earlier weaning making children not scared of spinach.

There certainly is a great deal of ongoing research about when is the optimum time to start solids based on factors like allergy prevention, gut readiness and need for iron. Those can be competing factors sometimes and so it's about finding a sweet spot, or the nearest thing to one. There isn't consistent data, actually, but there is a lot of it.

However, there is a sad dearth of research suggesting that babies over 4 months are scared of spniach...

[Penhacked]

We are central Italy but I would say everything in the South will be magnified. They are absolute nutters driving in the South, so I am guessing seatbelts are either very much encouraged or it is just like the wild west and they are all loose in the back
The running to the paediatrician will be worse the South no doubt. Even more of a 'nonna knows best attitude.
Here in central Italy car safety is like England. Bike helmets are just a gimmick​ though, like kids sun glasses. I routinely see five ear olds crogging a lift on adults' bikes!

[chloechloe]

Being married to an Italian I would venture to say they're a bunch of hypochondriacs kanga . We have heated discussions in our house about whether our kids need to go to the Dr - I take the view that if you leave things long enough they generally clear up by themself. DH disagrees and phones his mother for backup, who has him racing to the surgery.

[Penhacked]

Yes there is that thing. X can't eat chocolate because he gets diarrhoea, Y can't have pasta after 2pm as it make her bloated etc. And with the hypochondria and blind devotion to gp comes a paradoxical mistrust of conventional drugs and vaccinations and a boing homeopathy industry

[Beansonapost]

BLW is what my mother did, though it never had a name. As culturally babies eat from the family pot... only hard fruits would be turned to purses everything else was given to the baby. Meal times are also done together. When I started weaning DD 21 months now, my husbands step-mother frowned upon the things I was doing... like the fact I wanted DD to eat with us especially main meals. She suggested we feed her.. bath her and put her to bed so we could have an adults only dinner undisturbed. Which I found weird as she wasn't even sleeping through 😂.

I think my approach is what has made DD such a good eater .. we all eat the same things and so far no real issues. Another thing with weaning my mother always said to give babies a taste of the foods/fruits etc you're eating... she started us all on porridge at 4 months as we would get tastes of real food as well. She had 8 children and there is nothing we are allergic to or don't eat.

Co-sleeping as well ... again didn't know it had a "name" as it just what you do. Children aren't in their own bed until about age 3.

Breastfeeding is the norm it's not questioned unless the mother cannot/doesn't want to feed. Though most children are eventually mix fed. It is the norm to see a mother take her breast out to feed her child... no one bats an eyelid and she can choose to cover up or not. It's no big deal , it seen a very natural.

Potty training is started from about age 2... as children start school at 3. And all children attending school are well potty trained. So we don't tend to have 3,4,5 year olds in nappies. It's frowned upon for a child that age to still be in nappies. As soon as children are able to speak, potty training starts.

I'm from the Caribbean...

[HeartsTrumpDiamonds]

Marking place to come back tomorrow when I'm not so tired. I have lots!

[NoncommittalToSparkleMotion]

I'm laughing and nodding along with "Nonna knows best."

I'm Italian/French Canadian, and the hypochondriac, fawned over, over dressed for warm weather children is bang on from my experience. The fear of choking doesn't go away until the kids are about ten.

They also nap midday for about 4 hours until about ten, apparently. My Nonna sighed when I told her DD had a 2 hour nap and said "Oh, God, just a power nap, eh?"

Breastfeeding was supported by my family but they were adamant that whatever I ate would effect DD negatively. So they warned me about broccoli, coffee, anything "gassy" as that would make DD gassy too, according to them.

They are saddened that DDs don't have their ears pierced.

As for the Canadian experience, yes about the skating before they walk. My DDs are more comfortable on skates than riding their bikes​.

[ilovepixie]

I was surprised as a visitor to Norway that people left their babies in their pram outside. I thought it was unusual, but logical, to leave them outside a coffee shop or restaurant where the parents could see them through the window, but they were also left outside a museum that we visited where the parents couldn't see them or hear them crying (they were never crying) and they must have been left for quite long periods of time unless one parent popped back out of the museum every 20 mins or so.

Are they not worried about the babies being stolen?

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

Apparently that doesn't happen ilovepixie. When we were there (about 20 years ago) a Norwegian tourist had been arrested in New York for leaving her baby outside a shop. The police only released her on condition that her husband agreed to supervise her anytime that she was with the baby until they left the US. So baby kidnapping wasn't even a concept in Norwegian public consciousness at the time. Most Norwegians that we spoke to thought that the tourists were a bit naive and should be more cautious in a foreign country, but that the US cops were vastly over-reacting not to just hand the baby back to the Mum without imposing conditions.