Number's game (part two)

Where to begin. I think my last post was a little ill-considered.

I don't step back from the general gist of it, that being, there is a lot of finger pointing and blame games when it comes to raising babies. That somehow, as replicated in text books, academia and healthcare, there is a superior Western European way of raising a baby. Whether it be sleeping the baby in the bed with mum and dad, formula feeding, feeding a baby to sleep, using a pacifier or weight, people seem to have very strong opinions about it all. I think I am still shocked how ferociously anti- non-mainstream people can be about these things.

Certainly, these attitudes were never impressed on me before N was born. I would have thought that there are many ways to raise a child in any culture and none should be considered inferior to another.

As an example, I would have thought that being as close to a baby as possible for the first, say nine months after birth would be a great way for a baby to feel secure. For mum and dad and baby.

What I have witnessed is a general, repeated sense of "what on earth are you doing to your child". Things as humble as using mustard oil instead of olive oil invokes responses such as "don't use that, India is a poor country". Sleeping a baby in the bed invokes "you are giving her bad habits". Giving her a pacifier gets "how can she talk when she's got that thing in her mouth" and feeding her to bed gets "she'll rot her teeth out with all the milk".

I went overboard by making this distinction based on the colour of people's skin, because well ignorance and sneers are not based on the colour of people's skin and it was unfair on those people with an open mind about these things and don't care how a baby is raised as long as baby, mum and dad are happy. So I am sorry about any offense caused by that.