Cracked: 6 Progressive Parenting Fads You Won't Believe Are Legal

[WhollyHeretic]

Numbers 6 and 1 are particularly disturbing. Heed their advice about not watching the baby yoga video. I got through about 45 seconds, very sick stuff.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19344_6-progressive-parenting-fads-you-wont-believe-are-legal.html

[laconicsax]

1. Painfully stupid article.

The suspended cages is about something patented in 1923 and has no references to anyone actually using it recently...so much for being a 'progressive fad.'

Baby Yoga probably isn't legal--in that you might get your kid taken away if caught. The video is Ukranian.

I'm not sure what's exactly wrong with male breastfeeding. True it isn't normal, but it isn't endangering the child in any way, and I'd bet that male http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtiyNv7zCbQ">luxury milk is still better than formula. The linked article in the Guardian also points out that the reason for men having nipples is to play backup when mom isn't available. Why shouldn't this be legal?

Elimination communication is ridiculous, but why wouldn't it be legal? What's objectively wrong with it?

Same thing with androgyny, gender is a social construct and the reality is that it's more complex and fluid than the one-to-one sex=gender relationship that people like to pretend it is. While I think the Canadian family chose a stupid name for their child and using it to make a statement isn't the best thing, there's no reason why it shouldn't be legal. The Swedish gender-neutral preschool seems a bit excessive, but fine. Why shouldn't I believe this is legal?

The lotus birth thing is admittedly gross and stupid, but again it's best to wait for the cord to stop pulsing before cutting it and while that certainly doesn't take a few days, it looks like (aura-bullshit aside) people taking the idea of letting the cord and placenta stop being useful to the extreme. Yes, there's a risk to the child, but less so than tearing and cutting newborn genital flesh, which isn't just legal, but routine.

I'm frankly surprised that this article didn't list http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1908442,00.html">placenta eating. There's nothing wrong with it, but if trying to predict when your kid is going to shit is unbelievably legal, why wouldn't placenta eating be so?

Here's an actual progressive parenting fad that I can't believe is legal: Anti-vaccination.
Here's another actual parenting fad I can't believe is legal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method">Ferberizing

[frogmarch]

3. The Ferber Method is mean and

accomplishes nothing good. Letting babies "cry it out" or sob themselves to sleep makes for frustrated babies, who may then become frustrated adults.

[laconicsax]

6. It's child abuse.

Infants don't have object permanence, so when they don't see their mother, they don't understand that she's just in the other room--they think that she's gone forever.

[LeftishBrit]

8. Both of the latter are indeed much commoner...

And inded far from being especially progressive, have been around for quite a while. Anti-vaccination since as long as vaccinations have existed; 'Ferberizing' variants for as long as many families have had houses with enough rooms for the parents and baby to have separate rooms. An ancestor of this was the upbringing style particularly promoted by Sir Truby King in the early 20th century. He was a New Zealand paediatrician who emphasized hygiene and recommended breastfeeding, both of which doubtless helped to produce improvements in the appalling infant mortality rates of that time. But some of his other ideas were fairly loony. Babies should be fed according to a strict four-hourly schedule, and NEVER picked up when they cried in between times, otherwise it would ruin both their character and digestion. 'Your child's best friend is the clock', he wrote in one book. Moreover they should spend most of their waking hours out of doors (in a pram or playpen) and parents should not 'overstimulate' or play with them more than absolutely necessary. The out-of-doors idea might have been quite healthy for New Zealand children; but the poor baby brought up according to Truby King methods in an English winter risked not only emotional and intellectual deprivation, but getting practically frozen.

[TheWraith]

2. Sweet holy mother of fuck.

Whatever fucking moron thought up that windowsill baby cage should have been fired. At. With an artillery gun. And then all of his living relatives hunted down and imprisoned to insure that those genes could not propagate.

[salvorhardin]

4. Aww! I liked the baby coop, or maybe it should be called the baby annex.

I think a lot of babies would enjoy something like that -- just not that particular model deathtrap.

[Warpy]

5. The no diaper thing has been around for a while

The parenting rage in the 40s and early 50s was early potty training. My mother's own journal of trying to do this before I was 6 months old is hilarious until she got to the part where she blamed herself for being inconsistent and moving from place to place too frequently for it to work.

Of course, given the cephalocaudal myelinizaton of the nervous system in infants, there was no way to potty train any child before voluntary control was both possible and established, so all they were doing is the "grunt training" of the no diaper people, waiting for the kid to start to grunt and slapping a potty under its arse.

At least the up in the air baby cage might have produced people with no fear of heights. It likely also produced Darwin winners who managed to exit windows that didn't have cages attached.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Wow

To be fair, I haven't come across most of these directly, so they can't be common. Except the no-diaper one, which actually I think was commoner in the past when nappies were more unaffordable/unsatisfactory/hard to wash.

'Androgyny' tends to hit the headlines, as does anything unusual with regard to sex and gender; but I'd say it was very rare. It would be difficult to prevent a child from knowing their sex once they got beyond the toddler years, mixed with others and saw books.

Children are observant, after all. I once knew a bright small boy who combined the vocabulary of a 4-year-old with the (lack of) social inhibitions that went with his chronological age of two-and-a-half. I heard a number of interesting things from him. My favourite: 'You know, I've got a willy! And my Daddy's got a willy. But my Mummy hasn't got a willy. She has a bottom!'

[GoneOffShore]

9. We know a couple who have gone the "no nappy' route. The kids are fine.

If you've got the time and energy to deal with it, the method would seem to work just fine.

[laconicsax]

10. No! It's madness! You're not supposed to believe it's legal!

FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!