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> If you think that's a given, think again. Many countries base their maternal/neonatal care on common sense and old wives' tales instead. Not a general attack

> If you think that's a given, think again. Many countries base their maternal/neonatal care on common sense and old wives' tales instead. Not a general attack on what you write, just a warning against taking this too far. As both a father of small children, and as someone born in the early eighties I recently found reason to take a closer look at SIDS which peaked around here around the time when I was born: Turns out it was explained by doctors and nurses telling people to let their infants sleep upside down instead of on their backs which is what has always been done. And they had good reasons for what they did as well, at least thats what they said: - sleeping upside down was supposed to strengthen the kids neck and improve early development - another argument was that it would protect them from being choked if they vomited Once people went back to allowing their kids to sleep on their backs, SIDS almost vanished over night. Turns out Chestertons fence is there for a reason. Same goes for a number of other BS ideas that doctors has pushed even around here like the idea that mothers should use wipe their breasts with antibac before allowing infants to drink milk.

nostrademons 7y ago
I wonder what the long-term effects of the "put them to sleep on their back" advice will be, though. Our son hated (and continues to hate) sleeping on his back. We put him down that way because that's what medical advice recommends today, and if he died of SIDS because we didn't we'd feel terrible. But as soon as he learned to roll over, the first thing he did was start sleeping with his butt up in the air. I'm told this is very common, and most infants don't like to sleep on their back, and will avoid it if possible. Are we going to find out in 20 years that we've raised a generation of kids with lower cognitive abilities and poorer emotional control because they didn't sleep well when they were newborns? That they have asthma and sinus problems from mucus dripping down their throat while asleep? That there's some other unknown risk factor we're not accounting for? That's certainly the case with a lot of common parenting wisdom from the 80s. Oftentimes both sides of Chesterton's fence suck, but they suck for different reasons. And humans have a bias toward fixing problems they see, not being grateful for problems that were silently averted. That's why we perpetually tear down fences and generate new stocks of problems.
specialist 7y ago
"Turns out Chestertons fence is there for a reason." The bummer is when there's no followup research to validate the new policies. For example, Atul Gawanda attributes some of the reasonability for the opioid epidemic to updated standards of care for managing pain but then those advocates failing to do any followup studies to assess the outcomes.

nostrademons 7y ago

I wonder what the long-term effects of the "put them to sleep on their back" advice will be, though. Our son hated (and continues to hate) sleeping on his back. We put him down that way because that's what medical advice recommends today, and if he died of SIDS because we didn't we'd feel terrible. But as soon as he learned to roll over, the first thing he did was start sleeping with his butt up in the air. I'm told this is very common, and most infants don't like to sleep on their back, and will avoid it if possible. Are we going to find out in 20 years that we've raised a generation of kids with lower cognitive abilities and poorer emotional control because they didn't sleep well when they were newborns? That they have asthma and sinus problems from mucus dripping down their throat while asleep? That there's some other unknown risk factor we're not accounting for? That's certainly the case with a lot of common parenting wisdom from the 80s. Oftentimes both sides of Chesterton's fence suck, but they suck for different reasons. And humans have a bias toward fixing problems they see, not being grateful for problems that were silently averted. That's why we perpetually tear down fences and generate new stocks of problems.

specialist 7y ago

"Turns out Chestertons fence is there for a reason." The bummer is when there's no followup research to validate the new policies. For example, Atul Gawanda attributes some of the reasonability for the opioid epidemic to updated standards of care for managing pain but then those advocates failing to do any followup studies to assess the outcomes.