5 ms·

> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it a

> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. Certainly the odds aren't good that this is true of everything humans do, but the odds that some of the things we do fall into this category is 100%. Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.

bawolff 4y ago
> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
- neaden 4y ago
  They absolutely claimed it was good for the enslaved person as part of justifying it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave. People still argue that slavery (in particularly, chattel slavery of Blacks in North America) was good for the slave, and the argument was even more common when slavery was legal but under active debate.
- acdha 4y ago
  > Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave. People said it was the natural order of things - similar to how men owning women or children was divinely approved, and if you read about “the curse of Ham” you can see many variations of the excuses offered that it was just due to ancestral sin - and during the colonial era that exact argument was used to the general effect that slavery provided heathens with a chance to adopt Christianity and be saved. The reason the Southern Baptists exist as a separate denomination is because they split off from the main Baptist community in support of slavery, only recanting in 1995!, and while that’s generally accepted as being significantly motivated by the massive financial impacts it relied on those rationalizations (it’s biblical, we’re improving people who would otherwise be doomed to a primitive existence without the chance of salvation). These days people know not to say slavery was good but you can still find conservatives saying colonialism was a net win for many countries. There’s considerably more about this dark part of our history here: https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp
kaitai 4y ago
There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet-nurses-in-the-eighteenth-century/#_ftn2 https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance). For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting? Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion Some stuff is evolutionary. Co-sleeping is seen in all mammal species. And its an important part of the group sentiment, including the social support it brings. The lack of it causes anxiety in mammal species. Even domestic cats prefer to take care of their young in groups of mothers until the kittens grow up. > This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn... ...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it. > England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure Inbreeding, negligent and sociopathic aristocrats are never good examples for anything related to the basic tenets of human civilization. Less, parenting. Sheeesh. If your parenting morning star is murderous 18th century aristocrats who starved their people to be able to live in extravaganza with their powdered wigs...
thewhitetulip 4y ago
Dude, only Europeans had slaves right? It is not like the entire world had them. In fact the word slave originates from Slavic people.. I don't think Asians ever had slaves in the history. The OP comment said " what are the odds that the rest of the world was wrong for a millenium and Americans figured it out in 100yrs" Edit: damn. non European had slaves. Didn't know it before. Wasn't definitely part of the history taught in schools though. OP is right though. Throughout Entire history people had slaves until it was abolished.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Is this parody/sarcasm/troll? At a minimum, Africans and Muslims had slaves. Pretty sure the Incas and Aztecs did. I lack data on Asia.
  - Xixi 4y ago
    It's not hard to find sources about slavery in Asia. "Slavery in Korea formally existed from antiquity up to the 20th century. Slavery was very important in medieval Korea; it was a major institution. [...] The Korean "nobi" system of slavery peaked between the 15th and 17th centuries and then declined in the 18th and 19th centuries." [1] "The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-slavery/forced-migrations-and-slavery-in-the-mongol-empire-12061368/C183F34FAECBB6F24F029256F6DBE235 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-his...
    - thewhitetulip 4y ago
      Mongols weren't exactly 20th and 21st century were they? I had no idea about Korean slavery that existed till the 20th century. Why aren't these parts included in history curriculum?
unity1001 4y ago
[flagged]
- shaklee3 4y ago
  except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive. so despite your preconceived notions of a baby crying being mentally damaging, there is no evidence to suggest that. on the contrary, everyone is happier and gets more sleep.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive The study was made on ~40 children. That is not a good group for anything. And there are absolutely no long-term studies on this. There are a lot of other comments that discuss that angle in this thread.
    - shaklee3 4y ago
      it literally says 235 babies and external factors were controlled for. you didn't even read the article you're responding to.
      - unity1001 4y ago
        Here is a formal rebuttal from other people: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13390 https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.... > In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.

bawolff 4y ago

> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.

neaden 4y ago
They absolutely claimed it was good for the enslaved person as part of justifying it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave. People still argue that slavery (in particularly, chattel slavery of Blacks in North America) was good for the slave, and the argument was even more common when slavery was legal but under active debate.
acdha 4y ago
> Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave. People said it was the natural order of things - similar to how men owning women or children was divinely approved, and if you read about “the curse of Ham” you can see many variations of the excuses offered that it was just due to ancestral sin - and during the colonial era that exact argument was used to the general effect that slavery provided heathens with a chance to adopt Christianity and be saved. The reason the Southern Baptists exist as a separate denomination is because they split off from the main Baptist community in support of slavery, only recanting in 1995!, and while that’s generally accepted as being significantly motivated by the massive financial impacts it relied on those rationalizations (it’s biblical, we’re improving people who would otherwise be doomed to a primitive existence without the chance of salvation). These days people know not to say slavery was good but you can still find conservatives saying colonialism was a net win for many countries. There’s considerably more about this dark part of our history here: https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp

kaitai 4y ago

There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet-nurses-in-the-eighteenth-century/#_ftn2 https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance). For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting? Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.

unity1001 4y ago
> There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion Some stuff is evolutionary. Co-sleeping is seen in all mammal species. And its an important part of the group sentiment, including the social support it brings. The lack of it causes anxiety in mammal species. Even domestic cats prefer to take care of their young in groups of mothers until the kittens grow up. > This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn... ...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it. > England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure Inbreeding, negligent and sociopathic aristocrats are never good examples for anything related to the basic tenets of human civilization. Less, parenting. Sheeesh. If your parenting morning star is murderous 18th century aristocrats who starved their people to be able to live in extravaganza with their powdered wigs...

thewhitetulip 4y ago

Dude, only Europeans had slaves right? It is not like the entire world had them. In fact the word slave originates from Slavic people.. I don't think Asians ever had slaves in the history. The OP comment said " what are the odds that the rest of the world was wrong for a millenium and Americans figured it out in 100yrs" Edit: damn. non European had slaves. Didn't know it before. Wasn't definitely part of the history taught in schools though. OP is right though. Throughout Entire history people had slaves until it was abolished.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Is this parody/sarcasm/troll? At a minimum, Africans and Muslims had slaves. Pretty sure the Incas and Aztecs did. I lack data on Asia.
- Xixi 4y ago
  It's not hard to find sources about slavery in Asia. "Slavery in Korea formally existed from antiquity up to the 20th century. Slavery was very important in medieval Korea; it was a major institution. [...] The Korean "nobi" system of slavery peaked between the 15th and 17th centuries and then declined in the 18th and 19th centuries." [1] "The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-slavery/forced-migrations-and-slavery-in-the-mongol-empire-12061368/C183F34FAECBB6F24F029256F6DBE235 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-his...
  - thewhitetulip 4y ago
    Mongols weren't exactly 20th and 21st century were they? I had no idea about Korean slavery that existed till the 20th century. Why aren't these parts included in history curriculum?

unity1001 4y ago

[flagged]

shaklee3 4y ago
except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive. so despite your preconceived notions of a baby crying being mentally damaging, there is no evidence to suggest that. on the contrary, everyone is happier and gets more sleep.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive The study was made on ~40 children. That is not a good group for anything. And there are absolutely no long-term studies on this. There are a lot of other comments that discuss that angle in this thread.
  - shaklee3 4y ago
    it literally says 235 babies and external factors were controlled for. you didn't even read the article you're responding to.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      Here is a formal rebuttal from other people: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13390 https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.... > In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.