Parenting, The Millenium Edition

It's no secret that parenting in America has changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. Certainly news to me. As I spend time with new moms and old moms, its clear that a lot of the big things stay the same though. At the end of the day, new babies need to be fed, burped, changed, and held. Not necessarily in that order. That hasn't changed and isn't likely to until I invent the automatic burping/changing machine :)

LaSandra and I are learning about anthropological baby raising though - and man, that's different. In other societies, babies are raised much differently than here. Thanks to globalization, we're picking up on some of it - the sling for example - but a lot of it is just a different lifestyle. Babies in most other cultures tend to benefit from communal living and mothers that are very active with the baby. Active in the "go pick berries" sense, not the "taking a concall" sense. Mothers in primitive tribes in Botswana for example breastfeed til their kids are 4 and never lay them on their backs. This results in their babies walking much earlier than ours and just having better overall motor skills. I'm sure they'd look at the way we raise kids and think we're nuts. As different as new parenting in America is from parenting in years past - its not THAT different.

I have no doubt that when my kids are raising kids there's going to be a brand new baby-raising doctrine with new best practices, etc. So far the grandparents (and aunts and uncles) in Alana's life are doing a great job of picking up the New Parenting stuff and giving us the benefit of the old parenting knowledge. I only hope we can learn as quickly as they have.