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Comment by genrez | Hacker News Reader

I think that the article is trying to point out that some western parenting practices are potentially harmful to infants. In this case, "weird" is a very kind way of expressing the articles concern.

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It doesn't, though. It mentions sids a lot but then quotes a doctor to say the research is unclear. Other countries experience sids at reduced rates but its not clear if thats because of bed sharing, and there's no evidence in the article one way or another.

If they want to point out potential harmful behaviours, they should do that, and then they would get called out on doing so with little to no evidence. Instead they went with "weird" because they have no argument per se.

I agree that the article does choose not to say that their claims are backed with evidence. The article in fact does correctly state that they don't have evidence that bed-sharing is safer. However, they do state that room-sharing is current pediatric best practice, and provide links [1], [2] to articles to back that up.

Given that as far as I know, room-sharing is not standard Western parenting practice, I believe they have backed up with an appeal to authority the idea that Western style parenting is harmful. Furthermore, link [1] contains a link to [3] which is an recommendation from a pediatric journal that provides links to scientific papers that suggest room-sharing reduces SIDS risk by up to 50%. (see bullet point 4 of link [3]) Thus I think the appeals to authority are backed by evidence.

Thus I think that the article could have made a stronger point if they had talked about room sharing more instead of bed sharing, but I think they do have an evidence backed point that Western parenting is potentially harmful. They avoid ruffling parent's feathers too much by understating their point.

[1]: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-ini... [2]: https://www.lullabytrust.org.uk/safer-sleep-advice/ [3]: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/138/5/e201629...

Again, this article is written poorly, the headline is pure clickbait, and its worthy of any criticism it garners.

It's great to steelman someone else's arguments in a discussion. It's terrible to let BBC print garbage with clickbait headlines without criticism, because it will keep happening, and its bad for society.

It doesn't make the point your making, and the way it goes about making its point is not something I'd accept in an inclusive society.

I agree that the article is poorly written, and doesn't more than tangentially make the point I was making. I think I can understand why you would want criticism a poorly written article in the supposedly high quality BBC. My curiosity is peeked about the inclusive society point. Nothing in the article ran afoul of my speech norms. I don't think my speech norms are particularly well developed though. What part of the way the article makes its point is something you would not accept?

If we're accepting of other cultures, you shouldn't call one weird because it doesn't' conform with other cultures. Isn't the point to celebrate differences? The whole premise of the article is nonsense.

I think I understand now. Thank you for explaining. To me Western culture is a set of knowledge and practices one grows up with, but I don't attach my identity to any particular culture, nor do I hold people responsible for any harm caused by practices their country's culture accepts. I can see that if someone had said something like "programmers are weird", then it would feel like an attack to me though because I identify as a programmer. Many people do attach their identities to their county's culture, so we should be careful about how we discuss cultures. Did I miss anything?

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