Experts have long been interested in how parents influence child development. However, it is challenging to find actual cause-and-effect correlations between parents' particular behaviors and children's later behavior.
The parenting style essentially affects academic accomplishments, self-confidence, violence, psychological strength, and willingness to deal with real-life problems.
Western parenting appears to have several variations than Eastern due to cultural myths, societal requirements, services available, and several other factors that impact parenting. The Western-style seems lenient and permissive, while the Eastern style is more oppressive, rigid, and demanding.
What are a few Western parenting cultural myths?
While Western parenting encourages children to grow up as autonomous and imaginative individuals, these are myths, and you shouldn't be surprised.
According to some experts, the idea that babies shouldn't wake up at night is a cultural myth. The belief that older babies "should" be able to sleep through the night derives from studies in the 1950s that discovered that 70 percent of babies living in London started "sleeping through the night" by the time they were three months old.
But the researchers described "sleeping through" as not waking their parents between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m. by crying or fussing, far from the unbroken eight-hour cycle that many new parents long for, and not whether or not during that period the babies themselves were still asleep.
In any event, by that age, 30 percent of babies had not started to sleep for extended periods and half of the babies who were "sleeping through" return to waking up later at night.
Instead, many parents in Western cultures resort to sleep training tactics, the most severe form of which includes leaving a baby to "cry it out" on their own in an attempt to enable their babies to sleep for more extended periods so that parents can get some much-needed rest as well.
There are also state-funded residential sleep schools in Australia where parents can "sleep-train" their children.
This isn't the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. Another relatively recently developed misconception is the sharing of beds or rooms with babies, and not spread across the world. Sharing a room, and often a bed, with your baby is the norm in some cultures.
For at least the first six months, parents in the US and UK are encouraged to sleep with their babies in the same room, although many see this as a quick stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery.
Babies remain with their parents longer than most other cultures worldwide since it is one way of reducing the stress of waking up at night for babies. In several Asian countries, sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for instance. Research in countries across Africa is patchy, but it shows that the activity is almost universal.
Encouraging early freedom aligns with individualism with a typical Western cultural focus. For this reason, some may find that bed-sharing is like giving in to your child and allowing them to remain dependent on their parents.
