Americans are raising their babies just fine, thank you very much.
Though perhaps unintentional, that’s one key takeaway from Robert and Sarah LeVine’s new book, “Do Parents Matter? Why Japanese Babies Sleep Soundly, Mexican Siblings Don’t Fight, and American Families Should Just Relax,” which is getting quite a bit of attention in the press.
The LeVines try to show that child-rearing is done differently across the world, and the kids turn out just fine. Indeed, looking at the mommy blogosphere, for instance, it does seem to be the case that we’re constantly shaming American parents for doing anything that deviates slightly from official recommendations by government bodies of experts. And to their credit, the LeVines argue that there are many right ways to bring up children.
Unfortunately, that seems to be about the end of their good sense.
Take childbirth. The LeVines criticize US doctors for performing too many C-sections. The Gusii mothers of Kenya don’t resort to such measures! But then again, a Gusii woman who has a bad relationship with her husband’s family may have to give birth alone in a field. Sometimes a midwife is called to help, but the midwife’s folk remedies might actually make things worse. And during the course of their research, the LeVines “took several women to the hospital with retained placentas.”
Even the most fervent advocate of natural childbirth might wonder whether it matters both to the health of the mother and the child whether the baby is born alone in a field.
Of course, that’s not the worst of it. The LeVines survey cultures where infanticide is practiced when a baby is in a breech position because “people would talk about it and say it had no sense because it was born backwards.” And then there are cultures where mothers decide to keep only one twin and dispense with the other because they simply can’t carry two around on their backs as they go about their work.
Surely “parents matter” to these babies who were murdered without having the chance to crawl or talk or feel a mother’s love. But again, the LeVines revert to cultural relativism.
Sure, it might sound mean that some mothers are taught never to have eye contact with their infants. But did you know that American and British mothers have been shamed out of breastfeeding for centuries?
It’s all relative. From female circumcision to child labor, people do things differently. We Westerners may think we’re morally superior and our children turn out better as a result of our parenting techniques, but we’re deluding ourselves.
There are, of course, grains of truth to this argument. Whether we engage in attachment parenting, whether our kids go to the best schools, whether they’re given educational toys, chances are children of educated American parents will turn out fine.
But those kids are a tiny slice of the American population and an even tinier slice of the world population.
Even within America, culture matters. Just take JD Vance’s story as he tells it in his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” An alcoholic father and a violent drug-addicted mother didn’t make Vance stand out in his childhood home of Middletown, Ohio. His mother had five husbands and many more boyfriends. His neighbors were mostly unemployed or barely employed and gaming the welfare system.
Though Vance made it, thanks to his grandparents, most of the kids in his community didn’t get a decent education and couldn’t get a decent job. In Vance’s telling, hillbilly culture “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”
But never mind the serious differences that are observable even within our own country. The left, led by academics like the LeVines, want us to see how backward we really are.
Look, they say, there are men in other cultures who take care of babies willingly. And there are mothers in other countries who aren’t as stressed out as we are. There are women in other cultures who sleep with their babies, and they don’t have to deal with children getting up in the middle of the night.
There are mothers who breastfeed on demand, cater to their baby’s every physical need instantly, and their toddlers turn out to be more compliant than ours. So maybe we’re doing it all wrong.
Actually the LeVines, for all their efforts, end up proving just the opposite. This tour around the world of parenting techniques should bring us comfort. Educated Americans — and the West more broadly — are mostly doing parenting right.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.