西方养孩子的方式奇怪吗?

By Kelly Oakes

作者：凯利.奥克斯

From sleeping in separate beds to their children to transporting them in prams, Western parents have some unusual ideas about how to raise them.

从分开睡到用婴儿车送孩子，西方父母对如何抚养孩子总是有一些不同寻常的想法。

"Is he in his own room yet?" is a question new parents often field once they emerge from the haze of life with a newborn. But sleeping apart from our babies is a relatively recent development – and not one that extends around the globe. In other cultures sharing a room, and sometimes a bed, with your baby is the norm.

“他已经在自己的房间里了吗?”这是刚带着新生儿走出生活阴霾的父母经常要面对的一个问题。但是，与婴儿分开睡觉是一种相对较新的发展，这在全球范围内并不是普遍存在的现象。在其他文化中，和宝宝同住一间房，有时甚至同睡一张床是很正常的。

This isn’t the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. From napping on a schedule and sleep training to pushing our children around in strollers, what we might think of as standard parenting practices are often anything but.

这并不是西方人初为人父母的唯一不同之处。他们会让孩子按时间表午睡、做睡眠训练，会推着孩子在婴儿车里走来走去，但是我们可能认为的标准育儿做法往往完全不是这样的。

Parents in the US and UK are advised to have their babies sleep in the same room as them for at least the first six months, but many view this as a brief stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery.

美国和英国的父母被建议至少在头六个月里要让孩子和自己睡在同一个房间里，但很多人认为这只是孩子们去专门托儿所的途中的一个短暂停留。

In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal.

在世界上大多数其他国家，婴儿跟父母在一起的时间更长。2016年的一项研究对儿童与父母中一人或多人同住一间房、同睡一张床的时间进行了研究，该研究发现，在许多亚洲国家，儿童与父母同住一间房、同睡一张床的几率很高。例如，婴儿时期印度和印度尼西亚父母的陪伴会超过70%，斯里兰卡和越南超过80%。关于非洲各国父母和婴儿的共床率研究并不完整，但已有数据还是表明（父母和婴儿同床）这种做法几乎是十分普遍的。

Debmita Dutta, a doctor and parenting consultant in Bangalore, India, says that despite Western influences, bedsharing remains a strong tradition in India – even in households where children have their own rooms. "A family of four has three bedrooms, one each for each child and for the parents, and then you would find both the children in the parent's bed," she says. "It's that common."

印度班加罗尔的医生兼育儿顾问Debmita Dutta说，尽管印度深受西方文化的影响，但是同床睡在印度仍然是一种强大的传统，即使在孩子有自己房间的家庭里，婴儿时期孩子还是会和父母同床睡。她说：“一个四口之家有三间卧室，两个孩子和父母各一间，但是你会发现两个孩子都会睡在父母的床上。这是很常见的。”
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Bedsharing is one way to reduce the burden of babies waking up at night, says Dutta. Her own daughter had a rollout bed next to her parents' that she could sleep on until she was seven years old. "Even after she stopped breastfeeding, she still liked to sleep with us in the same room," she says.

Dutta说，同床是减少婴儿夜间醒来有负担的一种方法。她自己的女儿就睡在父母床旁边的一张滚轴床上，她可以在上面睡到七岁。“即使她停止了母乳喂养，她仍然喜欢和我们睡在同一个房间里。”她说。

Many parents in Western societies instead turn to sleep training methods, the most extreme version of which involves leaving a baby on their own to "cry it out", in an effort to encourage their babies to sleep for longer stretches so their parents can get some much-needed rest. In Australia there are even state-funded residential sleep schools parents can check-into, to sleep train their children.

西方社会的许多父母转而采用睡眠训练方法，其中最极端的一种是放任婴儿 “哭出来”，这样做是为了鼓励他们的婴儿睡得更久，婴儿睡久了他们的父母也可以得到一些急需的休息。在澳大利亚甚至有国家资助的寄宿睡眠学校，家长可以加入来训练孩子的睡眠。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Encouraging early independence aligns with a typical Western cultural focus on individualism. For that reason, bedsharing can seem to some like giving in to your child, and encouraging them to stay dependent on their parents. But parents with a more collectivist mindset, like Dutta, usually don't see it that way. "You give them some self-confidence and some independence, they will separate from you on their own," she says. "They will not stick to you forever."

鼓励早期独立与典型的西方个人主义文化相一致。因此，在一些西方人看来，与孩子同床就等于是向孩子妥协，鼓励他们继续依赖父母。但像Dutta这样的集体主义心态的家长通常不这么看。她说:“家长只要给他们一些自信和独立，他们自己就会和你分开。他们不会永远跟着你。”

Cultural factors affect not just where babies sleep, but when and how much they sleep, too.

文化因素不仅会影响婴儿的睡眠地点，还会影响他们的睡眠时间和睡眠时长。

Research by Jun Kohyama, CEO at the Tokyo Bay Urayasu Ichikawa Medical Center, and colleagues has found that babies in Japan tend to nap less than those in other Asian countries once they reach three months of age, possibly, he says, because "sleep is considered a lazy attitude in Japan".

东京湾市川医学中心首席执行官Jun Kohyama及其同事进行的研究发现，日本的婴儿在三个月大后往往比其他亚洲国家的婴儿午睡得少，他说，这可能是因为“在日本，睡觉被认为是一种懒惰的态度”的原因。

Kohyama also found that children in Asian countries tend to have later bedtimes than their counterparts in predominantly-Caucasian countries. He thinks parents wanting to spend time with their children in the evenings is partly to blame. Bedsharing – the cultural norm in Japan – could also be a factor. "Parents feel their baby is a part of his or her own body," he says.

Kohyama还发现，与以白种人为主的国家相比，亚洲国家的儿童往往睡得更晚。他认为部分原因在于亚洲父母想在晚上花时间陪孩子。日本的文化规范中的同床共枕也可能是他们晚睡的一个因素。他说:“父母觉得宝宝是自己身体的一部分。”

Though, as in the UK, the US American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to share a room with their baby to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), it warns against sharing a bed because bedsharing has been associated with an increased risk of SIDS.

和英国一样，尽管美国儿科学会建议父母和孩子同住一间房以降低婴儿猝死综合症(SIDS)的风险，但它警告不要和婴儿同床同睡，因为同床同睡也会增加患婴儿猝死综合症的风险。

But Rashmi Das, a professor in paediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, and author of a review on bedsharing safety, says that a lack of high-quality research on the topic makes it difficult to say whether bedsharing itself increases the risk of SIDS in the absence of other risk factors like smoking and drinking. "We could not tell whether bedsharing is actually increasing the risk of SIDS," says Das.

Rashmi Das是全印度医学科学研究所布巴内斯瓦尔的儿科教授, 他也是一篇关于同床安全的评论文章的作者。他说,由于这个主题缺乏高质量的研究，在没有如吸烟和饮酒的其他危险因素的情况下，很难判断同床睡本身是否会增加婴儿猝死综合症的风险。Das说:“我们不知道同床是否确实增加了婴儿猝死综合症的风险。”

Studies on the topic mostly come from high-income countries, where bedsharing is less common. But low-income countries, where bedsharing is traditional, also have some of the lowest SIDS rates in the world.

关于这一话题的研究大多来自高收入国家，在这些国家，同床睡并不常见。但是，传统上同床睡的低收入国家也有一些国家的婴儿猝死综合症发生率是极低的。

It doesn't seem to be a simple issue of geography: when someone living in the West has imported their cultural practices from elsewhere, they bring the lower SIDS risk with them too. Families of Pakistani origin living in the UK, for example, have a lower SIDS risk than white British families – despite mothers commonly sharing a bed with their baby.

这似乎不是一个简单的地理问题:当生活在西方的人从其他地方引进他们的文化习俗时，他们也带来了较低的婴儿猝死综合症风险。例如，居住在英国的巴基斯坦裔家庭比英国白人家庭患婴儿猝死综合症的风险更低，而在巴基斯坦裔家庭，母亲通常与婴儿同睡一张床。

"It's the cultural practices that are associated with the lower SIDS," says Helen Ball, a professor of anthropology at the University of Durham and director of the university's Parent-Infant Sleep Lab. Mothers of Pakistani-origin in Bradford have higher rates of breastfeeding and are less likely to smoke, drink, and put their baby to sleep in a separate room – all factors that are known to reduce the risk of SIDS.

“这是因为文化习俗与低风险的婴儿猝死综合症有关。” Helen Ball这样说道, Hellen是杜伦大学的人类学教授，也是该大学父母婴儿睡眠实验室的主任。巴基斯坦裔的母亲在布拉德福德有更高的母乳喂养率，而且她不太可能吸烟,喝酒,也不太可能让自己的孩子睡在一个单独的房间。所有这些因素都减少了婴儿猝死综合症的风险。

Das says he'd like to see bedsharing encouraged but "with a caution note that those persons who are bedsharing should not smoke, should not take alcohol, should not be very obese". UK SIDS-prevention charity The Lullaby Trust has advice for parents who want to make their bed a safe sleep surface for their baby.

Das说，他希望看到人们鼓励父母和婴儿同床而睡，但“要注意的是，同床而睡的情况下父母不应该吸烟，不应该喝酒，不应该太胖”。英国预防小婴儿猝死的慈善机构摇篮曲信托向那些想与宝宝同床而睡的父母提供了建议。

Just as bedsharing keeps babies close during the night, babywearing provides a way to keep them close in the day while parents run errands or work around the house. Rather than a new trend, carrying children in a sling is something humans have done for as long as we’ve been around. It was only when prams became popular during the Victorian era that traditional baby carriers became less common among some sections of Western society. In the rest of the world, there are seemingly almost as many different ways to carry a baby as there are cultures in which babies are carried.

跟与宝宝同睡能让宝宝在晚上与父母亲密无间的原理一样，当父母在家里做杂事或工作时，穿宝宝袋也能让父母和婴儿在白天亲密无间。用背带背孩子不是一种新潮流，而是人类自古以来一直就在做的事。直到维多利亚时代，婴儿车开始流行起来之后，传统的宝宝背带才在西方社会的某些地区变得不那么常见。而在世界其他地方，抱孩子的方式几乎和抱孩子的文化一样多。

Even parents who don't use a sling will probably have noticed the instant calming effect of picking up their baby and moving with them. "They intuitively know that this kind of rhythmic motion, between 1-2 hertz, has some power to calm down a baby," says Kumi Kuroda at the Riken Centre for Brain Science in Japan.

即使是那些不使用婴儿背带的父母也可能会注意到当他们抱起他们的孩子并跟着他们移动时会产生立竿见影的镇定效果。日本理化研究所脑科学中心的Kumi Kuroda说:“这些父母凭直觉知道这种1-2赫兹之间的有节奏的运动有使婴儿平静下来的力量。”

Kuroda began looking into the physiological effects of carrying infants when she saw that previous research, which used parental diaries rather than real-time physiological measurements, didn’t find any correlation between the amount of time babies were carried and the amount they cried. "I couldn’t agree with that," she says.

Kuroda看到之前的研究，这一研究使用的是父母的日记而不是实时的生理测量，所以这项研究并没有发现婴儿被抱着的时间和他们哭的次数之间有任何关联，于是她开始着手研究抱着婴儿的生理影响。“我不同意这种说法。”她说。

Her research found that carrying a baby reduced their heart rate and movement as well as how much they cried. She says subsequent research found that movement without holding, such as transporting a baby in a pram or car seat, as well as holding without moving, also calms a baby over time, but that they work faster in combination.

她的研究发现，抱着婴儿会降低他们的心率和运动，以及他们哭的次数。她说，随后的研究发现，即使不用父母有抱着的动作，比如用婴儿车或汽车座椅放置婴儿，也不用抱着婴儿走来走去，随着时间的推移也会让婴儿平静下来，但两者结合起来效果会更快。

Close contact, day and night, is what babies expect, biologically-speaking. In their first months they need to be fed frequently around the clock. Even when a baby's circadian rhythm develops and their sleep begins to consolidate during nighttime hours, waking during the night for at least their first year is normal.

从生物学角度来说，日夜密切接触是婴儿所期待的。在它们出生的头几个月里，它们经常需要被喂食。即使婴儿的昼夜节律开始发展，他们的睡眠开始在夜间巩固，但是至少在头一年，婴儿在夜间醒来也是很正常的。

In the West, there’s a cultural belief that children who sleep on their own will be more independent.

在西方，有一种文化观念认为，自己睡觉的孩子会更独立。

"Babies' biology has not changed dramatically over hundreds or thousands of years," says Ball. "But our culture has changed dramatically, and our expectations of babies and of parenting has changed dramatically over the course of a few decades."

“婴儿生物学在几百年或几千年里都没有显著变化，” Ball说。“但我们的人类文化已经发生了巨大的变化，在这几十年的时间里，我们对婴儿和育儿的期望也发生了巨大的变化。”

But the idea that night-waking is normal is not the message that new parents in the West are getting from family, friends and the wider culture. "We've sort of developed this cultural myth that babies shouldn't wake at night," says Ball.

但是，婴儿“半夜醒来是正常的”这一观念，并不是西方国家的新父母从家人、朋友和更广泛的文化中得到的信息。“我们已经形成了一种文化神话，认为婴儿就是不应该在晚上醒来，”Ball说。

That myth has consequences. Disturbed sleep in early parenthood has been associated with postpartum depression. But Ball says that trying to "fix" a baby's sleep isn't getting to the heart of the problem – instead, supporting the parents directly is more likely to improve their mental health.

这个神话有其后果。初为人父母的睡眠紊乱与产后抑郁症有关。但Ball说，试图“修复”婴儿的睡眠并不能触及问题的核心，相反，直接支持父母更有可能改善他们的心理健康。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

"Parents who are depressed experience their baby's sleep disruption worse than parents who aren't," she says. "Our argument is that actually, we need to fix what's going on in the parents' heads, we need to support them to think about all of this in a different way." She put together the Baby Sleep Info Source to arm new parents with accurate information on baby sleep.

她说，“抑郁的父母比正常的父母更容易影响宝宝的睡眠。实际上我们的观点是，我们需要纠正父母的想法，我们需要支持他们以不同的方式思考这一切。” 于是她整合了婴儿睡眠信息资源来为新父母提供婴儿睡眠的准确信息。

The idea that older babies "should" be able to sleep through the night comes from research from the 1950s that found, out of a group of 160 babies living in London, 70% began "sleeping through the night" by three months of age.

大一点的婴儿“应该”能够睡到天亮的这一想法来自20世纪50年代的一项研究，该研究发现，住在伦敦的160个婴儿中，70%的婴儿在三个月大的时候就开始“睡到天亮”了。

But the researchers defined "sleeping through" as not waking their parents by crying or fussing between the hours of midnight and 5am – far from the unbroken eight-hour stretch that many new parents long for – and not whether the babies themselves were actually asleep during that period. In any case, 30% of the babies hadn't begun sleeping longer stretches by that age, and half of the babies that were "sleeping through" reverted back to waking more at night later in their first year.

但在研究中，研究人员对“睡过头”的定义是:在午夜到凌晨5点之间，父母没有因孩子哭闹或烦扰而被吵醒。这实际上远不是许多新父母所渴望的连续8小时的睡眠，研究没有关注婴儿本人在这段时间是否真的睡着了的问题。无论如何，30%的婴儿在那个年龄段都没有睡得更久，而且有一半“一直睡到天亮”的婴儿在一岁之后又会在晚上醒得更多。

Even today, much research on infant sleep only looks at a specific subset of the global population. "So much of the research over the last several decades has been done on Western babies," says Ball.

即使在今天，许多关于婴儿睡眠的研究也只是针对全球人口中的一个特定小团体而已。Ball说:“在过去几十年里，很多研究都是在西方婴儿身上进行的。”

While there are undoubtedly differences between cultures when it comes to how we care for babies, there are many differences within them, too. Not everyone in the West thinks a baby sleeping in their own room is ideal. In one study, for example, Italian parents called it "unkind".

毫无疑问，不同文化之间在如何照顾婴儿方面存在差异，但相同文化内部也有很多差异。在西方，并不是每个人都认为让婴儿睡在自己的房间里是最理想的。例如，在一项研究中，意大利父母就称之为“不友好”。

Personal circumstances play a big part in how people care for their babies, and every parent finds their own particular way to do things. "All families are different, so a wide diversity is OK," says Kuroda.

个人环境在人们如何照顾他们的孩子方面起着很大的作用，每个父母做事情都有自己独特的方式。Kuroda表示:“所有的家庭都是不同的，所以广泛的多样性是可以的。”

For her part, Kuroda co-slept with her four children as a way to adapt to being away from them during the day. "I'm working full time and if I separate the whole night, it's really minimal time for the baby. We can intensely communicate, even in the nighttime. It’s real communication and time together."

就Kuroda而言，她和四个孩子一起睡以弥补白天没有陪伴他们的生活的空缺。“我全天都在工作，如果我整晚都和他们分开，那我留给孩子的时间就真的很少。即使在夜间，我们也能热情地交流。这是真正的用时间在交流。”

But she says, as with all parenting choices, people should find what works for them and their baby, rather than worrying too much about what anyone else is doing. "I think the parent and the infant can adapt to each other," she says. "It's like a tango."

但她说，就像所有的育儿选择一样，人们应该找到适合自己和孩子的方法，而不是过于担心其他人在做什么。她说：“我认为父母和婴儿可以互相适应，就像探戈一样。”

The key to thinking outside the Western box might be to remember that babies are not out to manipulate us, no matter how tempting it might be to see it that way at 3am. "What we really need with babies is to stop thinking about them as hard-to-please bosses," says Dutta. "They're helpless little beings that have come into this world, and we must look at them with empathy and compassion."

跳出西方思维模式的关键可能是要记住，婴儿不是来操纵我们的，不管是否在凌晨3点他们多么容易产生这样的想法。Dutta说:“我们真正需要的是，不要把婴儿看作是难以取悦的老板。他们是来到这个世界上的无助的小生命，我们必须用同情和怜悯之心来看待他们。”