Americas child death shame

[thesummerqueen]

Happens all over the world, and the only reason some of those nations get a 'pass' on it is because their best medical facilities don't match the worst ones here in America.

[kılıç_mehmet]

Happens all over the world, and the only reason some of those nations get a 'pass' on it is because their best medical facilities don't match the worst ones here in America.

Probably, but even in those cases, people actually take someone to someone, even if he's just some medicine man, or local hodja, as it's the case in Turkey, practitioners of pseudo-medicine and healers of faith.
But to simply to deny your child any type of assistance, and just sit by and pray...Well, one has to be really crazy.

I cannot know how frequent these cases are amongst the protestant or catholic christian community in America, but Jehovah's witnesses are quite notorious for not even allowing blood transfusions for their own children, although they will not say no to any alternatives(if any are available).

[Minimalist]

I cannot really think why a religious person would kill their own child. One has to be mentally ill to do so.

Frequently one leads to the other.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/mar...z2Z8NHAbGJ

CARSON CITY — The Nevada Supreme Court on Monday rejected the appeal of Las Vegas killer William Redman, who maintained he was acting on orders from God when he stabbed his 12-year-old daughter to death.

Redman was found guilty of first-degree murder but mentally ill and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the stabbing of his daughter Gloria in their mobile home in March 2008.

When his wife, Rosemary, returned home the day of the killing, Redman told her he stabbed their daughter to save the world and that she would be resurrected in three days, according to court records.

Religion. A Special Kind of Crazy.

[Rahul]

The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada's and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year.

You know the funny thing about crime rates? If no crime is reported you have a really low one.

Back in the mid-twentieth century we kept catching a lot of serial killers here in the US. Communists called it a disease of free countries.

They had serial killers too. Theirs were just getting away with the shit.

Really people in America anymore are just itching to call the cops on adults because they don't agree with their parenting style.

Sometimes the wife and I let our girls go across the street to play at the park. They're 8 and 9 years old. We've had the cops called on us several times over that. We go over, talk to the cops, and say, "What law did we break?"

They say, "No laws were broken. We just had a concerned member of society." We say, "Ok. Later."

Helicopter parents are annoying as fuck.

[thesummerqueen]

I realize you have a tougher parenting style than some people would agree with, but I do think you recognize the difference between that and the fact that there are abused and neglected children in America.

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(Speaking as the daughter of an army ranger - my father would have had much the same style as yours, except he actually abused us after a while.)

[Angrboda]

While it's important to encourage responsibility and hold people accountable for their actions, I think a whole side of this question is being ignored. (I blame Plato, personally.) The fact is that we are biological beings with built in drives that are generally more in control than we are. First, the most obvious, sex leads to babies. We have strong, less than rational, drives to have sex. We're built that way for a reason. We also have strong desires to have children (and this operates at more than just the level of 'thought', it's a bodily conditioned response). At a fundamental level, there is no good reason to have children; ever. (I'm exaggerating.) If nature left it up to us coming up with rational reasons to have babies, we'd be extinct. There are six billion plus people on the planet, a large percentage of whom are going to be afflicted with the urge to breed, and not all of them are going to be as successful as a summerqueen at coming up with a post-hoc rationalization for following their irrational inclinations. Making babies is what we do; making up resaons for making babies is likely just an afterthought. (Michael Shermer suggests that we develop beliefs first, and then develop reasons afterward. And there is psychological research to support it. How much more so for emotional, irrational drives to breed?)

One quick example. When a man holds a newborn, there are pheromones and hormones given off by the baby's head which incline him towards desiring children. If after holding someone else's child, the man comes home and talks to his wife about having children, is he being irresponsible, or simply responding to his biological nature?

(And regards summer's question about the different socialization of men and women, there are significant hormonal differences between the neurological development of an adolescent male and an adolescent female. I don't want to oversell, but the hormonal differences result in differences in neural development, and which brain areas undergo development, which results in the world of the female adolescent being "cognitively" different than that of the male. It is this differential neurological picture, as much as socialization, which results in differential prioritization of cognitive tasks (social behaviors) and differences in cognitive stimulii (emotions and epiphenomena such as confusion, anxiety, attraction, and desire). [There is a further level I won't go into, but biologically and cognitively, because of the mechanics of the two separate roles in reproduction, the male and the female, strategies for maximizing one's results socially and sexually will diverge substantially. A boy, attempting to fulfill his sexual drives, has different priorities, concerns, and responses to the potential for that behavior resulting in pregnancy.])

[Rayaan]

[thesummerqueen]

Absolutely...everything's biology...

[Rahul]

Well I can't smell. So I'm disinclined to think I have the ability to detect pheromones. I might be wrong on that. Not sure.

For me it's about family. My mom's side of the family is really close to each other and loving. A great environment for anyone to be lucky enough to be born into.

For me having kids meant making more of family. More people to love.