Beaker wrote:Another BS thing they will do is force the baby to sleep on it's back with pillows or blankets to keep the head in that position. Check out the heads of adults and you will see they are flat because of this.
I've been checking out the heads of adults and growing children for a long time and haven't noticed too many flat heads.
Looking at the larger view, practices like this are just vestiges of earlier eras when modern medicine wasn't available. Child birth has always been a potentially difficult time so various practices grew up around it. My kid was born in a fairly modern clinic, but the scissors and the paste on the forehead still went on.
The old way was to let the expecting mother give birth on a platform, like those slatted things you see outside every rural home. A fire would be lit underneath, because a birth is a cold time and needs heating up according to traditional beliefs. The smoke and heat could be useful in driving away parasites/ mosquitoes/ ticks etc so it makes some sense, however smothering a new born and mother in smoke and bringing the heat anyway above the normal hot-as-hell ambient temperature seems unhealthy. Nowadays modern metropolitan women don't do that, but they do wear woolly hats after birth, as do the babies.
The knife/ scissors plays an important role in local beliefs, if you have been to a traditional funeral you would have seen the symbolic use of string in Buddhist rites.
Expecting mothers don't drink alcohol, but in the last semester they might prepare some. Using a pestle and mortar a whole range of traditional roots and herbs are prepared and immersed in rice wine. After giving birth, but not too soon as far as I know, they will ease their pains by supping on this.
Mothers are also expected to stay indoors for a month after giving birth, again I can see this as a survival mechanism as they are forced to stay at home by tradition but can forgo work and other duties and concentrate on taking care of the new-born. There is a traditional one-month "birthday" party for new-borns. I put this down to high mortality rates and also the way it coincides with the end of the mother's month of staying indoors.
[quote="Beaker"]Another BS thing they will do is force the baby to sleep on it's back with pillows or blankets to keep the head in that position. Check out the heads of adults and you will see they are flat because of this.[/quote]
I've been checking out the heads of adults and growing children for a long time and haven't noticed too many flat heads. :-?
Looking at the larger view, practices like this are just vestiges of earlier eras when modern medicine wasn't available. Child birth has always been a potentially difficult time so various practices grew up around it. My kid was born in a fairly modern clinic, but the scissors and the paste on the forehead still went on.
The old way was to let the expecting mother give birth on a platform, like those slatted things you see outside every rural home. A fire would be lit underneath, because a birth is a cold time and needs heating up according to traditional beliefs. The smoke and heat could be useful in driving away parasites/ mosquitoes/ ticks etc so it makes some sense, however smothering a new born and mother in smoke and bringing the heat anyway above the normal hot-as-hell ambient temperature seems unhealthy. Nowadays modern metropolitan women don't do that, but they do wear woolly hats after birth, as do the babies.
The knife/ scissors plays an important role in local beliefs, if you have been to a traditional funeral you would have seen the symbolic use of string in Buddhist rites.
Expecting mothers don't drink alcohol, but in the last semester they might prepare some. Using a pestle and mortar a whole range of traditional roots and herbs are prepared and immersed in rice wine. After giving birth, but not too soon as far as I know, they will ease their pains by supping on this.
Mothers are also expected to stay indoors for a month after giving birth, again I can see this as a survival mechanism as they are forced to stay at home by tradition but can forgo work and other duties and concentrate on taking care of the new-born. There is a traditional one-month "birthday" party for new-borns. I put this down to high mortality rates and also the way it coincides with the end of the mother's month of staying indoors.