Balkan Baby Balderdash

Everybody with children can relate to the torrent of unsolicited advice that one gets more or less constantly as a new parent. It is as if everybody who had children before has a Ph.D. in child-rearing, and many, it would seem, are more than willing to subject you to their opinions on everything. A brief survey of what I can remember: glass bottles are bad, car-seats are dangerous, you should feed every three hours, babies should sleep only on their front, only on their sides, only on their backs, you should breastfeed for four years, you should bottle feed from six months, you shouldn't use a microwave, if a babies hands are cold you are a bad mother, babies shouldn't sit until they are six months old, you should only serve honey with a plastic spoon as honey reacts with metal, etc. In this blog, I thought I would relate a few of the strange pieces of advice coming from Serbia.
1. Drafts are lethal. When our daughter was a few weeks old, my mother-in-law very kindly came to help us. It was a hot June, and we were warned by the Doctors that this was the only thing we should worry about and take care of (as an aside, that was the only piece of advice given really by medical people). I dutifully heeded this advice, as worried about her temperature constantly. I got a good breeze going by opening both sides of the house, but each time I left the room, I would come back to find both of the doors closed. I eventually realised this was my mother-in-law's doing, and she looked at me with some panic saying: Ali duva! As if that said it all. I must admit that the obsession with drafts is something that is common all over the former Yugoslavia, and indeed I'm not the first to notice this:

"Benjamin subscribed to the common Yugoslav theory that moving air was bad for children. Parents on stiflingly hot trains conscientiously kept the windows shut while the other passengers smoked their cigarettes and nodded approvingly".
--- The Impossible Country, Brian Hall

I'll simply never, ever convince her otherwise.

2. Suffering is part of parenthood. Whatever labor-saving, 21st century implement we have, it is always deemed to be bad, dangerous or just unwise. Even, it would seem, attempts to be comfortable while feeding the baby are not smart. Do your back in, naturally, so that the baby can eat 10 milliseconds faster. Why use a microwave when you can set up some complex arrangement of things on the stove?

3. Hand washing is best. The midwives told us that we shouldn't wash things with fabric softener, and that a simple warm machine wash, easy on the powder, was the best for babies skin. We were thus alarmed to discover that the mother-in-law was hand washing things in the sink with all manner of soaps instead of using the machine.

4. Swimming - are you kidding? Like thousands of other babies in Germany, our daughter takes swimming lessons. We are apparently insane for exposing her to the dangers of pool water. This paranoia, of course, isn't specific to the former Yugoslavia, but as a long time swimmer myself I have absolutely never understood it: when one swims a lot, it becomes clear that the worse thing that happens to you is that your hair and skin become too dry as they are cleaned too much. I mean at 4 parts per million (as a baby pool normally is), there is no way anything much is going to survive in that water.

5. Pregnant women shouldn't do much. There is, seemingly, some notion of "maintaining the pregnancy" that kicks in the moment you have a positive pee-on-a-stick test. Any western notion of doing things like (say) swimming or exercise or work even early in a pregnancy is scoffed at. Frankly I think this is just an excuse for people to do nothing.

6. Pregnant women should eat a lot of X. (where X is meat, potatoes, soap, whatever) It doesn't matter if it makes you sick.

7. Carbonated drinks give babies sore-throats (or all humans for that matter). What? I realised after a brief survey that this is something that a lot of ex-Yugos stick to. We used to drink fizzy ginger-ale when we had sore-throats, and I'm not saying that Canada is necessarily right, but I struggle to come up with a plausible explanation for how this could happen.

8. Science or logic does not apply. You may think you know that viruses can't, for instance, be readily passed from Dogs to humans, but here kod nas things are different. Nada told me that dog hair can make babies very very sick, and her cousin is a doctor.

There are probably dozens that I forget, but you get the idea.