mylène daily

As a multicultural family, we find ourselves confronted with different views on particular matters sometimes. Even though globalisation is starting to rule the world, some cultural differences still exist ..... luckily.

Shiqi told me about a Chinese website she discovered recently. She was quite enthousiastic about it, because it provided links to lots of useful information. As it turned out, the site also paid attention to the question of how to develop your baby's intellectual skills.
This triggered me. I had noticed already before, that in Asia (particularly in China, Korea and Japan) parents are very much occupied with this question, which sometimes leads to bizar situations (at least in the eyes of most Europeans). I think many of you have heard about Japanese who try to teach their unborn geniuses mathematics by playing Bach during pregnancy. I thought it would make a nice subject for a post on this blog.

Just to see whether my thoughts were correct, I checked out some German and Dutch parent/baby sites. My preliminary conclusion regarding the differences between China and Europe regarding raising your baby:
In Europe we tend to focus more on understanding how baby's develop and on finding ways to cater for their needs in different stages of their development, rather than focussing on explicit techniques to stimulate particular intellectual skills, like in China.

As I know that we have both Chinese and European readers, I'd like to invite you to post your comments on this issue here. We might get an interesting discussion.