Another reason my kid gets sick all the time

To me, it's amazing that, even though we live in a fairly modern city, advice (esp. when it comes to raising children) seems rooted in old wives tales and such. For example, in the US, we are told time and time again, as new mothers, that breast-feeding is the healthiest thing for your child. When you give birth at a hospital, the nurses bring you the child every time it needs to be fed. They don't try to sneak it formula when you're not looking, which is exactly what happened to a friend of mine here who recently gave birth. SEVERAL TIMES. She finally had a huge fight with the nurses and convinced them to bring her the baby when it started crying so she could nurse the hungry newborn.

Another friend of mine was told time and time again that the baby she just had needed to be fed with formula. It would not get fat and healthy if she didn't drink formula. She caved into the advice and now is regretting it. Her daughter is constanly sick, and no one explainied to her that antibodies can be passed from mother to child through breast-feeding, and help prevent sicknesses.

Another issue is colds. I was talking to my friend Muna a few weeks ago and I was complaining about how my son is always getting sick, and she said, "hmm... maybe it's because of the weather change?" And I thought to myself, a more likely reason is that my son is in a daycare about 20 hours a week, and the children are constanly coughing on each other and passing germs around. So I tactfully mentioned this, and she looked at me like she was going to say, "yes, you're right; that never occurred to me before." Now, I'm not giving Muna a hard time, she really is a wonderful friend and she's a very educated woman, but I couldn't believe that my proposed possibility hadn't been thought of.

Part of the reson, I tell myself, is due to the nature of the society. It is an oral society. People are literate, but advice is passed down from mother to daughter, form elder to young adult. People don't get pregnant and go out and read every book on the market that has been written in the past ten years. Now, there is some wisdom in this, but the deference to elders has a positive and negative side. It shows respect for those above you, that is true, but what happens when the older (and supposedly wiser) person is wrong? There is not a sense of curiousity to try to find the truth. In general, people accept whatever the doctor (or grandmother or imam) tells them. It's starting to change, especially among the younger generations, but there is a long way to go before a balance is acheived.