[ak217]

Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too.

The researchers in the article were conducting an actual RCT, they are the only ones who should be speaking to this. Anyone else's anecdotal opinion should be discounted just as much as things like religious fundamentalist views on contraception.

Just let parents be. Stop with the admonitions. If something worked well or poorly for you, you're free to relate that without passing judgment.

[gsinclair]

Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic.

Anyway, my charitable reading of GP is not that parents should or shouldn’t do anything in particular, rather that the child’s needs, as expressed over a very long time, should not be forgotten just because we live in different times.