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Parenting Around the World

Photo by lindsey gee, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

Every weekend my wife and I pack up our 10-month-old son Owen in his stroller and walk to town. We read books at the library, we buy bananas at the store, we stop in at the coffee shop for a diaper change and maybe a nap. If we were raising Owen in Buenos Aires instead of New Hampshire, we might be getting a late night dinner with friends instead of afternoon coffee – and if we lived in China, we wouldn’t be changing his diaper, because he probably wouldn’t be using one.

Mei-ling Hopgood is a writer and associate professor of Journalism at Northwestern University. In her new book “How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm” she tests out parenting techniques from around the world with her daughter Sofia, from trying out new foods the way French families do, to potty training the Chinese way, which starts much earlier than what’s done in the west. She joins us now with the good, the bad and the messy from her global parenting adventure.

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