How to observe the loudest man-made noise ever recorded...
Ask a toddler to be quiet for two minutes while you're on the phone.
The next time we want war with another country we should send a thousand 2 year olds as an advanced fighting force. After two days in theatre, the enemy will surrender and beg to be shipped to Gitmo, provided there are no children there.
I think my daughter wakes up some mornings with the goal of breaking my spirit and making me cry.
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I had a chance to work with a number of native peoples in several 3rd world settings earlier in my career and did not observe their young children experiencing crying jags/temper tantrums like our kids do--even a general lack of crying on planes-- or in unfamiliar settings, as they happily lay in the arms of their mother or father. As, I am not an anthropologist, nor behaviorist, I have no clue what explains the difference, but it stood out enough that I remember remarking on it with others who had worked with these populations.
My hat is off, though to parents experiencing the "terrible twos"... Maybe the soothing, unconditional love of a pup would help get them through? 
that the 'crying on the plane' phenomenon is related to the pressure differential and a difficulty of equalizing pressure in the inner ear.
Other than that, well, kids sometimes just cry. 
the rest very well could be cultural and a reflection of how children are raised/cared for. I tend to tread a middle path between RW extremism ("It's bad parenting" and LW Woo ("Don't ever scold/punish the kids" .
Hey, I figure my kid got to 18. Now she can get therapy if she needs it.
I'm not really feeling that. My comments were intended to reflect on the amount of extremism in the world, a trait I found kind of counter productive when it came to my parenting experience. Plus, I didn't mean to include you in one of the extreme categories.
It was more an attempt at being light-hearted than meant as a criticism. Raising kids is hard enough without trying to place hard judgements about how it's done. It could be that more "3rd world" children have learned the hard way that crying won't fill an empty belly, and have ceased to try that avenue.
I remember the old school attitude that children have to learn that the parent can't drop anything they're doing to comfort every boo-boo, and that raising the alarm ("crying" needs to be saved for real emergencies. In effect, sometimes you just had to let the kid cry in their room until they were done if you knew there wasn't really anything wrong. And, teaching kids how to behave in public can be difficult. There is a place where crying becomes a kind of blackmail against the parents to get their way. Somewhere in there is a middle way that teaches proper comportment without coddling or turning the kid into a bully.
