Note that their sub zero C is only 23F. 
Article goes on to say this is a parenting practice that goes back at least 60 years.
It makes sense. My wife just reminded me that our daughters always got fussy in a hot room. They would cry and cry instead of napping. We’d crack a window to cool the room a little and they’d be happy little babies.
All bundled up like in those pictures, sheltered from the wind by walls and the stroller (pram) and the top up? I don’t see why not. Certainly it’s better for 'em then being overheated in the coffee shop, and easier than getting all those layers on and off. Babies are routinely overdressed in my country, and fussy from overheating.
But I admit I’m still agog at the whole “leave 'em outside while I have my coffee” aspect of Scandanavian parenting. That’s the part I have a more visceral NOOOOOOO! reaction to than the cold. Cultural differences are funny.
Yeah, that weirded me out too. I’d be too worried about kidnapping.
About sixteen years ago, a Danish woman visiting New York City left her baby in a stroller outside a Manhattan restaurant while she ate dinner with the baby’s father. The parents were arrested and the baby was put in foster care. The incident made the papers in Denmark, where people were astonished that Americans had a problem with what the mother did.
Or eaten by bears.
I feel the same way, but I can’t really explain why. It’s not like babies are a valuable commodity; the amount of people who would kidnap a baby in an infinitesimal percentage of the population.
Yeah, better be safe and put baby in the refrigerator.
Make sure you put it in the crisper bin. Most babies are milk-aholics and you don’t want to make it too easy for them to get hold of a quart if they’re unsupervised.
Dr. Spock recommended doing this at least up to the seventh edition of his book, if I remember correctly. Letting them sleep outside in their prams, that is, not leaving them outside on city streets.
My dad grew up sleeping with his window cracked open in the winter [depression era] and my brother and I grew up sleeping with my window cracked open in the window. I still prefer to sleep in a warm bed and an ice cold room, which drives my husband the desert born Californian nuts.
I was relieved to read about Scandinavian practices like that when I wanted to take my baby on walks on chilly days in November and early December. All bundled up, with a weather shield over the stroller if the wind was bitter, and her and I were happy as could be.
Now the mountains of snow at every street corner makes walk impossible. And I am going bananas without my usual daily exercise. Only a couple more weeks, a couple more weeks…
This! I used to drive my dad nuts, “heating the neighborhood”. I still keep the house cold for sleeping.
You speak like the bedrooms were heated… :dubious:
You heat the rest of the house, not the bedroom=)
Oh, I know. My dad closed the vent to my room!
Oddly, there are other neighborhoods in New York City where it’s common to leave babies outside stores and restaurants while their parents shop or eat. I’m thinking of the Hasidic areas of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for example. There’s a cluster of strollers outside every store.
Of course, just because the parents are inside doesn’t mean the babies are unwatched. There’s always someone from the community watching what’s going on. He might be hard for the casual observer to spot, though.
Ah, another rural doper I take it 
Before I was born, my grandmother hit a car. She never got a license, and wasn’t driving at the time. Instead she was wheeling a heavy rack of clothes outside the store where she worked for a sidewalk sale. The rack started to roll down the hill, so she jumped on it, thinking that’d stop it. It didn’t. Her added weight helped it pick up down hill momentum and it, and she, only stopped when they smashed into a car driving down the street.
Now, grandma was okay, but with luck like THAT in my family with sidewalks, I don’t think I’d chance leaving an unattended baby in a stroller on one.
Babies in prams waiting outside were a very common sight when I was in Scotland.
A lot of those shops didn’t have enough room to take the pram inside, anyway…
I saw a spot on this practice on a talk show once and the women said “who on earth would want to steal our babies? No one does that!”
Isn’t that lovely? A culture where parents aren’t completely paranoid about some imaginary stranger stealing their little ones?
It would be very rare, but the number of people out there who would steal or harm a child isn’t zero. Why would someone take a chance with something as valuable and irreplaceable as a child, even if it’s a small chance?
If something bad did happen because I had left my kid outside, I wouldn’t find it to be much consolation that it was a one in a million occurrence.
Because the chances of raising a frightened, stunted individual are almost 100% if you actually mean this. Which is worse than the 1 in a jillion chance something will happen to a kid left alone for a second.
Why would you take a chance with a baby? Hope you never put a baby in a car. Because, statistically, that’s an insanely dangerous thing to do. I also hope you lived in a padded cell, with nothing that could hold liquids over an inch. And no one could ever visit (most child abuse is committed by someone known to the child). Actually, parents are the biggest threat of all. So, to avoid even a “small chance” (your words!) of harm ever befalling a child, one would have to raise it in some sort of upholstered chamber, tended to by robots.