What would you think if an article in a Chinese weblog about a baby who died of heatstroke in the back of her mother’s car after her mother forgot she was there featured a headline that read:

“Have a baby, a locked minivan and forty minutes in the sun?, you have all you need for an American Infantatorium.”

I admit, a rough analogy, but the scenario I describe has happened. Someone reading only the headline could conclude that this is a common practice among those barbarian Americans.

Working parents all over the world are stressed out, they sometimes resort to unsafe, desperate measures when they have to choose between watching their kid or earning the income necessary to feed their kid. In China that might mean chaining up a toddler for half an hour. In the U.S. that might mean forgetting that you still have your sleeping baby in your car because you varied from your usual routine on your way to a busy day at work. Each of these scenarios are extreme examples of what can result from the particular stresses people in each of those respective countries face.

It’s a bad situation all around.

It is the headline that bothers me, not the story. The headline reads like an indictment of an entire country and an entire people. I thought I was going to read a story about scores of Chinese Children chained up a child care centers.

We already engage in too much stereotyping, and this stuff adds up. Most people just scan past the headlines, so they matter.

Perhaps you could rewrite the headline to read:

“Chinese father does to his two year old son what my parents wanted to do with me.”

The really interesting bit that you, or somebody, could focus on is what the article said about kidnapping being common as a result of the one child policy.