KIDDING AROUND THE WORLD

Parents ever ywhere have a message for American moms and dads: Chill out!

PARENTS, relax. Your infant can sleep in your bed, your toddler can share your dinner and your 1-year-old can amuse herself just fine.

“[American] parents nowadays think, ‘Oh, my God, my baby isn’t doing the right thing; he’s not going to get into Harvard!’ ” anthropologist Sarah LeVine tells The Post. But she and her husband Robert LeVine, co-authors of “Do Parents Matter?” (PublicAffairs), have spent 50 years observing families across five different continents — and they’ve found that some so-called parenting musts are just American nonsense.

“Children are much more resilient than we give them credit for,” says Robert. “Their lives aren’t over at 1 year old or 5 years old.”

Mei-Ling Hopgood, author of “How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm” (Algonquin Books), agrees.

“Too much of the dialogue around parenting is about what’s right and what’s wrong,” she says. “It is great to look outside [your own culture] and see that there are other people doing other things. Yeah, it can be shocking and weird. But it shows you that there’s no right way to raise a child.”

Here, we’ve rounded up parenting tips from around the world — consider it your globally sanctioned license to chill out.

Let your baby sleep in your bed

Most American babies sleep in their own cribs, away from Mom and Dad. The American Academy of Pediatrics even cautions against having babies sleep in the same bed as their parents, saying that it increases the risk of sudden infant death syndrome or SIDS.

However, according to a 2010 study published in Current Pediatric Reviews, many of the countries with the lowest rates of SIDS are places where co-sleeping is the norm, such as Japan.

In fact, the vast majority of parents around the world — from those in agrarian communities in Mexico and Kenya to middle-class metropolitan families in Tokyo and Stockholm — sleep side by side with their infants.

“People have slept with their children for millennia,” says Sarah.

And it’s more than just convenient for nursing — it’s good for your kid in the long term. Surprisingly, she says, co-sleeping seems to produce more self-reliant, happy children and adults.

“Adolescent girls in [American] society are so self-conscious about their looks, but in West Africa and East Africa, and Mexico and other places in South America, they are totally un-self-conscious and self-assured,” she says. The one common

denominator: They all slept with a mother — or grandmother or aunt — sometimes until adolescence. And it doesn’t seem to stunt their emotional growth, either.

“That physical security from co-sleeping has left a lifelong, positive impact about how they feel about themselves,” she says.

Heck, let them sleep outside

Back in 1997, Danish mom Anette Sørensen was arrested for leaving her sleeping baby outside an NYC restaurant (while watching her from inside). Yet letting your child sleep outside in a pram — even unattended, or in the freezing cold — is common practice in Scandinavia.

“I think it’s rooted in this belief that fresh air is really important to both children and adults, and you sort of want to get the kids used to being outside from the get-go,” says Linda Åkeson McGurk, the Swedish author of “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom’s Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient and Confident Kids” (Touchstone).

Leaving your kid on an NYC sidewalk unsupervised isn’t a good idea, McGurk acknowledges, but sitting with your sleeping child in a park or on the front porch could have benefits. One Finnish study found that babies who nap outside snooze more deeply and for longer periods than indoor nappers.

“It’s not unusual for a kid to sleep for two to three hours in a stroller outside,” says McGurk, who adds that it helps prevent sickness, since bacteria and viruses spread more easily indoors.

Banish ‘baby food’

Americans often start introducing solid food to their babies slowly, serving them purees and introducing new fruits and vegetables one at a time. But countries touted for producing “good eaters” tend to introduce a lot of different foods at once — even ones with strong flavors. South Korean babies savor kimchi (rinsed to tamp down the heat), French children devour fish and Italian kids love garlic.

“It’s still not common to do baby food [in those countries],” says Hopgood, who lived in Buenos Aires when her first child was born. “In Argentina, babies would suck on a meat bone or eat mashed squash, and it made sense because it seemed natural.”

In these cultures, meals are seen as more than fuel: They’re important social events. French and Korean parents don’t give their kids snacks because they expect them to eat big, long lunches and dinners.

And in South American and Mediterranean countries, babies not only eat whatever their parents are eating, but also whenever their parents are eating.

“If dinner is going to be at 9 p.m., the kids are going to eat dinner at 9,” says Hopgood. “They don’t eat separately earlier.” If they don’t go to bed until 10 or 11 as a result, parents are OK with it.

“Food is an important part of that social interaction and family time,” says Hopgood — more important than an early bedtime.

Trade the staring contest for cuddles

Most Western parents believe that talking to your children while maintaining eye contact with them is important for bonding and communication. But some African and Asian cultures think it’s more important to give a child physical warmth — meaning skin-to-skin contact — than engagement.

Sarah LeVine points to the women from Kenya’s Gusii tribe as an example. The ones she met made a point of carrying their babies everywhere, while avoiding talking to them (they figured they would learn language when ready) and looking them in the eye (they believed doing so would undermine the parent’s authority).

“There may not be a lot of physical affection, but there is a lot of respect,” she says.

Their strategy, she says, “produces a different type of child — one who is placid and content.”

You don’t have to go that far, but if you’re getting tired of locking eyes with your little one — give yourself a break, and maybe give them a hug instead.