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Anthropology
Researchers Show There's No One Right Way to Rear Children
Parents, take heart. A new compilation of child-rearing practices worldwide dispels the notion that there's one right way to raise children. Two professors in LAS have compiled parenting guides for seven societies, each written as if by a local Dr. Spock, showing that successful models of parenting are as varied as the cultures in which they flourish.
"Seeing that there are all these different ways that people raise healthy, productive children should be reassuring to many parents," says psychologist Judy DeLoache, who assembled the parenting case studies with anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. The work grew out of a course on infants cross-culturally that they team-taught at Illinois a few years ago. DeLoache's specialty is cognitive development of infants. Gottlieb has studied the daily life of the Beng people of Ivory Coast for many years.
Some of the practices the researchers describe may seem exotic, yet they reflect the belief systems of the societies. For instance, in West Africa, Beng parents may hold their babies until they are a year old to prevent them from "walking on their ancestors' spirits." In Indonesia, Balinese fathers protect their pregnant wives against having a stillbirth by not cutting their own hair. In Micronesia, Ifaluk adults don't talk to their babies until they are age two because infants are considered to have no thoughts or intelligence.
Many American parenting styles can be traced to the Puritans, says Gottlieb. "For example, our forebears' practice of making infants sleep alone when they reach the age of six months is still followed today and has been expanded to begin right after birth." In contrast, babies throughout most of human history have slept with their parents for at least a year or two, says Gottlieb.
DeLoache and Gottlieb's findings are available as an imaginative book in which fictional childcare authors present factual data called A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies (Cambridge University Press).
Winter 2001