Anthropology and Child Development

"The editors offer a refreshing historical perspective. It is easy to have the sense that the anthropology of childhood was invented yesterday. In fact it has a long if uneven history and was probably more integrated into mainstream anthropology in the first half of the 20th century than it is today. The book includes excerpts from Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Meyer Fortes and beyond. One also gets a sense of the comparative perspective, with a glimpse of infants from many societies, from hunting and gathering bands to denizens of contemporary Japan. The book touches on play, discipline, communication, attachment, fathering and more. You know what Chekhov said, that if a great many remedies are proposed, then it means the disease has no cure. It is probably true with parenting too. There are so many solutions for crying in infants that we can assume the problem will always be with us. But what is interesting to observe is that some behaviour that we consider inevitable in the United States, such as tantrums, are not common at all in many societies. To an extent, the lack of a consensus over parenting strategies reflects the fact that there are different ways of organising human society. At the same time, we are not limited to one way of parenting even within the same type of society. One thing that is clear in the United States and other wealthy countries is that what is orthodoxy today almost certainly will not be orthodoxy in the near future. Now we’re told to place infants face-up for sleeping. It wasn’t long ago that the advice was the opposite. Parents risked being accused of endangering the lives of their children – based on medical advice that was not only unsound but that put the infant’s life in jeopardy. There is a lot we don’t understand about babies. I think humility and an open mind will be useful. Both anthropology and developmental psychology have long been fascinated by the concept of attachment. A lot has changed since the 1950s when John Bowlby, the British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, proposed that to have a healthy life infants needed a close, steady and warm attachment to their mothers, or a substitute. I don’t think that anthropologists would say that having that is a bad thing, but having a sense of the vastness of cultural possibilities suggests that babies can also grow up to be healthy under many different sorts of circumstances. Children who grow up with multiple caretakers and spend part of their childhood away from their mothers do not necessarily turn out to be disturbed."