The Anthropology of Parenting

Excerpted from
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent
By Meredith F. Small

As any new mother or father knows, nothing so invites advice as a new baby in the house. Other parents, Grandma, the lady next door, a stranger on the street, the family physician, and stacks and stacks of child-care books are happy to give directions about the "correct" way to care for an infant. What most parents do not know is that these various tidbits of advice, and even the consensus "rules" of parenting that have such an aura of credibility, are, for the most part, based on a mix of tradition, fad, and folk wisdom with a modicum of science. In fact, few have ever studied whether or not the rules of one society work better than the traditions of another society in producing functional, happy adults. If a parent talks to his baby, will it learn to speak earlier? No one knows. If you sleep with your baby, will it become emotionally dependent? Who knows. Yet societies establish these "rules" about various parenting techniques that imply there is a right and a wrong way to go about parenting. And the advice is usually offered in such ominous tones-make a mistake and your child may turn out socially inept, not very bright, maladjusted, or worse-that parents often follow these rules, or accept the advice, without considering that there might be alternative ways that also make sense. In addition, even the hard-and-fast parenting rules slip and slide, evolve and change, as societies change.

Theories of Parental Behavior

Scholars and scientists have been trying for years to figure out just how the parent-offspring relationship really works. And so far, they aren't really sure. They know that parenting advice has a social, cultural, and scientific context just like everything else that people do and say. And parenting specialists agree that parenting does have an effect on a child's physical and psychological development. As yet, however, no one is absolutely clear on exactly how the effect occurs. Human children are psychological and intellectual sponges-they watch and listen and grow with what they learn. But why does one event or interaction affect them more than another? And to what degree do the various threads of parents, family, and culture influence the way a person turns out? Is Mom most responsible? Siblings? Dad? TV? The entire culture? Or do none of these forces really matter, because much of personality is hard-wired and genetic?

Culture and Personality

At the turn of the century, Western scholars assumed that people the world over act basically the same. They felt that all individuals were unified in thought and action, in desires and motivations, simply because we humans are one species framed by similar psychological mechanisms. Much of this work was, of course, based on the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, who saw broad patterns of psychological thought in his patients. Anthropologists were the first scholars to turn toward non-Western cultures to support this paradigm. They assumed that by watching people in their everyday tasks, and by questioning informants about "normal" behavior in their culture, they could place behavior and thought in some sort of coherent psychological package, a package that would resonate with the psychological makeup of the Western mind. Therefore, according to this early work, culture would have only a superficial effect on the deep motivations of people; the belief was that underneath the skin, we humans are all pretty much the same.

It wasn't until the 1920s, and a flowering of anthropological field research across the globe in various non-Western cultures, that researchers began to realize the enormous impact of culture on the human mind and heart. From that point on, scientists realized that all people were not necessarily alike, not necessarily driven by the same psychological urges, and that wildly different cultures could produce wildly different people. This view also suggested that all cultures were of equal merit-a village of hunters and gatherers was finally considered just as interesting and complex and sophisticated as an industrial city. More important, anthropologists during those formative years of the discipline were instrumental in furthering the notion that culture, no matter what kind, is not a passive instrument but a heavy cloak that muffles what nature intended. This cultural mantle, the social scientists of the time believed, is what separates us from other animals; humans are marked as different from other animals because we have human-made culture as an interface with the natural world.5 And it was in this atmosphere-this acceptance of cultural shaping of the human condition-that the first studies of children and parents in various cultures were initiated.

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in the 1920s were instrumental in guiding anthropology away from individual psychology and toward a focus on the role of culture in shaping personality. They founded the "Culture and Personality" school of thought, a perspective that was, and still is, extremely relevant to studies of parenting across cultures. The framework of Mead and Benedict seems obvious now, but in their day the idea that culture might shape personality was quite radical. Mead was a pioneer field worker, and although some criticize her work today, especially her methodology, there is no denying that she bravely sailed to foreign ports and attempted to gather information firsthand from the way people in other lands lived. It may be that her informants in Samoa were pulling her leg when they described the loose sexuality of adolescent girls, and one can argue that she didn't live long enough in Manus, New Guinea, to really gain a clear picture of childhood there; but in the end, it was Margaret Mead who announced to the West that there were other, equally valid ways to grow up, and that these differing ways had a dramatic effect on molding adult personality.

Once the data from other cultures began to roll in, it was clear that people in different geographical regions not only behaved differently, they also thought differently. Ruth Benedict was famous, or perhaps infamous, for describing cultures in sweeping generalizations of differing personality types, a framework that today would be considered too stereotypical, even "racist." Nonetheless, both of these women were the first to point out that culture affects the individual, and that this effect occurs from the moment of birth, as parents make culturally approved decisions about how they raise their children.