Meredith Small - Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children

MEREDITH F. SMALL

KIDS

MEREDITH F. SMALL is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of Our Babies, Ourselves; Whats Love Got to Do with It?; and Female Choices. She writes frequently for Natural History Magazine, Discover, Scientific American, and is a commentator for National Public Radios All Things Considered. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Also by Meredith F. Small

Female Choices: Sexual Behavior of Female Primates

Whats Love Got to Do with It?

Our Babies, Ourselves

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2002

Copyright 2001 by Meredith F. Small

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Small, Meredith F.
Kids: how biology and culture shape the way we raise our children /
Meredith F. Small. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Child rearingCross-cultural studies. 2. Child developmentCross-cultural studies. 3. ParentingCross-cultural studies. 4. ChildrenCross-cultural studies. I. Title.
RJ47.S475 2001
649.1dc21
00-065684

eISBN: 978-0-307-76549-9

Author photograph Dede Hatch Photography

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For
FRANCESCA,
my kid

On the day you were born

the Earth turned, the Moon pulled

the Sun flared, and, then, with a push,

you slipped out the dark quiet

where suddenly you could hear

a circle of people singing with voices familiar and clear.

Welcome to the spinning word, the people sang,

as they washed your new, tiny hand.

Welcome to the green Earth, the people sang,

as they wrapped your wet, slippery body.

And as they held you close

they whispered into your open, curving ear,

We are so glad youve come!

DEBRA FRASIER,

On the Day You Were Born, 1991

Parenting is the most important job of your life, my father once told me, but one for which you get no training. He looked at me, one of his four children, and added rather sheepishly, Most of the time, you fly by the seat of your pants.

Ive thought about the seats of those pants a lot over the past few years, years during which Ive been researching and writing about parenting across cultures and throughout human history and years during which I have been parenting my own daughter. In my research, Ive questioned how we care for our children and why our styles of care are shaped a particular way. Is there a best way to treat a child? Might other cultures have ideas about parenting that make sense and be incorporated into our child-rearing practices? Can biology provide some answers?

And as a parent with anthropological training, I began to question seriously my own parenting and what my culture was telling me to do. Surely the way we treat kids in Western culture isnt the only way, or even the best way to go about this, I wondered. Slowly I began to question even the simple parenting tasks that I had taken for granted. Why do I expect my daughter to sleep through the night? Why do I expect her to be a certain height and weight and have a vocabulary of so many words at so many months? Why am I spending all my free time driving her to play groups just to expose her to other kids? Whats with this concept of timeout parents have come up with and that ubiquitous phrase of encouragement, Good job? Deep down, I knew these were all cultural constructions. I wanted to stand apart and take a look at themand their validity. Eventually, I just couldnt take on faith what the pediatrician said I should do to properly raise my daughter, or what Dr. Spock or Penelope Leach or Dr. Sears said was true, or what the advice books told me was normal. I had to know the larger context within which such advice is given, where these pearls of wisdom come from culturally, and why exactly that particular advice is considered the right thing to do or expect.

In my previous book, Our Babies, Ourselves, I followed the work of a group of anthropologists, child development experts, and pediatricians who are interested in how various cultural styles mold parents and babies in their first year of life together. I learned that we adult humans are pretty nicely designed to take care of infants. Human babies are born highly dependent. When our human ancestors began to walk upright on two legs, this change in locomotion restructured the pelvis. This was not a problem at first, because our ancient ancestors still had infants with small heads. Until 1.5 million years ago, the ancestral brain was the same size as a chimpanzees and could easily fit through the birth canal. But then came a push for large brain size. Adult humans have the largest brains relative to body size, and largest heads, of any mammal. But a pelvis designed for upright walking cant accommodate such a huge head. And so there is a compromiseour babies have had to come into the world a bit too soon, neurologically unfinished and unable to care for themselves. At the same time, adult caretakers come equipped with the ability to sense what babies need and they are compelled to engage in a physically and psychologically entwined relationship, a relationship that lasts for years, even a lifetime.

I also discovered that this relationship can play out in myriad different ways. Biology might dictate a close connection, but humans are highly flexible and so we interject culture into biology. In fact, in parenting as in all human behaviors, the dictates of biology are often ignored, denied, or overridden for all sorts of social or cultural reasons. The way we bring up our children, in fact, often reflects more about our social history and our folkways and our traditions than what babies and children might need and expect. And so I have become fascinated by that place where biology meets culture, the place where parents and their children are pushed by biology and yet pulled by culture.

Kids picks up where Our Babies, Ourselves left off. Once infants begin to walk and talk, a whole new universe opens up for themand for us. The logical move for me, as a scientist, a writer, and a mother, was to follow along into that next stage.