This article explores ethical issues raised by parenting interventions implemented in communities in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs) with rural, subsistence lifestyles. Many of these ...interventions foster “positive parenting practices” to improve children’s chances of fulfilling their developmental potential. The practices are derived from attachment theory and presented as the universal standard of good care. But attachment-based parenting is typical primarily of people living Western lifestyles and runs counter to the different ways many people with other lifestyles care for their children given what they want for them. Thus, such parenting interventions involve encouraging caregivers to change their practices and views, usually with little understanding of how such changes affect child, family, and community. This undermines researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to honor promises to uphold ethic codes of respect and beneficence. Support for this claim is provided by comparing positive parenting practices advocated by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF; with the world health organization WHO) Care for Child Development (CCD) intervention with parenting practices typical of communities with rural, subsistence lifestyles—the most common of lifestyles worldwide and largely observed in LMICs. As UNICEF has a considerable presence in these countries, the CCD intervention was selected as a case study. In addition, parenting interventions typically target people who are poor, and the issues this raises regarding ethics of fairness and justice are considered. Recommendations are made for ways change agents can be sensitive to the living conditions and worldviews of communities, and, thus, be appropriately effective and ethically sensitive to the diverse needs of different communities.
Interviews were conducted with 336 mother-child dyads (children's ages ranged from 6 to 17 years; mothers' ages ranged from 20 to 59 years) in China, India, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, and ...Thailand to examine whether normativeness of physical discipline moderates the link between mothers' use of physical discipline and children's adjustment. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that physical discipline was less strongly associated with adverse child outcomes in conditions of greater perceived normativeness, but physical discipline was also associated with more adverse outcomes regardless of its perceived normativeness. Countries with the lowest use of physical discipline showed the strongest association between mothers' use and children's behavior problems, but in all countries higher use of physical discipline was associated with more aggression and anxiety.
This article argues for the value of interdisciplinarity by attempting to integrate an evolutionary theory of human ontogeny with psychodynamic perspectives to explain the origins of an American ...cultural schema of marriage. Specifically, I draw on the work of evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello to propose that key features of the American “cultural” schema for marriage—commitment to it and the expectations it be shared, mutually beneficial, and lasting—are understandings that arise largely out of young human children's capabilities for emotional alignment or attunement and, thereafter, for fully developed joint intentionality. This focus of the American marital relationship on joint intentionality, and on even earlier beginnings of shared intentionality, I interpret as evidence—drawing on psychodynamic theory—that marriage as an American institution is largely a defense, a regression, that allows a return or “retreat” to feelings of dependency never fully resolved in adulthood because of the extreme emphasis on independence and self‐reliance in American child‐rearing. cultural schemas, defense mechanisms, evolutionary psychology, marriage
The linguist Anna Wierzbicka casts linguistic meaning in terms of cultural scripts, which she constructs from a short list of 60 or so conceptual primes, each with a grammar, deemed basic to human ...language, in the sense that these occur in all languages. I focus on the Ifaluk Islander lexeme fago, for which she has published such a script, and which I have also analyzed in another context. I argue that her script for fago does not adequately capture its meaning. Instead, I show, a culturally adequate definition of this emotion term cannot be founded on metalinguistics but must incorporate relevant nonlinguistic experience pertaining to the domain in question—in the case of fago, early attachment and the cultural defenses that emerge in response to it. My analysis of fago is compatible with a theory of cultural meaning as susceptible to considerable cross-cultural variability while constrained by shared features of human neurobiology in combination with common features of the world in which humans all live.
This article delineates four universal features of child rearing that together explain how child rearing everywhere so effectively turns children into valued adults. Cultural models for child ...rearing, so variable in the substance of what they teach, are all equally designed to make the child’s experience of those important lessons constant, to link those lessons to emotional arousal, to connect them to evaluations of the child as approved or disapproved of, and to prime the child to be emotionally predisposed to learn them. This design insures that the child is receptive to these lessons, and that the lessons themselves are unmistakable, motivating, and memorable. The result, human adulthood, could not be accomplished otherwise.
One common cultural organizing principle is event sequencing. This article describes and illustrates two widespread examples of this kind of organization, cultural routines, and cultural templates. ...Cultural routines organize recurrent activities in time and space. Cultural templates rely on causally linked sequences of more abstract events to support reasoning and narrative. Why should so much of culture be organized thusly? My argument rests on evidence from childhood development and evolutionary history. Recognition of discrete events and their sequencing in routines occurs early in childhood. Although event sequencing is an ancestral trait in humans, it is the full-blown human capacity to understand how the events in such a sequence are causally linked, including intentionally linked, that finds its way into the organization of cultural templates. In taking advantage of event sequencing and causality, culture has piggybacked on human cognitive capacities. It follows that a full accounting of human culture requires recognition of the way both world and brain are organized.
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