Culture and Child Raising
Child-raising practices reflect not only individual values, but also cultural values that vary across time and place. Should children be independent or obedient? If you live in a Westernized culture, you likely prefer independence. “You are responsible for yourself,” families and schools tell their children. “Follow your conscience. Be true to yourself. Discover your gifts.” Some Western parents go further, telling their children, “You are more special than other children” (Brummelman et al., 2015). (Not surprisingly, these children tend to have inflated self-views years later.) In the past, Western cultural values placed greater priority on obedience, respect, and sensitivity to others (Alwin, 1990; Remley, 1988). “Be true to your traditions,” parents then taught their children. “Be loyal to your heritage and country. Show respect toward your parents and other superiors.” Cultures schange.
Cultures vary Parents everywhere care about their children, but raise and protect them differently depending on the surrounding culture. In big cities, parents keep children close. In smaller, close-knit communities, such as Scotland’s Orkney Islands’ town of Stromness, social trust has enabled parents to park their toddlers outside shops.
Children across place and time have thrived under various child-raising systems. Many North Americans now give children their own bedrooms and entrust them to day care. Upper-class British parents traditionally handed off routine caregiving to nannies, then sent their 10-year-olds away to boarding school. These children generally grew up to be pillars of British society.
Asians and Africans more often live in cultures that value emotional closeness. Infants and toddlers may sleep with their mothers and spend their days close to a family member (Morelli et al., 1992; Whiting & Edwards, 1988). These cultures encourage a strong sense of family self—a feeling that what shames the child shames the family, and what brings honor to the family brings honor to the self.
In traditional African Gusii society, babies nursed freely but spent most of the day on their mother’s or siblings’ back—with lots of body contact but little face-to-face and language interaction. In time, the toddler was weaned and handed over, often to an older sibling. What might appear as a lack of interaction to many Westerners might to these Gusii parents seem far preferable to the lesser body contact experienced by babies pushed in strollers and left in playpens (Small, 1997). Such diversity in child raising cautions us against presuming that our culture’s way is the only way to raise children successfully.
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The investment in raising a child buys many years of joy and love, but also of worry and irritation. Yet for most people who become parents, a child is one’s legacy—one’s personal investment in the human future. To paraphrase psychiatrist Carl Jung, we reach backward into our parents and forward into our children, and through their children into a future we will never see, but about which we must therefore care.