Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a slightly quirky example of what could be called `social constructionism books'. These books typically take some sacred cow of Western culture that is widely believed to be obvious, natural and eternal and then knock it off its pedestal by showing (a) that not all cultures believe it even exists and in fact in the grand scheme of things our views are bizarre and (b) that our not-so-distant ancestors believed something entirely different about the subject at hand. I have read an awful lot of these books and have to admit that this is not one of the better ones.

There are two reasons, I think, why I didn't feel the excitement I normally feel when reading such books. First, childhood in the modern US is already controversial, so there aren't as many sacred cows to be gored. Many of the things that we do, like exhaustive extracurricular scheduling and teaching to tests, have many American critics, so a more global perspective isn't as mind opening as it could be in other contexts. Likewise, I'm old enough to have witnessed tremendous changes in childcare in my own life, so it's obvious to me that no one approach is 'natural'. (I don't think I'm _that_ old; child-raising just seems to be subject to fads.)

The second reason I'm not gobsmacked by this book is that it tries to link behavior to biology. This has such a nasty legacy --- such rhetoric has been fallaciously used to justify so many inequalities (e.g., claims that particular ethnic groups deserve to be poor because they're less intelligent)--- that I think it behooves authors to be extremely thoughtful about whether such theories are really ready for prime time before they're repeated in pop social science books. There's nothing morally obnoxious like that in this book, but the biological explanations don't necessarily add that much either. I don't, for example, think it adds much to use science to talk about how child abuse tends to be directed toward children who are valued less. That's just Cinderella. (It's actually much more interesting when the book reverses the direction of causality and explores how children biologically react to the stress in their environment.)

So what I mainly got out of the book was tidbits, trivia about different child-raising practices across the globe. If I hadn't read so many books already done in this style or if I hadn't been reading about kids so much of late, I'd probably have a more enthusiastic reaction. Personally, if I were to recommend just one book with a global perspective on kids, it would be _Preschool in Three Cultures_. (Incidentally, that book also works well in college classrooms.)

A very good book that just like Our Babies, Ourselves make you think on how you want to raise children. Some people say Small is biased. I beg to differ on that. I think she writes in a way which shows quite well how biology and culture and individual choice shape childhood. Recommended reading if you're really interested in raising children, at least in my opinion.

I love Small's approach to childhood. As a parent who follows a more natural philosophy of childrearing and as a homeschooling, former public school teacher, her observations and discussions of studies and cultures resonate with me.

In her wonderful book, Kids: how biology and culture shape the way we raise young children, Anthropologist Meredith Small looks at the culture of parenthood . She asks the question, "where did all of this advise come from?" Small determines that in "most cases it is based on cultural beliefs, tradition and folklore, not on science". Small's book expands our understanding of childrearing and parenting, it is a great resource for parents looking to parent with more thought and intention. It is a great tool for parents to begin to understand how the culture we live in influences our actions, beliefs, and parenting in ways that we often fail to realize. Small has a conversational writing style with lots of personal stories and annecdotes. I enjoyed Our Babies Ourselves, a bit more (which is why I gave this one 4 stars instead of 5) but this is a GREAT book, which I highly recommend.

I loved this book and highly recommend it. Even better, though is the author's book Our Babies, Ourselves, which I buy for every new mother I know!

I found this book very interesting reading as a means to discovering more about other cultures, how they raise their children, and why. For that reason alone, I would recommend this book. Ms. Small does go from there, however, to draw conclusions that in our culture we should look at these differences and re-think the way we raise our children from the fundamentals to the details, and I generally disagree with her perspective here. While I feel it is always good to 'think outside the box' about some things, we simply do not have the same lifestyle, needs, or concerns of primitive tribes, and so to compare child-rearing in such divergent cultures becomes too extreme for me. I agree with the reviewer who felt that Ms. Small seems, at times, impervious to the fact that we live in the world we live in. For various, generally legitimate, reasons, in our world it is not particularly wise for toddlers to be touching valuable products that could easily be broken. In other cultures, it might not matter since what is "valuable" in that society may be different. As someone on the cusp of receiving a grad degree in early childhood development and starting a child care business, as a mother of a pre-schooler, and most of all as a person living in western culture, I see strong reasons to acclimate our children to the world in which THEY will live - this often means "no touchy" as well as learning classroom rules and other lessons that will allow them to move seamlessly into OUR world. Early exposure to educational and cultural experiences may "over-schedule" them, but within reason establishes neural networks at a time when they are most ripe for learning and ingraining skills that will last a lifetime. This and other aspects of our Western view of child rearing, when in moderation, I believe are of benefit to our children unless they end up moving to Tanzania.... She talks about one culture in which children instead learn to find trails and fetch water in their early years, but our children do not need these skills, so I find the comparison interesting but irrelevant. She does make excellent observations about how, even in our own culture, the standards for child rearing have changed even over the last few decades. As a constantly evolving species, I'm sure the next few decades will see changes as well, hopefully weeding out the things that didn't work for our children and keeping what did.

I hope Professor Small reads this. There were two self-described scenes in this book that portrayed the author as rude and condescending to the other adult in the scene. The first was Professor Small and her child in a Pediatric room with a nurse and the second was Professor Small and her child in an eyeglasses store with an eyeglasses salesman. In the first scene Professor Small laughed and acted haughty at the nurses slightly ignorant yet well intended question about how many words the toddler could speak and in the second Professor Small refused to intervene despite several requests from the salesman that she stop her toddler from playing with the eyeglasses that were on display. In both scenes Professor Small had good points to make that conflicted with the opinions of the other adults in the scenes, yet in both scenes I felt she behaved in a manner that demeaned the other adults. Beyond those two jarring scenes, I found this book a little light in content. I learned a few things in the chapters that reviewed the current state of knowledge on subjects like child growth and child language but then felt many chapters were meandering and repetitious on issues such as cultural comparisons of child raising.