Then, less than four years after Pearl Harbor, we Americans were told to stop hating and killing Japanese, and to forget the slogan that had dominated American life: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” Many Americans alive during those years have struggled for the rest of their lives with what they were taught and subsequently told to unlearn—especially if they were directly affected then, for instance through having survived the Bataan Death March, or through having had close friends and relatives who did not come back. Yet those legacies of American attitudes resulted from just four years of experience, for most of us second-hand. Having grown up during the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II, I find it unsurprising that the Wilihiman Dani became so passionate about killing the Widaia Dani, when those attitudes were inculcated into them for decades by both teaching and extensive first-hand experience. The thirst for revenge isn’t nice, but it can’t be ignored. It has to be understood, acknowledged, and addressed—in ways other than actually taking revenge.
PART THREE
YOUNG AND OLD
CHAPTER 5
Bringing Up Children
Childbirth Infanticide Weaning and birth interval On-demand nursing Infant-adult contact Fathers and allo-parents Responses to crying infants Physical punishment Child autonomy Multi-age playgroups Child play and education Their kids and our kidsComparisons of child-rearing
On one of my visits to New Guinea I met a young man named Enu, whose life story struck me then as remarkable. Enu had grown up in an area where child-rearing was extremely repressive, and where children were heavily burdened by obligations and by feelings of guilt. By the time he was five years old, Enu decided that he had had enough of that lifestyle. He left his parents and most of his relatives and moved to another tribe and village, where he had relatives willing to take care of him. There, Enu found himself in an adoptive society with laissez-faire child-rearing practices at the opposite extreme from his natal society’s practices. Young children were considered to have responsibility for their own actions, and were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. For example, if a baby was playing next to a fire, adults did not intervene. As a result, many adults in that society had burn scars, which were legacies of their behavior as infants.
Both of those styles of child-rearing would be rejected with horror in Western industrial societies today. But the laissez-faire style of Enu’s adoptive society is not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires (Plate 19).
Why should we be interested in child-rearing practices of traditional hunter-gatherer, farmer, and herder societies? One answer is an academic one: children account for up to half of a society’s population. A sociologist who ignored half of a society’s members couldn’t claim to understand that society. Another academic answer is that every feature of adult life has a developmental component. One can’t understand a society’s practices of dispute resolution and marriage without knowing how children become socialized into those practices.
Despite those good reasons for us to be interested in child-rearing in non-Western societies, it has received much less study than it deserves. Part of the problem is that many of the scholars who go out to study other cultures are young, don’t have children of their own, aren’t experienced in talking with or observing children, and mainly describe and interview adults. Anthropology, education, psychology, and other academic fields have their own ideologies, which at any given time focus on a certain range of research topics, and which impose blinders on what phenomena are considered worth studying.
Even studies of child development that claim to be broadly cross-cultural—e.g., comparing German, American, Japanese, and Chinese children—are actually sampling societies all drawn from the same narrow slice of human cultural diversity. All of those cultures just mentioned are similar in sharing centralized government, economic specialization, and socioeconomic inequality, and in being very atypical of the wide range of human cultural diversity. As a result, those and other state-level modern societies have converged on a small range of child-rearing practices that by historical standards are unusual. Those practices include systems of school education administered by a state (as opposed to learning as part of everyday life and play), protection of children by police and not just by parents, same-age playgroups (as opposed to children of all ages routinely playing together), children and parents sleeping in separate bedrooms (as opposed to sleeping together in the same bed), and mothers nursing infants (if the infants are nursed at all) on a schedule often set by the mother rather than by the infant.
A result is that generalizations about children by Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, pediatricians, and child psychologists are based heavily on studies of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) societies, especially on studies of their college undergraduates and children of college professors, and have been inappropriately generalized to the rest of the world. For example, Freud emphasized the sex drive and its frequent frustration. But that psychoanalytic view doesn’t apply to the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, nor to many other traditional societies, where willing sex partners are almost constantly available, but where hunger for food, and preoccupation with the food drive and its frequent frustration, are ubiquitous. Formerly popular Western child-rearing theories that stressed the need of infants for love and emotional support viewed other societies’ widespread practice of breast-feeding infants on demand as “overindulgence,” and classified it in Freudian terms as “excessive gratification at the oral stage of psychosexual development.” However, we shall see that breast-feeding on demand was formerly almost universal, that it has much to recommend it, and that the common modern practice of breast-feeding at infrequent intervals to suit the mother’s convenience is, from a historical perspective, a rare exception.
Those are academic reasons for us to be interested in traditional child-rearing practices. But there are compelling practical reasons for all of us non-academics to be interested as well. Small-scale societies offer us a vast database on child-rearing. They reveal the outcomes of thousands of natural experiments on how to rear children. Western state societies would not permit us to carry out the experiments that Enu lived through, of either extreme repression or extreme laissez-faire as the norm. While few readers of this book would consider it admirable to let children roll into fires, we shall see that many other traditional child-rearing practices do recommend themselves for consideration. Thus, another reason for studying them is that they can inform our own choices. They may suggest practices different from those now routine in the West, but that we may find appealing when we learn about their consequences for children.