The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University.  Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood. 

 “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully will have children who are better adjusted,” she says.

“In the U.S., for example, a good mother is reactive… She responds to the child’s needs, feeding or changing him when he cries. In contrast, a good mother in Japan is proactive, attempting to anticipate the needs of her baby before he cries.”

 “Lansford acknowledges that her research makes cultural generalizations, and cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions because there is significant variation within countries and cultures.”

Read more at thestar.com

Mothers love differently around the world

New research explores the different ways mothers show they love their babies in countries around the world.

Marco Chown Oved, May 09 2013

Writing for NPR, the anthropologist Barbara King observes: “some parents, mostly in one area of New York City, as far as I can tell, are raising their children from birth without diapers.” She speaks to Meredith Small, an anthropologist from Cornell University, who explains: "Only Westerns make such a big deal about toilet training," and adds that the lack of diaper use in many cultures does not reflect a lack of diapers:  “Of course they could use any cloth, but often this is the much easier way.”

Read more at NPR:

Adrienne Pine was in a jam. The assistant anthropology professor at American University was about to begin teaching “Sex, Gender & Culture,” but her baby daughter woke up in the morning with a fever. The single mother worried that she had no good child-care options.

 

So Pine brought her sick baby to class. The baby, in a blue onesie, crawled on the floor of the lecture hall during part of the 75-minute class two weeks ago, according to the professor’s account. The mother extracted a paper clip from the girl’s mouth at one point and shooed her away from an electrical outlet. A teaching assistant held the baby and rocked her at times, volunteering to help even though Pine stressed that she didn’t have to. When the baby grew restless, Pine breast-fed her while continuing her lecture in front of 40 students.

American University professor breast-feeds sick baby in class, sparking debate

By Nick Anderson, Published: September 11

From 2001 to 2005, a team of social scientists studied 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles, a project documenting every wiggle of life at home. The study was generated by the U.C.L.A. Center on the Everyday Lives of Families to understand how people handled what anthropologists call material culture — what we call stuff. These were dual-earner households in a range of ethnic groups, neighborhoods, incomes and occupations, with at least two children between the ages of 7 and 12 — in other words, households smack in the weeds of family life.

Read more at NYTimes

Elinor Ochs’ latest research on child-rearing practices among middle class US families receives wide spread media attention:

Anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have studied family life as far away as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon region, but for the last decade they have focused on a society closer to home: the American middle class.

Why do American children depend on their parents to do things for them that they are capable of doing for themselves? How do U.S. working parents’ views of “family time” affect their stress levels? These are just two of the questions that researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, or CELF, are trying to answer in their work.

By studying families at home—or, as the scientists say, “in vivo”—rather than in a lab, they hope to better grasp how families with two working parents balance child care, household duties and career, and how this balance affects their health and well-being.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal:

A Field Guide to the Middle-Class U.S. Family
By SHIRLEY S. WANG, March 13th

Also, read responses to the original article at The Washington Post and Slate Magazine

Janice D’Arcy - Are we asking enough of our kids? Anthropologists don’t think so

Libby Copeland  - The American Middle Class: Guilty Parents and Lazy Kids