Motherhood Across Cultures

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 […]

About Diaperless Babies

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 […]

Breastfeeding in the Classroom

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 […]

Family Stuff

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 […]

Family Life in the USA

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 […]