Cultural Differences in Parenting

As the mixed race child of an Asian woman who mar­ried a cau­casian Amer­i­can man and immi­grated to the United States, who then her­self mar­ried a Ger­man and moved to Ger­many (still with me?), I’ve been aware of cul­tural dif­fer­ences in par­ent­ing styles most of my life. I never really stopped to exam­ine what role cul­tures play in par­ent­ing until read­ing the book Our Babies, Our­selves: How Biol­ogy and Cul­ture Shape the Way We Par­ent.  I could not put this book down.  I’d say this is hands down the best par­ent­ing book I’ve read so far (and there’s been quite a few), and if you were to only read one par­ent­ing book, I would rec­om­mend it be this one.

In this book, the author first dis­cusses the bio­log­i­cal needs of babies, namely, how babies evolved.  Why do babies cry?  What bio­log­i­cal rea­sons lie behind cry­ing?  Cry­ing babies got the atten­tion and nutri­tion they needed to survive.

The baby’s cry­ing is not pathological–all infants around the world do this at two months.  Wak­ing up sev­eral times a night is not strange–this is what babies are designed to do.  Con­stantly demand­ing inter­ac­tion and atten­tion is not the sign of a hyper­ac­tive infant–this is what babies need as social animals.

The author cites a researcher who recorded the amount of cry­ing babies did in a famine struck coun­try.  When the researcher returned sev­eral months later to do fol­low up, the babies who cried more were more likely to still be alive, while many of the qui­eter babies had died.  So the next time you’re sleep­less, pac­ing the hall with an incon­solable infant, maybe it will help to keep in mind that this was a sur­vival mech­a­nism that we in the indus­tri­al­ized world have out­grown the need for, but our biol­ogy has not quite caught up to this fact.

The author goes on to present par­ent­ing styles of dif­fer­ent types of soci­eties.  Hunter-gatherer, nomad, hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist and urban par­ent­ing styles are described, along with the styles of dif­fer­ent eth­nic­i­ties.  The author dis­cusses how mid­dle class Amer­i­can par­ents often cite fos­ter­ing inde­pen­dence as their num­ber one goal, while most other cul­ture make no men­tion of inde­pen­dence as a goal at all.

Amer­i­cans try to instill self-esteem in their chil­dren; self-esteem is a word not eas­ily trans­lated into other lan­guages because the trait is not part of the cul­tural milieu of other groups–it is of import only in a com­petive self-achieving soci­ety.  The Dutch, in con­trast, believe that reg­u­lar­ity, rest, and clean­li­ness pro­mote intel­li­gent devel­op­ment, so much so that when chil­dren throw tantrums, as they do all over the world, par­ents assume there has been a break in the child’s rou­tine that has caused the episode.

An espe­cially inter­est­ing sec­tion of this book was about how peo­ple bring the par­ent­ing style of their cul­tures or eth­nic­i­ties with them when they move to other areas of their coun­try or the world.  I real­ized through this sec­tion that I was in many ways raised in an Asian style of child-rearing, and not so much in the mid­dle class Amer­i­can style.  I can’t count how many times I said to my mother, “But this isn’t Thai­land, this is Amer­i­can.  We don’t do things like that here.” (I know I’m going to be paid back for every time I said that though, now that I’m rais­ing a child in Germany.

I also know now that I am rais­ing my son in a hybrid Asian-American style.  Per­haps some of the rea­son attach­ment par­ent­ing seemed so nat­ural to me (I was doing it before I knew it had a name), is that many AP tech­niques are prac­ticed by Asians.  Read­ing this sec­tion also reminded me of how we should be open to the par­ent­ing choices other par­ents make.  No one style is right and no one style is wrong.

In one very telling study of Lebanese moth­ers trans­planted to Aus­tralia, for exam­ple, the clash of cul­tures was clearly illus­trated by how the women approached par­ent­ing.  The Aus­tralian moth­ers expected their preschool­ers to be highly ver­bal and to be pre­pared for the rig­ors of school.  The Aus­tralian moth­ers also felt that cer­tain devel­op­men­tal tasks have only a small win­dow of oppor­tu­nity dur­ing which a child can acquire those skills, and that if kids are not poked and prod­ded they will fall behind and be losers.  The Lebanese moth­ers, in con­trast, felt no urge to teach their chil­dren any par­tic­u­lar skills before they went to school and felt kids would learn skills as they needed them; there was no sense of “it’s too late.”  In addi­tion, the Lebanese moth­ers were much more con­cerned about their children’s wel­fare at school.  As a result, Aus­tralian teach­ers labeled the Lebanese kids as unpre­pared for school and over­pro­tected, but the Lebanese moth­ers felt they were doing what was expected of any mother…

Imag­ine the Cam­bo­dian woman new to Amer­ica who is told by her physi­cian to make sure the baby sleeps in his own bed.  Or imag­ine the Guatemalan woman who is con­fused by all the toys her new cul­ture says she must buy for her baby’s hap­pi­ness.  Or what about the British woman who looks in dis­dain at the Niger­ian woman breast-feeding in pub­lic.  Now, more that ever, we need to under­stand how cul­ture molds what we do and what oth­ers do.  By com­par­ing our­selves with oth­ers, and com­par­ing each group with yet another, we also oblit­er­ate any notions of “normal.”

A some­what sen­si­tive sub­ject is dis­cussed, the sub­ject of not breast­feed­ing due to low milk supply:

Lack of milk is, in fact, an urban phenomenon–women in rural areas rarely if ever report that they have stopped breast-feeding because of lack of milk.  Some women may be ratio­nal­iz­ing their desire to switch to for­mula.  It might also be that stress and anx­i­ety in the urban envi­ron­ment con­tribute to the fail­ure of the nat­ural sys­tem.  For exam­ple, urban women often lack the multi­gen­er­a­tional female sup­port sys­tem to help teach them about breast-feeding.  Also, by def­i­n­i­tion, the urban envi­ron­ment means an empha­sis on work that is phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally sep­a­rated from home life; breast-feeding, or any kind of child care, is sequestered from the rest of urban daily life, unlike the envi­ron­ments of hunters and gath­er­ers, nomadic herders, and hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ists.  In fact, the urban and West­ern styles of care­tak­ing make breast­feed­ing par­tic­u­larly chal­leng­ing; it is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that moth­ers in these envi­ron­ments give up.

No style is pre­sented as per­fect.  While the hunter-gatherer model is the model we had for much of human exis­tence, and thus what chil­dren are per­haps most bio­log­i­cally set up for, it is not as a whole ideal for the life we live now.

There is no “per­fect” way to care for babies, only trade-offs in which par­ents weigh the needs of the infant against the con­straints of daily life.  Babies are clearly adapt­able, at least within the para­me­ters of their most basic organic needs.

What works for one set of par­ents may not work for another, and what is con­sid­ered nor­mal is only a cul­tural def­i­n­i­tion.  Kids the world over grow into healthy adults.  Sure, we need to take into account what the cul­ture we live in con­sid­ers “nor­mal,” but we can also learn about the par­ent­ing styles of other cul­tures and peo­ples and con­sider if per­haps there aren’t things we can do differently.

Have you noticed dif­fer­ences in par­ent­ing between cul­tures and eth­nic­i­ties?  What have you experienced?

You may also be interested in reading:

• Thoughts on Parenting (2)
• My thoughts on being a stay at home mom (8)
• Breastfeeding After Reduction: One Year In (13)
• Breastfeeding After Reduction Surgery - 19 months and counting (5)
• Book Review: The Parking Lot Rules (6)

Tagged as: attachment parenting, Books, Breastfeeding, crying, cultural differences, Parenting