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

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.

everyone should read this. parents especially...perspective change.. great insight..liked this book very much.. highly recommended to all. Great work.

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.

excelent

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.)

I appreciated reading Meredith Small's book from an anthropological and multicultural perspective. Small's prose is very accessible and clear, and the concepts she discusses are easy to understand for both laypersons and professionals. Small's book is informative and entertaining, and Small's writing helped to expand and refresh my existing knowledge on child development. At the same time, the concepts she describes in her book did not seem groundbreaking (perhaps this can be attributed to the book's age, as it was published in 2002). I also partially agree with C. Ackerman's review for Small's book in that, while it was very interesting to read about the proposed biological foundation for many of people's actions, I also believe there are many non-biological explanations for people's actions and motivations; for example, there could by psychological, geopolitical, or historical explanations. I understand that it is extremely difficult to write a book that will please everybody who reads it. A member of a dominant group almost always runs the risk, when writing from a multicultural standpoint, of exoticizing or other-izing the non-dominant groups that one writes about. While Small writes with great humility and reverence for the cultures and peoples with whom she lived and studied, there are moments in her writing that seemed to evoke otherness for me. I also don't think one has to travel across the world to discuss the differences in child rearing across different cultures. In any given neighborhood, city, county, and state in this country are a myriad of cultures, both non-dominant and dominant, whose practices in raising children may differ due to a slew of possible reasons: cultural/traditional/religious differences, socioeconomic and ethnic differences, gender and ability differences, etc. I would have loved for Small to have included more of this research in her book. Despite some of my criticisms of the content in Small's book, I am overall glad that I read it, and will take away a number of salient points-such as, how childhood evolved across the world, how children speak and gather knowledge, and the anthropology of language. This book has informed my thinking about children and families in our mainstream culture. I also appreciate that Small's book reinforces my commitment to approaching each family system in my work with humility, curiosity, openness, and respect.

An amazing sequel to her first book! Again, Small explores the question of what is best for young children based on what we know of children's biological and evolutionary needs. She compares different cultures and speaks of the trade offs of different ways for parenting for children and parents too. I loved every page!