ARE YOU RAISING A KIDULT OR A SURVIVOR?
Anthropologist David F Lancy hops across continents and cultures to question whether the modern quest to protect children from all real and imagined harm undermines their natural inclination to develop survival skills.
Anxious parenting, argues Lancy, often produces ‘kidults’ who are not equipped to cope with the complexities of the adult world, leading to anxiety, stress and depression.
The book brims with insightful anecdotes and observations. In Connecticut, USA, it tells us, teachers are banned from marking work submitted by students with red ink because ‘it may damage the child’s self-esteem’.
Among Thailand’s nomadic huntergatherers and certain South American tribes, meanwhile, children of the same age are encouraged to use tools, knives and machetes to hone their survival skills.
Kids as young as five routinely babysit younger siblings in Asia and Africa, while the parents are away at work, but in many developed countries, leaving young children at home without supervision would be labelled criminal neglect.
The book throws up rare insights from India too, like the concept of delayed personhood.
The Lepchas of Sikkim, for example, consider a baby still in-utero for three days after birth and refer to it as a ‘rat-child’. The Punan Bah from Malaysia and Indonesia believe a child is little more than a body in its first days, as its soul is still gradually moving in and making it human.
Lancy rejects helicopter parenting and encourages adults to be more relaxed and confident about their parenting skills.
He challenges the high-maintenance regimes demanded by both the so-called progressive parenting movements and by prescriptive societies, including the concept of attachment parenting that prescribes a strong emotional and physical attachment to at least one primary caregiver.
Modern practices associated with attachment parenting, such as on-demand feeding and giving in to children’s demands, he says, should either serve both the family and the child, or be abandoned.
As Lancy puts it: “We must not let the pendulum swing so far that other family members, or even the very fabric of family life, must suffer to stave off the dubious threat of reactive attachment disorder.”