For others
Parenting is by no means a science, and some practices are weird, even abhorrent to other cultures. Helen Grange reviews a book offering insight into how different cultures raise their children
IF YOU’RE a parent, you’ll be weathering, or have weathered, the tough baby years. And you’ll be familiar with tried and tested directions passed down through your maternal generations.
So you check baby’s nappy when she’s crying, burp her after a meal, feed her every two or three hours, and impose a rigid sleep routine as soon as possible so as to reach the “sleep through the night” milestone.
The “map” of your baby’s routine will be so embedded in your life as to seem instinctive.
But how “instinctive” is it? Did you know that Argentinean babies stay up all hours of the night, that the Chinese eschew nappies in favour of crotchless pants (so cleaning up the floor is part of the potty-training process), that Italian infants are fed olive oil and fish-flavoured prepackaged baby foods, that a small drink of coffee is routinely given to Brazilian children?
A baby in Kenya is likely to be completely unfamiliar with a pushchair, and the Japanese have a notably higher tolerance of children bickering or fighting.
Child-raising, in other words, is by no means a “onesize-fits-all” formula.
In fact far from it – some Western practices are close to abhorred by other cultures, and vice versa.
A fascinating book on the subject is How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm; Parenting wisdom from around the world, by Chicago-based MeiLing Hopgood, who researched the subject while travelling with her husband and first daughter Sofia, then just a toddler.
After she became a mother, Hopgood realised that “in many cases there are interesting and really good reasons for why people do what they do… When I saw how early the Chinese pottytrained, how the French talked to their children about food, how members of a Lebanese-American extended family methodically taught their kids to feel deeply responsible and connected to one another, I was compelled to think about what I wanted for my own child in a wider context,” she writes.
The book begins in Buenos Aires, where Hopgood found herself doing as the locals do and “breaking the rules” of Western sleep time for children. She discovered that although not all Argentinian parents keep their kids out late, most families she met “think spending quality time with relatives and friends is more important than getting their kid to bed at the same time, in the same place every night”.
Dinners rarely started before 9pm, and it was simply a matter of the children fitting in with the parents’ schedule, which typically started in the late morning.
Though the late nights were frowned on even by Argentinian doctors, Hopgood found that many child development experts admitted there was nothing intrinsically wrong with setting later bedtimes, if children made up for it by sleeping in or taking naps.
Sleeping arrangements also vary widely between cultures, she found in her research.
“In many societies (like the Balinese) children sleep with their parents at least through infancy and sometimes much longer. Some do so because they don’t have much space, but also because they believe co-sleeping to be an essential way to feed, comfort, protect and bond with their babies and children,” she writes.
In her chapter on “How the French teach their children to love healthy food”, Hopgood looks at Saint-Laurent, a hamlet in the Languedoc region, where she found that adults and children “linger for hours over the preparation and eating of meals – always a few courses or more – discussing life and their food and drink”. A French cook and food blogger named Labro explained to her: “It’s almost a habit of the French to talk about the food while they are eating their food, and not even the food they’re eating… you have to stop and have a relationship with food.”
Many French children, Labro found, are involved in the cooking process from when they are very young, even tending homegrown vegetables as part of their chores.
Being involved with their eating process and tasting veggies they’d cared for themselves tended to change mindsets in children, and create adventure in their eating.
Leading by example is also key. Textier, one of Hopgood’s interviewees, told her: “You have to appreciate the food if you want your children to appreciate the food. Don’t push children to eat everything on the plate; just put everything on the table.”
On a much more contentious subject, that of disciplining children when they fight, Hopgood looked to Japan, where adult intervention in squabbles is typically far more restrained than would be comfortable in a middle-class Western home.
She had witnessed a research DVD showing a fouryear-old boy called Hiroki who would start his day by “pulling out his penis and waving it at the class during the morning welcome song”.
“Often the first to complete his work, he yelled responses out of turn, sang aloud when everyone was quietly completing their workbook exercises, and imitated cartoon characters.”
His teacher just ignored him, and the researchers were later told this was a deliberate strategy, based on the belief that children best learn to control their behaviour through interactions with peers rather than from adults, thus when fights broke out, the children were left to it. In other words, these squabbles are viewed as lessons in conflict resolution, with the weaker children learning to be strong enough to handle themselves. Hopgood deftly examines the pros and cons of these different approaches to discipline, and to her credit, doesn’t find one “better” than the other.
She does, however, mention that bullying in Japanese schools has become an issue of concern.
In the chapter titled “How Mayan villagers put their kids to work”, Hopgood found ample evidence of this in poor, Mayan villages near the eastern Yucatan in Mexico.
“A child of two or three will start feeding chickens or washing clothes. Children as young as five help take care of their siblings, bathing, feeding and watching over them when they are not at school. Little girls will help their mothers do laundry and make tortillas, and little boys will help their fathers purchase goods that they will take to larger towns to sell. Almost all of them may go to school, but they still have to help at home,” she writes.
Hopgood interviewed Suzanne Gaskins, a psychologist at Northeastern Illinois University, who had documented one of these villages for over year. Gaskins said: “Participating in daily family life is very different from doing wage labour as a child – it is not usually harsh, exploitative or unpleasant for the child. They often seek to do more than they are asked to do… and they enjoy the feelings of competence and belonging when engaged in work… From my point of view, most middle-class American children may have too little work and responsibility to help them become competent.”
Hopgood’s last chapter is called “How Asians learn to excel in school”. She looks to traditions in countries like India, China and Japan, and writes, “good grades and high scores on tough standardised tests were not only essential to a young person’s future, but often the meal ticket for their entire family to the middle-class and a comfortable lifestyle… That kind of pressure has a deep impact on the value of academics.”
Here, she turns to the study findings of Laurence Steinberg, an expert in adolescent psychological development at Temple University. Steinberg found that Asian pupils, from a very young age, tended to have higher standards for themselves than other ethnic groups. He surmised that in many cases, “there are bad consequences at home for doing poorly in school… Asian parents simply put achievement above everything else and do this from an early age, so that by the time high school rolls around, it’s not even an issue,” he says.
Expert findings proliferate Hopgood’s book, and she does a good job of infusing these with her own observations as a journalist.
Her anecdotes as a parent, and many other parents, round it off and make this an entertaining, informative, intriguing and occasionally controversial read. I have looked for the juiciest nuggets, but the contexts so intelligently explored in the book make it a highly recommended buy.