IF YOU pick up your child every time she cries, she will whimper and whine simply to get your attention. Never sleep with the baby because you will surely roll over and suffocate him. Newborn infants need rigorous schedules to be content; breast feed only every two hours. A good mother must spend hours every day talking with her child to encourage mental development.
New parents are deluged with advice from paediatricians, childcare experts and just about anybody on the street who stops to peek into the pram. What few parents realise is that most of these rules, these laws of infant care, have little scientific credibility. But that may change if proponents of a new brand of research into childcare, called “ethnopaediatrics”, have their way. This group of anthropologists, paediatricians and child development researchers seeks to discover exactly how different styles of parenting across the globe affect the biology, growth, health and survival of infants. The researchers also aim to explain how those cultural differences come to be; how they are forged from social expectations about children, as well as varying perceptions of child health and disease. For instance, in Guatemala, mothers of zinc-deprived babies were alarmed at how alert their infants became after taking zinc supplements. In these women’s experience, such alertness was a sign of illness.
Making sense of every variation in childcare across the globe will be no easy task. But with one-third of the world’s population currently under the age of 15 the need to do so has never been greater, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Expanding research into Western…
