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

To what extent do our parenting practices help or hinder our children? As parents, how much influence do we have over what kind of people our children will grow up to be? In the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Our Babies, Ourselves, Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small now takes on these and other crucial questions about the development of preschool children aged one to six.“A revealing perspective on how and why we raise children as we do.” — Booklist While Our Babies, Ourselves explored the physical and cultural preconceptions behind child-rearing and offered new clues to parenting practices that might be detrimental to a baby's best interest, Kids delves even deeper. Unraveling the deep-seated notions prescribed in most parenting books, Kids combines the latest scientific research on human evolution and biology with Small's own keen observations of various cultures for a lively, eye-opening view of early childhood in America. Small not only reveals how children in this age group socialize and absorb the rules that underlie the societies they live in; she also explains the extent to which parents enhance or hold back the emotional and psychological growth of their kids. In her engaging style, Small blends memorable accounts from her own experiences raising a preschooler with fascinating findings from her pioneering cross-cultural research, which spanned the country as well as the globe. Covering myriad aspects of the miraculous process of human growth, Small breaks new ground on topics such as why childhood is the optimum time for acquiring language skills; how children absorb knowledge and learn to solve problems; how empathy, and morality in general, make their way into a child's psyche; and the ways in which gender impacts identity. Underlying each chapter is an illuminating discussion of how the roles parents assign children in America shape the self-esteem and self-image of a future generation. Rich with vivid anecdotes and profound insight, Kids will cause readers to rethink their own parenting styles, along with every age-old assumption about how to raise a happy, healthy kid. Parents are usually told that by a certain age a child should sleep through the night, that kids needs exposure to other kids, that "time-out" is a useful way to discipline children. But where does all this advice come from? What makes it "right"? Do other cultures have ideas about parenting that make sense and might be incorporated into our child-rearing practices? Is there even such a thing as a "best" way to treat a child? Kids explores the places where biology and culture intersect during the childhood years. Picking up where her critically acclaimed Our Babies, Ourselves left off, Meredith F. Small focuses on child development in the preschool years as she attempts to "go beyond the narrow confines of one culture, one socioeconomic class, adn one species." She explains when and how childhood became a part of human life. She looks at cultures in which young childhood is a time of work, not play. She offers fascinating discussions of language acquisitions and of how kids learn in general. She follows kids as they begin to socialize and learn what it means to become part of the society around them. And throughout she focuses on the impact of parental expectations. The result is a book that will expand the horizons of caretakers as it encourages them to question what they do, understand where their decisions come from, and consider that there is more than one valid way to guide children into adulthood. -- from back cover Provides an exploration of everything from language development to morality in a study that assesses the amount of influence parents and teachers have over what kind of people children become