Kids

How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children

(2001)
Meredith F. Small

Finished Reading: 04.2010

This book is the second part to Our Babies, Ourselves which covered the first year of human life. Kids picks up from age one, commenting on the next half dozen years, a period of serious development, learning and growing.

While American parents obsess about whether or not their child is in the right learning environment, whether she is maximizing her learning potential for her age, and whether or not she has the right toys which are needed to mold the intellect - most cultures simply let their children learn by observation and then give them something useful to do. While education is important, the author points out that our preoccupation with excessive education at an early age - preschool enrollment and constant chattering with our babies will not necessarily make them smarter. They will learn when their bodies are biologically ready to learn, and not before. Eventually children will speak and read, and the important thing is to encourage the joy of learning.

One chapter that I found to be particularly interesting was the one about gender differences, while the speculative chapters on the evolutionary history of, and reasons why we have a childhood I could have done without. Humans have a childhood while other animals do not, it is pointed out. Many animals are ready to run around on their own soon after birth while some are born helpless but grow quickly into mature adults before too long. This is interesting to note, but doesn't really help with making parenting decisions.

As far as gender goes, children don't know the biological difference between boys and girls for their first few years and so those pink dresses are not really reinforcing anything except their parents acquiescence to cultural norms. While pink dresses don't really hurt anything (except my sense of style), the author thinks our Western culture over does it a bit with established differences between adult male and female dress, hair, makeup and overall perception. Distinguishing gender is of course useful, as it makes it easier to know who to pursue when looking for a mate, but if we all wore brown and did our hair the same way, relationships could become awkward. Since children are not ready for all that, why force them into gender specific activities or to wear gender specific colors?

Similar to Our Babies Ourselves, this books shows we need to ask ourselves why we raise our children the way we do, and decide whether some of our parenting persuasions can be left behind in favor of a parenting style that is primarily beneficial for the child rather than simply a convenience for the parent. There is more than one way to raise a child.