A new book, Do Parents Matter? by Robert LeVine and Sarah LeVine, will be published in the UK next year. It was previewed in The Times last week (29 October 2016, summarised below), and it sounds really interesting. After almost five decades of research, the authors, both acclaimed anthropologists, say parents have far less influence than we think, but they do stress two things parents can do to ensure their child is happy and healthy.
The book’s purpose, arguably, is to reassure. Parents these days are bombarded with advice on what they should and shouldn’t do to raise healthy and well-adjusted children. They are often made to feel they are falling short in some way – being a parent can be a role filled with anxiety.
So, Do Parents Matter? The authors conclude that yes, parents do matter, but not as much as we would think.
The couple have spent their working lives looking at parenting practices across the globe. Children can be happy in a variety of conditions, ‘not just the effort-intensive, cautious environments so many British and American parents drive themselves crazy trying to create’ they say in their book.
In other societies, parenting practices that we in the west would regard as neglectful or even cruel can still result in happy and healthy adults. For instance, many western working mums feel guilty about leaving their children in nurseries or with childminders. Yet communal childcare is the norm in other parts of the world; in some places, toddlers are routinely sent away by their mothers after weaning and taken care of by their grandmothers and other women.
In the UK and America, parents engage toddlers in discussions about what food they would like to eat or what clothes they would like to wear. Elsewhere in the world, parents teach their youngsters to follow commands without talking back, the first step in learning about obedience and respect.
Whilst western parents tend to cosset toddlers and try to shield them from the nasty parts of life, in other parts of the world parents believe children’s development can be helped by these things. The authors tell the story of a three-year-old Inuit girl living in the Canadian Arctic. Although the girl was loved and well taken care of by her parents, they constantly challenged the child with extreme, adult questions like ‘Why don’t you die so I can have your nice new shirt?’ This is seen as an Inuit strategy to get children to realise that life is uncertain and capricious, and that they will have to work through a lot of conundrums. The authors don’t suggest anyone does this, but include the example to show that there is a huge variety of ways to teach children about moral relationships.
Another contrast is around responsibility. Modern western parents don’t give children a lot of responsibility, believing that early childhood should be play-based. In Africa and Latin America, however, children aged five or six might be expected to care for a baby or herd animals; in the Pacific islands, three-year-olds are given scaled-down machetes and at five carry heavy loads of firewood.
The LeVines’ message is that children usually turn out fine, whatever the expectations placed on them and the contexts they grow up in. They do, nevertheless, identify two behaviours they see as essential for raising well-adjusted children:
- physical affection, whether from a parent or other responsible adult, and
- confidence to know that they are the grown-ups and whilst they may not always know best, they do know better than a child.