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

by Meredith Small

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385496281
• ISBN13: 9780385496285
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book on childhood in different cultures

A very good book that just like Our Babies, Ourselves make you think on how you want to raise children. Some people say Small is biased. I beg to differ on that. I think she writes in a way which shows quite well how biology and culture and individual choice shape childhood. Recommended reading if you're really interested in raising children, at least in my opinion.

Great Follow Up to "Our Babies, Ourselves"

I love Small's approach to childhood. As a parent who follows a more natural philosophy of childrearing and as a homeschooling, former public school teacher, her observations and discussions of studies and cultures resonate with me.

Awesome- Almost as good as her other book

I loved this book and highly recommend it. Even better, though is the author's book Our Babies, Ourselves, which I buy for every new mother I know!

Great book! I encourage all parents to read it!

Without a doubt this is a book every parent should read as an aid in the never-ending process of tuning what we called our "parenting style". It's eye opening and revealing. The author compiles a fair and diverse amount of research in such controversial topics as "the especial place of childhood in human evolution", "acquisition of language", "development of the cognitive capacities" and "boy and a girl differences", that makes the book very well documented, interesting and appealing to every parent. Besides her very fluent and catching writing style, Small colors the text with her own anecdotes as a parent of a young child and her own dilemma about her "participation" in her child developmental process. This is an every day dilemma for every parent: Can I make my baby smarter?, what is "a smart kid" anyway? Can I really make a difference in his/her natural biological developmental path?, in what sense?, Should I even care to intervene in some aspects? How about the whole debate between nature and nurture influence? who's right? what's right? Am I doing wrong? Are there alternatives to what I believe to be the unique and better way to raise a child? Which ones? What should be our goal as parents?. This book will give you a broaden perspective on parenting and your role in providing the right "environment" for your child's innate and very human potential. I like that I can see my style within the worldwide frame of child rearing. I like that I can know more about how other people around the globe do it and works too, how other people do it and doesn't work as much, how everything is relative to culture and that there is a lot for us to learn from other groups, and a lot other groups could eventually learn from us. I like that I have found answers and more sense to some of my own and very amateur observations of the way people raise their kids. The pros, the cons, the trade-ins. The book contributes to clarify the perspective of a natural child rearing: what did nature intended for us to do as parents? Why did nature intended for human babies and children to have such relatively long very depending periods of life? How did nature intended for us to "care" for our young? What is the whole idea? After reading this book, even though I understand that we are "culturized" beings and that my family will develop within the context of a certain culture (whether I like it or not, whether I'm totally aware of it or not), I have the power to enhance our life with other people's view. I agree with Small, that even though much of our problems or "not very good" practices are culture based, that still doesn't make them right. I agree that in the West we are driven to have our young children behave as the adults we want them to become...and that it's not necessarily right. We, unrealistically, expect young children to sit still, don't talk back, and understand and follow the rules of a "modernized" society (politeness), we are concerned for the education of our