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This illuminating new volume offers a multifaceted view of parenting cultural belief systems - their origins in culturally constructed parental experience, their expressions in parental practices, and their consequences for children's well-being and growth. Discussing issues with implications beyond the study of parenthood, the book shows how the analysis of child outcomes which relate to parents' cultural belief systems (or parental "ethnotheories") can provide valuable insights into the nature and meaning of family and self in society and, in some cases, a basis for culturally sensitive therapeutic interventions. Illuminating the powerful influence of parents' cultural belief systems on th...
The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood offers a portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Anthropological research on learning in childhood has been scarce, but this book will change that. It demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it shows the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Book jacket.
To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need questions and methods that reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods that Matter offers compelling and successful examples of mixed methods research that do just that. In case after case, the researchers here break out of the traditional methodological silos that have long separated social science disciplines in order to better describe the intricacies of our personal and social worlds. Historically, the largest division between social science methods has been that between quantitative and qualitative measures. For peo...
The second volume in a set of three, this text incorporates the views of authors from a variety of nations, cultures, traditions and perspectives. It summarizes research in the areas of basic processes and developmental psychology, adopting a dynamic, constructivist and socio-historical approach.
Developmental psychopathology involves the study and prediction of maladaptive behaviors and processes across time. This new edition of the Handbook furthers the goal of integrating developmental processes into the search for adequate categorical systems for understanding child mental health problems and the trajectories that lead to adult psychopathology. The editors respond to contemporary challenges to place individual behavior in a biological and social context. By including a range of approaches, this volume encompasses the complexity of the growing developmental literature. At the same time, it includes the most recent efforts to produce concise child diagnostic categories. In a thorou...
A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting. New parents are faced with innumerable decisions to make regarding the best way to care for their baby, and, naturally, they often turn for guidance to friends and family members who have already raised children. But as scientists are discovering, much of the trusted advice that has been passed down through generations needs to be carefully reexamined. In this ground-breaking book, anthropologist Meredith Small reveals her remarkabl...
An introduction to the authors' pioneering New York Longitudinal Study on temperament, defining temperament, reviewing studies that support and expand the definition, and exploring the impact of temperament across various practice settings and populations. Looks at applications of temperament research in early intervention, pediatric and nursing practice, and psychotherapy, as well as related biological research, and temperament and culture. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Most educators might agree that the hidden agendas on class, race, and gender, to a large extent, condition and determine the form and the content of schooling. But, how much of this situation is due to school factors, and how much to social background factors, is heatedly discussed and debated by scholars working within both the mainstream and critical traditions in the field of education. Class, Race, and Gender in American Education represents a groundbreaking overview of current issues and contemporary approaches involved in the areas of class, race, and gender in American education. In this book, the first to combine a consideration of these issues and to investigate the manner in which they connect in the school experience, authors consider the particular situations of males and females of divergent racial and class backgrounds from their earliest childhood experiences through the adult university years. While providing valuable original in-depth ethnographic and statistical analyses, the volume also incorporates some of the important current theoretical debates; the debate between structuralists and culturalists is highlighted, for example.
Theorists of child development, for the most part, have taken white, middle class, Euro-American children as the norm. These "typical" children, however, are exposed to two major enculturating influences that are by no means common across cultures: formal schooling and parents who consciously attempt to serve as teachers at home. Providing an important contribution toward a more universal understanding of child development, this book concentrates on children of the Kpelle-speaking people of West Africa, who grow up neither spending thousands of hours in quiet study nor receiving a heavy dose of parent tutelage. Acknowledging the centrality of play in children's lives, the Kpelle expect their...
Based on interviews with forty-one teenagers, Lightfoot argues that adolescent risk-taking is necessary in establishing a sense of self and peer group identities