Margaret Mead was one of the earliest anthropologists to examine parenting across global cultures. Nearly 90 years after her first forays into the subject, husband-and-wife researchers Robert and Sarah LeVine have started looking for answers in 50 years of extensive field work. Harvard professors and researchers, the LeVines have distilled five decades of work into a single question: Do parents matter?
Their answer may surprise you.
“We hope that by emphasizing the resilience of kids and demonstrating it, however anecdotally, in different cultures, we can get American parents to see that resilience is a powerful force in child development, and that kids might well turn out alright even if you don’t micromanage every aspect of their development.” Robert and Sarah LeVine
So what does that mean exactly? Having viewed widely disparate parenting practices from all across the globe, the LeVines came to one conclusion: the individual practices parents undertake don’t seem to matter as much when compared to the resiliency of children. While cultural practices swing wildly from one spectrum to another, each society is able to produce well-rounded, healthy individuals who thrive – regardless of whether they co-slept or were placed in a crib; were potty-trained as infants or as preschoolers. This is not to say that every parenting practice across cultures is optimal, and the authors of the study saw many practices they could not condone. Instead the LeVines perceived that children were adaptable, resilient, and able to flourish under many different circumstances rather than one rigid set of codes. As parents, we make many choices for our children and families, some easy and some quite difficult. The message that the LeVines are promoting is that there isn’t a single right answer to many of these choices, and to realize there are many ways to rear a happy and healthy child. And yes, parents absolutely matter!
For the full article on the LeVines’ new book, visit The Atlantic.
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