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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 remarkable findings in the new science of ethnopediatrics. Professor Small joins pediatricians, child-development researchers, and anthropologists across the country who are studying to what extent the way we parent our infants is based on biological needs and to what extent it is based on culture--and how sometimes what is culturally dictated may not be what's best for babies. Should an infant be encouraged to sleep alone? Is breast-feeding better than bottle-feeding, or is that just a myth of the nineties? How much time should pass before a mother picks up her crying infant? And how important is it really to a baby's development to talk and sing to him or her? These are but a few of the important questions Small addresses, and the answers not only are surprising, but may even change the way we raise our children.… (more)
User reviews
As a parent in modern Western society, if you are familiar with the concepts/philosophies of "attachment parenting," you will find a lot of the ideas in this book familiar and validating. From that perspective it can sometimes feel like the author is subtly pushing an agenda -- this might be the book itself, or might just be in the eye of the beholder. Certainly the author does a good job of presenting the pro's and con's of particular parenting practices from the perspective of the Western world (for example: breast-feeding is widely acknowledged as superior nutritionally, but can be difficult to manage in the context of a working parent's lifestyle). What is perhaps most interesting about this book is the way it really highlights the fact that most things we might think of as universal -- our ideas of how a baby "should" fit into a family unit, how parents "should" raise a child, and so forth -- are very much cultural constructs. This book is bound to get any intelligent person thinking, and prompt him/her to take a hard look at his/her assumptions about parenting, and about society's attitudes toward children in general.
As another reviewer wrote, the book does get repetitive at times and tends in certain sections to rely too heavily on a single researcher or study. In a few places the same information is reiterated repeatedly over the course of a chapter or section. On the whole, though, it's a very worthwhile read for anyone, parent or no.