How Do We View and Value our Children? Or...Why we shouldn't listen to mainstream media for information about parenting.

Thank you to my sister, a new parent herself, for suggesting this topic for my blog!

Although I had been planning to keep you updated on my exhausting week celebrating the Week of the Young Child with the 250 students at my preschool, I think it's more important to delve into this subject at this point.  Considering that my career has moved from an advantaged community to an under-served one, I regularly think about the differences in expectations we have for our children in diverse groups.

The article that my sister recommended describes a study done by two researchers in the field of Family Studies that explains differences between the ways that American parents view their children and the way that parents from other Western cultures view theirs.  The article in The Atlantic suggests that the "differences are stark," and focused on the fact that Americans rank intelligence as a more important quality in their children than the parents from other nations.

While looking at the graphs in the article, I noticed that the percentage of American parents who ranked their children as intelligent was only 6%.  Compare this with the percentage of Spanish parents who described their children as easy: 20%.  With a second look, you notice that 10% of Spanish parents described their children as intelligent!  I became very curious about the details of this study and why the story was so focused on the 6% of American parents who think their children are smart.

Truth be told, I was more than curious; I was a little offended.  I knew that there was some sort of media slant because I am familiar with the work of the two researchers.  In fact, they are one of my favorite developmental research teams because their names are Charles Super and Sara Harkness, which sounds like a comic book duo, whether they are publishing as Super and Harkness or Harkness and Super (and they do do both).  This collaboration is responsible for the concept of the developmental niche, which describes that children are raised within and under the influence of their caregiver, their caregiver's culture, and the society and environment at large.  You can picture these levels of influence like a nest with the little baby in the middle.  First the parents' arms are wrapped around the child, and all of the experiences and beliefs those parents have are put into the child's upbringing, both consciously and subconciously.  Then, around that, you see the circle of the physical space that the parent and child inhabit.  Each of these levels, along with the child's own innate temperament, influence how they will develop.

Upon further investigation of the new Super and Harkness study, I came to realize that The Atlantic DID blow the story of out of proportion.  First of all, yes, there were differences found in the study between values that are important to parents in different countries, but that wasn't the emphasis of their conclusion, which looks like this:

 In summary, the patterns of both cross-cultural similarity and difference in parents’ 
descriptions of their own children suggest that these descriptions are culturally constructed in the 
sense that there are locally shared ideas about what child qualities are most important, most 
worthy of note.  Comparing across the six cultural samples, there is evidence of commonality in 
the group of descriptors that were among the most frequent in all of the samples.  At the same 
time, the particular ways that these are combined with other, more culture-specific profiles of 
descriptors suggests that each community has its own unique perspective on the nature of the 
child.

The study re-affirms the influence of the developmental niche, showing that the parents' view of their own children has strong similarities with other parents within their culture.  Most importantly, it states that, "across the six cultural samples" the most frequently reported qualities were similar.  The differences, which The Atlantic uses as their titillating thesis, is really sort of an interesting after-thought in this conclusion.  It's almost as if Harkness and Super are saying, "All of these parents have been influenced by their culture, but the cultures support similar views of children. Isn't that cool?"

HOWEVER, I think that the most important take-away from the study is the simple fact of their sample:

In each cultural site, we recruited a sample of 60 families with target children 
divided evenly into five age-groups balanced for birth order and sex: 6 months, 18 months, 3 
years, 4.5 years, and 7 to 8 years. The sample families, recruited mostly through community 
networks, were broadly middle-class, with one or both parents employed and no major health 
problems; most of them were nuclear families with both parents present in the home; and parents 
in each sample were all native-born to that culture.

The Atlantic is using this research to create a news story about how Americans are obsessed with their children's intelligence.  We already discussed the numbers and the real theory behind the research, but let's also take a look at how even that information is really only based on SIXTY American families.  Sixty, middle-class, two-parent, native born families.  I don't even know the number of American families that fit that description, but my intuition tells me that it is not a soaring percentage. As much as I love Super and Harkness, this study tells us how the very stereotypical American family views their children, not necessarily how the real-life, widely diverse families in our country view theirs.

To conclude, it has been my experience that parents, all within our borders, have a wide range of the positive qualities that they believe their children possess. And to leave you with one cliff-hanger/conversation starter, I'll tell you that intelligence is not the one that seems to be most observable:  It is obedience.  It seems to me that the more privileges you have the less concerned you are with how obedient your children are, or...your idea of what obedience looks like is different from that of parents who struggle to meet their children's basic needs.  Now, GO...DISCUSS.