Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Editors’ Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- CHAPTER ONE If Dr. Spock Were Burn in Bali: Raising a World of Babies
- CHAPTER TWO A Parenting Manual, with Words of Advice for Puritan Mothers
- CHAPTER THREE Luring Your Child into This Life: A Being Path for Infant Care
- CHAPTER FOUR Gift from the Gods: A Balinese Guide to Early Child Rearing
- CHAPTER FIVE Making Babies in a Turkish Village
- CHAPTER SIX Infants of the Dreaming: A Warlpiri Guide to Child Care
- CHAPTER SEVEN The View from, the Wuro: A Guide to Child Rearing for Fulani Parents
- CHAPTER EIGHT Never Leave Your Little due Alone: Raising an Ifaluk Child
- Note to Chapter One
- About the Contributors
- Authors' Acknowledgments
- Citations and Sources Cited
- Index
CHAPTER ONE - If Dr. Spock Were Burn in Bali: Raising a World of Babies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Editors’ Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- CHAPTER ONE If Dr. Spock Were Burn in Bali: Raising a World of Babies
- CHAPTER TWO A Parenting Manual, with Words of Advice for Puritan Mothers
- CHAPTER THREE Luring Your Child into This Life: A Being Path for Infant Care
- CHAPTER FOUR Gift from the Gods: A Balinese Guide to Early Child Rearing
- CHAPTER FIVE Making Babies in a Turkish Village
- CHAPTER SIX Infants of the Dreaming: A Warlpiri Guide to Child Care
- CHAPTER SEVEN The View from, the Wuro: A Guide to Child Rearing for Fulani Parents
- CHAPTER EIGHT Never Leave Your Little due Alone: Raising an Ifaluk Child
- Note to Chapter One
- About the Contributors
- Authors' Acknowledgments
- Citations and Sources Cited
- Index
Summary
* Do babies have the devil in theme or are they divine?
* Should parents talk to their infants, or is it a waste of time?
* Do babies need a daily bath – or two or three daily baths?
In this book, you will find answers to these and many other questions about infants and how to care for them. In fact, you'll find several different answers to each one. Most of these answers will be quite different from what the majority of contemporary middle-class North Americans or Europeans would say. Here are some examples of the contrasting views you will encounter in these pages.
To the Puritans in seventeenth-century America, infants were born in sin and in need of strict direction by their parents to help them resist the temptations of the devil. To the residents of Bali, however, babies are reincarnated ancestors and gods. Everyone including their own parents, must treat infants with the respect and deference due a deity, which includes addressing them with honorific titles otherwise reserved few individuals of the highest rank.
Writers of Western child care manuals stress the great importance of talking to infants to foster language development The Beng of West A World of Babies Africa also talk to their babies, but they do so because they believe young infants can understand all the languages of the world. In contrast, many other group, including inhabitants of Ifaluk, a tiny Micronesian atoll, think that babies cannot understand any thing that's said to them, so there's no point in speaking to them.
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- Information
- A World of BabiesImagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000