Playing With Knives: The Socialization of Self-Initiated Learners.

Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as "self-initiated learners." In this article, the ethnographic literature that shows why children are encouraged to learn without prompting or guidance and how that happens is reviewed.

"Teaching is so WEIRD".

Direct active teaching by parents is largely absent in children's lives until the rise of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized rich, democratic) society. However, as mothers become schooled and missionized - like Kline's Fijian subjects - they adopt "modern" parenting practices, including teaching. There is great variability, even within WEIRD society, of parental teaching, suggesting that teaching itself must be culturally transmitted.

When nurture becomes nature: ethnocentrism in studies of human development.

This commentary will extend the territory claimed in the target article by identifying several other areas in the social sciences where findings from the WEIRD population have been over-generalized. An argument is made that the root problem is the ethnocentrism of scholars, textbook authors, and social commentators, which leads them to take their own cultural values as the norm.

Getting noticed. Middle childhood in cross-cultural perspective.

Although it is rarely named, the majority of societies in the ethnographic record demarcate a period between early childhood and adolescence. Prominent signs of demarcation are, for the first time, pronounced gender separation in fact and in role definition; increased freedom of movement for boys, while girls may be bound more tightly to their mothers; and heightened expectations for socially responsible behavior. But above all, middle childhood is about coming out of the shadows of community life and assuming a distinct, lifetime character. Naming and other rites of passage sometimes acknowledge this transition, but it is, reliably, marked by the assumption or assignment of specific chores or duties. Because the physiological changes at puberty are so much more dramatic, the transition from middle childhood is more often marked by a rite of passage than the entrance into this period. There is also an acknowledgment at the exit from middle childhood of near-adult levels of competence--as a herdsman or hunter or as gardener or infant-caretaker.