interpersonal skills and strategies, differing rules for emotional expression, and differing standards by which to judge their own behavior.
Robert LeVine has analyzed childrearing practices and child socialization extensively in the decades since he worked with John Whiting as one of the Six Cultures researchers, and he remains at the forefront of research on children and their social development. He has strongly argued that studying social development cross‐culturally is central to studying children within anthropology, and such work forms the backbone of an anthropology of childhood. His work has illuminated the interplay of cultural belief and social development and shown how childrearing practices are rational, adaptive processes that enable children to grow up effectively, understanding the norms of their society.
Much of LeVine’s work is based on comparisons of middle‐class mothers in the United States with those of mothers in rural communities in Kenya such as the Gusii. He identifies two approaches – pediatric and pedagogic – which may help explain why parents prioritize different goals in different circumstances and why social development in young children is not a priority for all parents in all cases. He argues that the pediatric approach, which is customary in parts of Africa, focuses on protection and survival in the early years, and the pedagogic approach practiced in the United States, is more concerned with teaching young children behavioral competencies. In African societies, where infant mortality is high, and the early years of life most dangerous, mothers are likely to keep their children in very close contact with them, carry them everywhere, and breast‐feed them for up to 2 years. They will feed them on demand but generally do not treat babies as emotionally responsive individuals with whom they should make eye contact, talk to, or be concerned about their behavioral development (LeVine, 1977). This is not to claim that they are uninterested in their long‐term development, or have not made explicit plans for events later on in life such as betrothal or initiation, but when children are very young, parents are more concerned with their physical survival rather than with their social development. In contrast, many middle‐class mothers in the United States (where infant mortality is low) may take the survival of children for granted, and so are more likely to devote time and energy to shaping how their children behave and get on socially and academically.
There are very different parental strategies at work here, different conceptualizations of the relationship between the child and the parent and consequently very different ways of socializing a child and measuring their social development. LeVine describes this (2003, p. 32), in the African case, as parents expecting to be “united with their children in a long‐run relationship of ‘serial reciprocity.’” In this model, the care given to children by parents is reciprocated by children working on the family land and supporting their parents in their old age. Teaching obedience to children is a crucial factor in this strategy and one of the major goals of childrearing. A child must learn to be quiet, make few demands, and must not be allowed to disrupt the hierarchical basis of society. Gusii mothers explicitly discourage praise as they think it would make even a compliant child conceited and disobedient and therefore a threat to the social order. American mothers have no such expectations, and they praise their children, engage in proto‐conversations with them, and encourage them to walk and talk early (LeVine et al., 1994). While social development in infancy is largely outside the scope of this book, LeVine’s work on infant care suggests that children’s social development is highly dependent on parental strategies from a very early age and that the care of the very young is not simply about ensuring that a young child’s basic needs for food or shelter are met but is part of much larger systems of cultural practice which ensure that, even from the earliest days of a child’s life, he or she is socialized and enculturated into the social values of the society.
Continuing the tradition and interdisciplinarity of comparative research on children’s social development, and also drawing on data from the HRAF, David Lancy’s work has focused on children’s learning and the role it plays in social development and socialization (Lancy, 2014). He is particularly interested in middle childhood as a time when children learn from their peers as much (or even more) than from their parents or other adults and when, crucially, they are rarely directly “taught” skills or behaviors but are nevertheless expected to learn and master particular tasks (Lancy et al., 2010). He refers to these key skills and behaviors as the “chore curriculum”: the tasks that children need to learn (depending on the social expectations of gender and their growing physical and cognitive competence) in order to function effectively in any society (Lancy, 2012). This curriculum is not learned in schools, or from adults, but primarily through interactions with other children, thereby blending socialization, learning, play, and work. Lancy (1977, p. 87) describes children’s social development among Kpelle blacksmiths in Liberia where he conducted fieldwork in the 1970s:
I didn’t find that play has no relationship to work. They are, to use a favourite anthropological term, “integrated” … make believe play seems to be one step in an alternatively collapsing and expanding process. A child of three spends hours observing a blacksmith at work. A child of four brings his stick down on a rock repeatedly and says he is a blacksmith. A child of eight weaves with his friends an elaborate reconstruction of the blacksmith’s craft, all in make‐believe. The child of ten is a blacksmith’s helper in reality; he fetches wood for the forge and no more. At twelve he begins learning the actual skills of smithing, adding a new one every few months or so. At eighteen he is a full‐fledged blacksmith with his own forge. Parallel patterns can be observed for virtually every class of work.
He has since argued that this pattern can be more widely observed and that children learn social and economic competence within their communities through observation of their peers. The chore curriculum is a form of learning and social development which takes place outside formal educational settings, or directed teaching, by parents, and Lancy emphasizes the impossibility of separating out social development from economic, cultural, and educational development.
His work, along with that of Robert LeVine, exemplifies the interdisciplinarity of studies of children within North American anthropology. In this respect it follows the broader curriculum of anthropology as it is taught within North American universities which emphasizes a “four fields” approach; in this, equal emphasis is given to archaeology, linguistics, sociocultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. (In contrast at many British universities it is possible to gain an undergraduate degree purely in social and cultural anthropology without studying these other areas.)
There is also a strong evolutionary strand in this tradition. Evolutionary perspectives on social development (covered in detail in Chapter 4, this volume) is also an area in which anthropologists have had a significant influence. Evolutionary anthropologists have emphasized the importance of integrating understandings of cross‐cultural variation alongside biological studies of growth and development, ecology, evolution, and adaptation: arguing that childhood as a developmental phase is both biologically based and culturally diverse and that this diversity is ecologically adaptive. They have also drawn links to how childhood as a life‐history stage compares to that of other mammals, especially nonhuman primates (for a summary see Meehan & Crittenden, 2016).
Evolutionary theorists have been particularly interested in hunter‐gatherer societies, as being most representative of the kind of subsistence environment in which humans evolved. Melvin Konner has focused on hunter‐gatherer childhoods, particularly those of the !Kung of Southern Africa, and his work explores the links between extended childhood dependency, brain growth, and social learning and development. While much of his work analyzes infants and their care, Konner (2011) also gives detailed and authoritative accounts of children’s play and peer groups, which draw on biological, psychological, and ethnographic data. Similarly, Barry Hewlett’s work on hunter‐gatherers uses evolutionary theory to show how hunter‐gatherer children learn and develop socially. He argues that children’s learning in these communities is rapid and vertical until the age of five (i.e., it is passed downwards from parent to child) but becomes oblique and horizontal between the ages of six and twelve. Like Lancy, he also argues that the explicit teaching
