Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$19.00$19.00
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$9.62$9.62
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Zoom Books Company
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent Paperback – May 4, 1999
Purchase options and add-ons
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.
- Print length292 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateMay 4, 1999
- Dimensions5.24 x 0.74 x 7.95 inches
- ISBN-100385483627
- ISBN-13978-0385483629
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Review
--Salon
"Nothing less than a liberation. For too long parents have agonized...that there is one 'right' way to raise an infant. With engaging wit and profound scholarship...Small opens our eyes to the variety of child-care practices in other cultures."
--James Shreeve, author of The Neanderthal Enigma
"Wise, humane and packed with information."
--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor of anthropology, University of California, Davis.
"In elegant, engaging prose, Meredith Small shows the mother-child relation to be a microcosm of society."
--Frans B. M. de Waal, Ph.D.
From the Inside Flap
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.
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
From the Back Cover
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.
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.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I walked up the main steps of the museum, passed under the banner announcing the exhibit, and entered. It was dark, and quiet, with only a few people milling about. The ambiance suited me--it echoed my own sense of anticipated reverence. Before me, the first exhibit was a tall glass case lit from above. Inside was a child's face, set high at adult eye level so that our gazes met. There was no flesh on this skull, no eyes, no mouth, just the empty face of a child with a set of battered teeth. I froze, sucked in my breath, and stared.
This was the "Taung Baby," a two-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus, discovered in 1925 and once thought to be the missing link between humans and apes. Long ago, when this little kid died, he or she somehow ended up in a limestone quarry where the bone tissue leaked away and was replaced by stone. Two million years later, quarry workers chucked this hunk of rock into a box of possible fossils that they routinely passed on to Raymond Dart, a British anatomist working at a South African university. Dart used his wife's knitting needles to pick away at the stone until the small face appeared. Dart was used to finding baboon fossils in his shipment, but this was no monkey, the brain was too big and the face was too flat. It was, Dart was convinced, the first evidence of the ape-human split. We know now that Taung and its relatives were a kind of human that walked upright but still had small brains, and that they were possible ancestors of our species, Homo sapiens. A child, then, led the way to understanding our past.
And here was that same face that Raymond Dart had looked at sixty years before.The face is gray stone, dished in from forehead to mouth, but with a flat nose. The eyes, were they in their sockets, would stare straight ahead. The right side of the inner skull is filled with a geode, sparkling crystals that give Taung a jewel-like glow. And that is appropriate. This skull, and the stone impression of this child's brain that Dart also found, are as precious as diamonds to those who are trying to figure out the human path of evolution. Staring at that skull, I was struck by the fact that this ancient child was somebody's baby long ago. Perhaps she was sick, or maybe he was accident-prone, or perhaps this baby was some predator's dinner. Standing there, I could picture him or her long ago, smiling, laughing, and reaching out to grab a mother's breast. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
From a biological point of view, the Taung child represents a specific stage of development for Australopithecines, our ancestors that lived from four to two million years ago. Paleontologists tend to concentrate on adults of any species because adulthood is the mature end product; but fossilized babies and children also give clues to anatomy and physiology, to rates of development and growth. Children are not just miniature versions of adults. There are sound evolutionary reasons why infants and children look and behave the way they do; childhood is a specifically evolved stage in the life course. The Taung child emphasizes the fact that we are not born as adults but go through a lengthy period of growth and change. In this child, and all children, are some of the most important secrets of our anatomy and behavior. There are reasons why mice are born blind and human babies cannot hold their heads up. Natural selection has opted for fawns to stand on their own soon after birth, for human infants to smile automatically, and for baby chimpanzees to cling to their mothers' fur. And all of this makes some sort of natural biological sense. The pattern of birth, infancy, and childhood in any species follows a particular course that eventually outlines adult biology and behavior.
The Human Infant Design
In the summer of 1990, on a trip to Africa, I had the opportunity to hold a wild baby chimpanzee. Its mother, and all its relatives, had been killed by a poacher. The poacher was caught before the infant was shipped off to some European zoo, and for now he was housed at a hotel where the sympathetic manager had made it a policy to take in abandoned animals. Cradling the infant ape in my arms was uncanny: she felt just like a small child, only hairier. She squirmed a bit, looked at me with frightened brown eyes, and cooed softly, lips pouting out. After a few anxious minutes, she stretched her long arms over my shoulder toward the woman who usually cared for her, reaching for the only mother she now had.
That chimpanzee felt so much like a human child for a good reason--about 98 percent of our genetic material is identical to that of chimpanzees. We are, in fact, more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. I state this fact to underscore a point: Human babies, and human adults for that matter, are animals. We are primates, a kind of mammal, and our babies are animal babies. Although humans like to think of themselves as unique, we share much of our physiology and behavior with others of our kind, with other primates. For example, the shape of our head follows a continuum with other primates that shows a reduced snout and an enlarged brain
case with a full forehead and forward-facing eyes. Our teeth are primate teeth, rather than dog teeth or alligator teeth. Our eyes see the way monkeys' eyes see, with color vision and good depth perception to facilitate swinging through the trees. And our flexible hands--the hands that can pick ripe fruit off a tree, type these words or tie a shoe, hold a flower or build a model plane--distinguish us, and all primates, from other mammals that have paws. Our whole upper skeleton reflects an even closer relationship to other primates, apes in particular. Using a human anatomy book, one can dissect a chimpanzee or a gorilla and find everything in the right place. We have the upper bodies of long-armed apes. The only difference, in a broad anatomical sense, is the fact that the human pelvis, legs, and feet have been adapted to upright walking. So much of our physiology is simply that of an upright-walking primate. The point is that human babies, like all babies, are animals of a certain species, born with certain physical and mental abilities and lacking some others. As this book will show, much of the animal context of human babies and children can be understood best through the lens of biological evolution. Taking this tack, one cannot think about babies as early unformed organisms or shadows of the adults they are to become. They are instead simply what they have been designed to be.
Product details
- Publisher : Anchor; Reprint edition (May 4, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 292 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385483627
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385483629
- Item Weight : 10 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.24 x 0.74 x 7.95 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #671,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,042 in Medical Child Psychology
- #1,345 in Popular Child Psychology
- #1,428 in Baby & Toddler Parenting
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Meredith F. Small is a science journalist, anthropologist, and Professor Emerita at Cornell University and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books take an anthropological look at parenting, mental health, and human sexuality. Her current book, Inventing the World, is the story of a long list of inventions that happened in Venice, Italy.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
For instance, in our society we take for granted that babies should sleep in cribs and often in their own rooms, but it is startling to realize that this practice has only been around for the last 200 or so years in Western civilization, that babies still sleep with their mothers in the vast majority of cultures in the world today, and that this is what humans have done for ages over the course of our (successful) evolution. It points out the contrast between our cultural practice of infant solitary sleep and how infants have evolved biologically to sleep in close proximity to their mothers. This data leads us to question whether our modern cultural practices are actual compatible with the biological needs of infants, and what is actually best for meeting the needs of infants.
This relationship between culture and biology is the theme that guides the rest of the book. In addition to sleep, two other topics which are central to the lives of infants are covered: eating and state (crying, temperament, etc.) Each of these chapters was packed with interesting information from historical, evolutionary, cultural, and scientific perspectives. Some of the parts that stood out to me in the "eating" section were learning about weaning ages from a biological (looking at humans within the spectrum of other primates) and cross-cultural perspective (ranging from 2.5 to 7 years old), as well as the history of breastfeeding and formula in Western culture. I was also interested to learn that "insufficient milk" syndrome only has a physical cause in 5% of the reported cases and is not found anywhere other than Western industrialized nations. Rather, its cause is usually associated with separation from the mother at birth, interval feeding (rather than feeding on cue or "demand"), and artificial milk presented as a reasonable alternative. Such insights, if properly applied, could help us to prevent this frustrating problem for many mothers.
Another eye-opening topic was crying. Crying is accepted in Western culture as normal and expected for babies, but in many cultures babies hardly cry at all. Studies have shown that what helps babies to cry less is human contact- picking up a crying baby, promptly feeding a baby that is crying out of hunger, and carrying the baby for more hours of each day. This may sound like common sense, but it is not the mainstream way that babies are cared for in Western culture. Rather, babies' cries routinely receive delayed responses and "cry-it-out" is a popular and widely accepted sleep training method for infants.
It frustrates me that as many advances as have been made in Western civilization, in many ways it has failed us so miserably. I wish I lived in a culture in which I could trust the mainstream cultural practices for infant care (and everything else), but unfortunately that's not the reality we live in. By broadening our perspective on infant care to cultures across the world and our evolutionary history, this book allows us to view our own culture in a new light and begin to look more closely at what is actually best for our children.
The information and perspectives shared in this book went well beyond what you would find in a normal "Parenting" book, and it kept me interested from beginning to end. I highly recommend this book for parents and non-parents alike.
you read it more efficiently.
- Like most non-fiction the first third of the book lays the ground
work but can be boring (kind of like the first two years of undergrad
classes). You can skim the first two chapters if you want.
- Chapter three is where things start to get good.
- I especially like the sections of the book on crying, sleeping, and
eating. The author can get a bit preachy at times but she provides
good evidence and always cites her sources.
- The section on temperament was the only really boring part and can
be skipped in my opinion.
- The last quarter of the book is notes, so it's not as long as it seems.
Overall the book was extremely interesting and mostly validated how I
want to raise our kid, and more importantly it gave me good ammo for
arguing with people (mainly my family!) about why I'm "right" ;)
Enjoy!
I was hoping for an anthropological take on the subject and got it. OUR BABIES, OURSELVES also quotes from a number of scientific studies. If you never read scientific nonfiction, you may not enjoy this approach. If, like me, you do, then I think you will find this one a page-turner. OUR BABIES, OURSELVES kept me awake a long plane trip where I had expected to do much more sleeping! I called my husband to share bits and pieces that had me excited and thinking in a new way, and got him thinking too!
A quick glance at other reviews tells me that some people found OUR BABIES, OURSELVES overly prescriptive. I did not. I found it less prescriptive than some of the other parenting books I have taken a look at. While Small does come down favoring parenting that lines up more with the rest of the world (co-sleeping, more touch, responding rather than letting children "cry it out"), I found the sketches of parenting practices in a variety of cultures empowering. They were not all identical. The take away message, at least for me, is to listen more to the child and less to western prescriptions for "getting parenting right."
I highly recommend OUR BABIES, OURSELVES. It is a fun read, and a book that will make you think!
Top reviews from other countries
I really enjoyed having information from observational studies laid out for me, as oppose to opinion/advice rammed at me as in other parenting books.
It has allowed me to feel quite relaxed about several things I was previously hung up such as lack of sleep, and feeding. I feel much more confident now about making decisions about parenting, despite them not necessarily being the most common thing to do in my own culture. I also enjoyed the authors conclusion in the book about respecting the choices others make because that is the situation they have found themselves in. In every culture, parents adapt their parenting to the needs of their lifestyle.
A little word of advice is to skim read the first few pages, not sure if it was the mood I was in, but they didn't really appeal to me, I was more than happy with the content of the rest of the book though, and have not stopped talking about its findings!
I would recommend to any parents or parents-to-be and of course any one with an interest in this subject. After reading it I feel much less inclined to need to read parenting books which which dictate routine and order!