Amazonian childcare

A really interesting piece by an anthropologist and feminist whose partner is an indigenous Ecuadoran. The couple went with their child to live in her partner's village. The resulting clash of child-rearing concepts may illustrate the view that it "takes a village to raise" a socially engaged child.

"Following current orthodoxy, Runa childrearing – with its casual breastfeeding, abrupt weaning, no extensive parent-child play, no lengthy adult-child talk – would be described as ‘lacking’ in so many respects. And yet, my Runa friends and family thought my own childcare practices were conspicuously inadequate to raise a child in the context of their community life. Their observations, their puzzlement and their quiet defiance of my own childcare practices remind us that, whenever we talk about childrearing, we are not talking about achieving some objective child development based on irrefutable scientific evidence, but rather about a moral project: a moral project about what kind of people we would like our children to become, what society we would like to live in, and what kind of economy we would like to serve. As my Runa friends and family have subtly but relentlessly demonstrated, there is more than one way to flourish as humans in this world."

https://aeon.co/essays/why-runa-indigenous-people-find-natural-parenting-troubling?

#anthropology #IndigenousPeople #Amazon #nativepeople #childcare