Value of LDS Primary--a supportive culture for parenting

I wrote up a debate piece for another site on Hillary's child/village thing, and it is a bit vague intentionally, but mainly I support both active parenting and a culture supportive of the parents' values that we try to accomplish in the church, etc.

Some prominent opinion-makers have quoted the wisdom "It takes a village to raise a child." Very likely this is true in many ways, but it certainly also helps if the child's parents live in that village! Optimally there will be many people interested in a child's development, but it works best when someone in the village takes the parent role, and takes it seriously.

There are ways that human babies come 'wired' to identify 'mother.' Before birth a child can recognize her mother by smell and sound. They diligently spend the first three months of life learning to recognize her facial features. Only for a few days can an infant be raised by detached nursing staffs. The care taking-in-shifts approach works with very young newborns, but after that they fail to thrive unless they are also forming primary bonds. In fact, according to widely accepted attachment theory, if a child is well attached to a primary caretaker figure, the child is much more secure and can use that relationship as a 'safe base' for exploration of the world, or at least the village.

During the babe-in-arms age, the child is still learning important things by mimicking the facial expressions of the parent they know enough to establish such recognition. For the child's health, there are numerous benefits from breast-feeding, which is nutrition tailor-made for the child by the mother according to her needs. There is hardly a better example of a way in which having your own mom is not just a cultural notion!

Early language and intellectual development is enhanced by the ability of a child to interact with a primary adult that knows them well and can build on that understanding. There is a way of talking to babies called 'motherese' where a caretaker interprets the child's babbling as speech, gives it meaning, gives full sentence form to individual words, and in general interact with the child as an interested and interesting partner in communication.

Later in the child's life, on the other hand, while it is still important to have that primary caretaker relationship, there are certain things a child learns that are more readily learned from someone other than the parent. By age seven, children start to actually prefer the company of same-aged playmates, while they appreciate adults that are interested in them and are keeping track of them. They almost develop a big of an anti-adult and anti-parent attitude in this pre-adolescent age. (Remember when kids sang 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school?' They were probably pre-teens.) They develop a bit of a rebelliousness though they don't know what they are rebelling from quite yet, mainly they are just separating a bit from the need to be cared for.

Some types of knowledge a child deliberately rejects the version they might get from their parents. If anyone knows someone who is a child of immigrants, say from Eastern Europe or Asia, it is quite probable that they speak English without much of an accent. Language is one of the skills where children learn primarily from their community, or their village. My children at a young age, say nine, got a sense of words that I would use that weren't in' anymore, that I had dated myself and they were clearly learning the optimal version of language, and probably other things such as clothing and other trends, from the larger culture. Later when my kids go through puberty there will be more obvious ways that they will no longer seek me out for what they are interested about.

But most relevant to the way in which this quote is discussed, when it comes to instilling or enforcing any type of value system, it is almost essential for parents (in order to be successful in raising a child with a certain values or a religion) to have a wider group that shares those values with the parents. It is as if the child establishes the parents' value system as a possible theory but only validates that theory if it is also shared by at least some subset of the wider population. Values that tend to run contrary to those they interact with in their 'village' may have a high danger of being rejected. But that is why some, particularly conservative religions that depend on this happening, tend to cluster in ethnic groups, so that not only they themselves but also the child's peers are likely to believe in the same values and help the child develop them.

In sum, while this statement is often rejected in its extreme form in that it is not typically the best situation for children to grow up without any person or people that that child can refer to as parents' it is true that it is the ideal situation to have interested caregivers who are also networked within a community that is supportive of their efforts and shares their values.