Are Child Raising Practices Related to Extremism?
Many
of the child-raising practices brought to the USA with European
settlers contrasted greatly with the nurturing practices common among
native peoples, which largely matched up with our species’ evolved nest.
The northern European practices were informed by strict versions of Christianity: They included isolation, sleeping alone, leaving babies to cry, little affectionate touch, corporal punishment. Some of these practices have been documented as damaging to young mammals like monkeys and rats (e.g., Harlow, 1958; Hofer, 1994). Such practices do not characterize humanity’s ancestral context, our small-band hunter-gatherers (Hewlett & Lamb, 2005). For human babies, who are like fetuses of other animals till 18 months of age, they are all harsh treatments. See here.
What might harsh treatment in early life do to a person?
Whiting and Child (1953) conducted a cross-sectional study of 75 cultures from around the world using data from ethnographers to examine the relation of child-raising to adult personality. Virtually all cultures were non-industrialized, though there was no discussion about how much colonizing forces in the last centuries had influenced their practices. Using a psychoanalytic framing (in parentheses), they rated child-raising practices that included free access and lengthy breastfeeding (oral), “toilet” training (anal), sexual expression (sexual), and nurturing responsiveness (dependence). They took a whole book to explain the framework, method, data, ratings, and summaries, giving concrete illustrations along the way. We don’t need to subscribe to psychoanalytic theory to find useful information from their study.
When children were provided satisfaction in the areas measured (e.g., breastfeeding the child on request, providing the breast to pacify the child), the culture received a high score, in this case, on “oral indulgence.” The Marquesans received the lowest oral indulgence score because they believed that breastfeeding ruins the beauty of breasts, which they valued, and believed that breastfeeding makes a child hard to raise and so provided very little breastfeeding and only when it was convenient to the mother, not according to child need or request. In contrast, the Kwoma received the highest score on nurturing responsiveness because the mother was always near the breastfeeding child, often carrying the child all day, enabling easy breastfeeding until weaning, giving them high scores on oral indulgence as well.
Using cross-sectional analyses by culture, Whiting and Child found correlations between the harsh treatment of young children’s expressed needs and adult anxiety. They concluded that adult anxiety was expressed in culture-sanctioned aggression toward others. Whiting and Child argued that adults with more anxiety either projected anxiety/fear onto others or displaced their anger onto others. The “others” were considered dangerous and were considered a group that was okay to blame, such as ghosts or ancestors or a particular type of person (e.g., witch). In other words, in their theorizing, early childhood experiences of harshness towards needs and desires, forcing the child to suppress those needs, were related to adult anxiety and culturally-sanctioned aggression towards outgroups.
Similar linkages between early harsh experience and adult attitudes have been found in US samples.
Milburn and Conrad (1996, 2016) describe in great detail the relations among corporal punishment and political attitudes. Though many factors contribute to political attitudes, they reported that early harsh treatment (corporal punishment) was associated with denial of emotion and its projection (anger, fear) onto culturally-sanctioned outgroups. Milburn and Conrad (1996) proposed an integrative theory called affect displacement theory (ADT) that melded theory and research findings on affect displacement, displaced aggression, hostile attribution and authoritarianism. An authoritarian personality has various definitions but typically includes rigid moral standards, punitive attitudes toward outgroups and inferiors on whom they project their impulses, a glorification of authority figures and toughness, and avoidance of introspection.
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Authoritarianism, they argue, is typically fostered by harsh, rigid and punitive childrearing, which results in
Correlational results cannot show that certain approaches to childrearing necessarily cause the outcomes associated with them. But even if harsh parenting has such effects, an awakening through education and self-introspection (which goes against a typical authoritarian personality) remains possible.
Milburn and Conrad (1996) describe a situation where an East German neo-Nazi, Ingo Hasselbach, met a filmmaker who valued him and asked to make a film about him. As the filmmaker followed Hasselbach to neo-Nazi meetings, Hasselbach began to see himself and his comrades in a new light and eventually was transformed away from the hate group.
Similarly, Derek Black grew up in the white nationalist movement in the USA and started the website KidsStormfront as a child. But he went to college, against the wishes of his family. While there he made friends, including Jewish friends. His friends were shocked to learn accidentally who he was but kept up the friendship with conversations about beliefs, which eventually transformed his thinking. At age 22, he publicly renounced white nationalism and became the subject of the book Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow.
Our society is multicultural and we have the opportunity to examine our many roots and identify and take up practices that promote flourishing. Indigenous wisdom elevates child nurturing to the center of a good society.
The northern European practices were informed by strict versions of Christianity: They included isolation, sleeping alone, leaving babies to cry, little affectionate touch, corporal punishment. Some of these practices have been documented as damaging to young mammals like monkeys and rats (e.g., Harlow, 1958; Hofer, 1994). Such practices do not characterize humanity’s ancestral context, our small-band hunter-gatherers (Hewlett & Lamb, 2005). For human babies, who are like fetuses of other animals till 18 months of age, they are all harsh treatments. See here.
What might harsh treatment in early life do to a person?
Whiting and Child (1953) conducted a cross-sectional study of 75 cultures from around the world using data from ethnographers to examine the relation of child-raising to adult personality. Virtually all cultures were non-industrialized, though there was no discussion about how much colonizing forces in the last centuries had influenced their practices. Using a psychoanalytic framing (in parentheses), they rated child-raising practices that included free access and lengthy breastfeeding (oral), “toilet” training (anal), sexual expression (sexual), and nurturing responsiveness (dependence). They took a whole book to explain the framework, method, data, ratings, and summaries, giving concrete illustrations along the way. We don’t need to subscribe to psychoanalytic theory to find useful information from their study.
When children were provided satisfaction in the areas measured (e.g., breastfeeding the child on request, providing the breast to pacify the child), the culture received a high score, in this case, on “oral indulgence.” The Marquesans received the lowest oral indulgence score because they believed that breastfeeding ruins the beauty of breasts, which they valued, and believed that breastfeeding makes a child hard to raise and so provided very little breastfeeding and only when it was convenient to the mother, not according to child need or request. In contrast, the Kwoma received the highest score on nurturing responsiveness because the mother was always near the breastfeeding child, often carrying the child all day, enabling easy breastfeeding until weaning, giving them high scores on oral indulgence as well.
Using cross-sectional analyses by culture, Whiting and Child found correlations between the harsh treatment of young children’s expressed needs and adult anxiety. They concluded that adult anxiety was expressed in culture-sanctioned aggression toward others. Whiting and Child argued that adults with more anxiety either projected anxiety/fear onto others or displaced their anger onto others. The “others” were considered dangerous and were considered a group that was okay to blame, such as ghosts or ancestors or a particular type of person (e.g., witch). In other words, in their theorizing, early childhood experiences of harshness towards needs and desires, forcing the child to suppress those needs, were related to adult anxiety and culturally-sanctioned aggression towards outgroups.
Similar linkages between early harsh experience and adult attitudes have been found in US samples.
Milburn and Conrad (1996, 2016) describe in great detail the relations among corporal punishment and political attitudes. Though many factors contribute to political attitudes, they reported that early harsh treatment (corporal punishment) was associated with denial of emotion and its projection (anger, fear) onto culturally-sanctioned outgroups. Milburn and Conrad (1996) proposed an integrative theory called affect displacement theory (ADT) that melded theory and research findings on affect displacement, displaced aggression, hostile attribution and authoritarianism. An authoritarian personality has various definitions but typically includes rigid moral standards, punitive attitudes toward outgroups and inferiors on whom they project their impulses, a glorification of authority figures and toughness, and avoidance of introspection.
article continues after advertisement
Authoritarianism, they argue, is typically fostered by harsh, rigid and punitive childrearing, which results in
“denial of the reality of harsh, even terrifying parents and of one’s own anger toward them coupled with displacement of that anger onto despised minorities in the society” (Milburn and Conrad, 2016, p. xi).To address whether parents socialize their children’s attitudes psychologically rather than physically through child treatment, they controlled for parental attitudes and still found the linkages between childhood corporal punishment and adult authoritarianism.
Correlational results cannot show that certain approaches to childrearing necessarily cause the outcomes associated with them. But even if harsh parenting has such effects, an awakening through education and self-introspection (which goes against a typical authoritarian personality) remains possible.
Milburn and Conrad (1996) describe a situation where an East German neo-Nazi, Ingo Hasselbach, met a filmmaker who valued him and asked to make a film about him. As the filmmaker followed Hasselbach to neo-Nazi meetings, Hasselbach began to see himself and his comrades in a new light and eventually was transformed away from the hate group.
Similarly, Derek Black grew up in the white nationalist movement in the USA and started the website KidsStormfront as a child. But he went to college, against the wishes of his family. While there he made friends, including Jewish friends. His friends were shocked to learn accidentally who he was but kept up the friendship with conversations about beliefs, which eventually transformed his thinking. At age 22, he publicly renounced white nationalism and became the subject of the book Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow.
Our society is multicultural and we have the opportunity to examine our many roots and identify and take up practices that promote flourishing. Indigenous wisdom elevates child nurturing to the center of a good society.
References
Harlow, H. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673-685.
Hewlett, B. S., & Lamb, M. E. (2005). Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine.
Hofer, M.A. (1994). Hidden regulators in attachment, separation, and loss. In N.A. Fox (Ed.), Emotion regulation: Behavioral and biological considerations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 192-207.
Milburn, MA & Conrad, SD (1996). The Politics of Denial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Milburn, M.A., Conrad, S.D., Sala, F., & Carberry, S. (1995). Childhood punishment, denial, and political attitudes. Political Psychology, 16(3), 447-478.
Milburn, M.A., Niwa, M., & Patterson, M. (2014). Authoritarianism, anger, and hostile attribution bias: A test of affect displacement. Political Psychology, 35(2), 225-243.
Trevathan, W. R. (2011). Human birth: An evolutionary perspective, 2nd ed.. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Whiting, J.W.M., & Child, I.L. (1953). Child training and personality: A cross-cultural study. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wiehe, V.R. (1990). Religious influence on parental attitudes toward the use of corporal punishment. Journal of Family Violence, 5(2), 173-186.
Hewlett, B. S., & Lamb, M. E. (2005). Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine.
Hofer, M.A. (1994). Hidden regulators in attachment, separation, and loss. In N.A. Fox (Ed.), Emotion regulation: Behavioral and biological considerations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 192-207.
Milburn, MA & Conrad, SD (1996). The Politics of Denial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Milburn, M.A., Conrad, S.D., Sala, F., & Carberry, S. (1995). Childhood punishment, denial, and political attitudes. Political Psychology, 16(3), 447-478.
Milburn, M.A., Niwa, M., & Patterson, M. (2014). Authoritarianism, anger, and hostile attribution bias: A test of affect displacement. Political Psychology, 35(2), 225-243.
Trevathan, W. R. (2011). Human birth: An evolutionary perspective, 2nd ed.. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Whiting, J.W.M., & Child, I.L. (1953). Child training and personality: A cross-cultural study. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wiehe, V.R. (1990). Religious influence on parental attitudes toward the use of corporal punishment. Journal of Family Violence, 5(2), 173-186.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/moral-landscapes/201909/are-child-raising-practices-related-extremism
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