Infant Care and Development: Historical change and cross-cultural value conflict in pathways to attachment and family relationships
Presented by Dr. Patricia Marks Greenfield
This webinar was presented live on Wednesday April 5th, 2023. Through the kindness of the presenter, a recording of the webinar is available here.
Dr. Patricia Marks Greenfield
Socialization into a cultural pathway starts in infancy with choices about basic infant caregiving practices such as sleeping and eating. Attachment behaviors reflect some universals in the development of close social relations. For example, Infants around the world seek proximity to specific people and are distressed if they do not achieve it. Nonetheless, caregivers in different communities respond in different ways to infant distress: physical contact (proximal caregiving) or contact at a distance (face-to-face vocal interaction, i.e., distal caregiving). This differential response generates two basically different cultural pathways to infant attachment and adult development. Sociodemographic and ecological features influence which cultural pathway is taken. Wealth, urbanization, formal education, and sophisticated technology lead to distal caregiving and the development of an independent individual. Poverty, rural environment, education at home or in the community, and simple technology lead to proximal caregiving and the development of an interdependent individual. Examples will be presented from the U.S., Mexico, Germany, and Burma.
Dr. Patricia Marks Greenfield received her A.B. summa cum laude and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and Visiting Scholar at Harvard in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. In 1968, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton invited her to follow up his newborn research in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico; and she has been studying the developmental effects of social change there ever since. This research culminated in her 2004 book, Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas, and inspired her theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development. The theory has generated a broad array of empirical research with collaborators at UCLA and around the world. Current research topics include intergenerational shifts in ecology, culture, cognition, behavior, and parenting in the U.S., Mexico, China, Israel, and Romania; cross-cultural value mismatch experienced by first-generation college students at UCLA; and behavioral investigations linking cultural processes to digital communication and social development.
Register for the webinar here