HDE 103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Lactose Intolerance, Social Change, Parental Investment
11 Jun 2018
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I. Lecture 6: Children and Families in Social Change (April 25, 2018)
A. **Check in – important concepts
1. WEIRD – white educated industrialized rich democratic
a. Skewed perspective that doesn’t apply to everyone
2. Interpretive reproduction – how people and children interpret the cultural norms/rules/standards in
their world and how they reproduce it; allows the opportunity for children to be active participants and
recipients of how they receive culture
3. Historical and ecological context for culture
a. Historical: Because we evolved, we changed over time; historically people interpret and
reproduce culture differently; intergenerational transfer of culture from parents to children
b. Ecological: the environment shapes the culture
4. Culture amplifying or suppressing biology
a. Cultural traditions and norms
b. People did things along rules/taboos in their societies – some were beneficial that coincided with
biology, others went away from it
c. Cultural traditions can hinder biology – Ex: blood-let babies die; suppresses biology
d. Ex: fertility – keeping people away from certain huts allowed women to bond with the children,
relax and recuperate beneficial to biology
e. Ex: when a culture develops different lifestyles affects their biology (eating cows lactose
intolerance)
5. Parental investment predicts competing strategies for men and women
a. Parental investment – how much each parent puts into reproduction
b. Dads vs cads
i. Men are more likely to want to reproduce
ii. Worry about cuckoldry
iii. Dads: when men are abundant, they are more likely to behave like men because the females
are scarce
iv. Cads: men are more likely to behave in one-night stands; females are abundant
c. Women have to invest in offspring
i. Females want to reproduce less
d. Depends on the sex ratio (ratio of men to women in the environment)
6. Parent-Offspring Conflict Theory predicts that parents and children have differing expectations from
families
a. Often a child’s needs, wants, or considerations are never taken into account
b. Children then, suffer the consequences of family conflict
c. Ex: a lot of focus is how society thinks (how mom thinks, how dad thinks) but no one considers
how the child thinks;
i. The child born to parents needs all the parents’ resources
ii. The parent who can ditch will ditch
iii. Women want to keep men around for security; men want to reproduce a lot
iv. Children want resources from both and will do things to get them
d. Different motivations for making kids and keeping them
i. There are gender differences for both
ii. There are cultural differences that amplify or suppress them
B. Social Change
1. Last lecture we saw how quickly subsistence strategies can change, and how much those changes can
impact all aspects of child development
2. Today we will examine:
a. How children, childhood, and families are affected by social changes
b. How growing diversity of families in industrialized and developing societies is impacting children
and families
c. How the breakdown of the “traditional” family is impacting development
d. Decide what counts as a “contemporary conception of a family”
e. Think about how groups want to “save children’s futures” without much consideration to their
lives right now
C. Children Negatively Defined
1. Alanen ~ “Children are often defined in the context of family and society as what they are going to be
rather than what they are now”
2. Changing families often focus on the changing roles of fathers and men, then mothers and women,
then finally children last
3. Let’s bring children and adolescents back into the discussion of social change and family life
4. Negatively defined: what the child is not; “a child is NOT an adult”
a. But it’s not that they are not people, they are on their own step in their progression of life
D. Studies of Families in Western Societies
1. Rarely captured in research
a. Positivist research – experimental settings controlling children’s behavior in a controlled setting
b. Interpretive research – interpret the meaning from information provided by the child
c. *Neither looks at children interpreting their role within the family
i. They don’t just go to the family and watch/observe
2. Psychology is focused on looking at relationships between attachment and parenting behavior in a
controlled setting
a. Not looking at children where they are comfortable and may behave differently
3. Research gaps are also cultural
a. We respect the privacy of families
E. Cultural studies
1. Emic – studies within the culture, using the specific cultural terms
a. Anthropologists go within the culture and write ethnographies
2. Etic – studies of cultural trends above/outside culture using general, non-structural terms
a. Trying to make unbiased, generalized terms
3. Participatory –
a. Ex: 1980s ; Grad student who went to high school and middle schoolers; became “one of them”,
learned how status and hierarchies operated in those grades
4. Observational methods – go to a culture and observe them; note what they do; observations of what
they do lots
a. Like what Andrew did in Tanzania
b. Give depth and profoundness to situations
5. Interviews – talking with a person and noting down what they say
a. Ex: research on boys loss of friendship in Inner-city New York; extensive interviews over 10-
years
i. 8,9,10 years: Boys are very emotional (hug, kiss, express verbally care and love)
ii. But those behaviors decrease as they grow older – stop their emotional expressions
6. Qualitative in nature – based on quality, descriptions
7. Quantitative methods are used in conjunction (i.e., mixed methods)
F. Research exposes Human Universals….or…
1. Between ages 1-3, children tend to develop behaviors one usually does not associate with young child
behavior
a. Assertiveness and Resistant behaviors: Led to conflicts and thus a new context to learn about
emotions and emotion regulation
2. Through different types of research we have come to understand that in our culture:
a. Children tend to challenge the authority of adults at an early age
b. Children learn how misbehavior is a way to gain control back from parents
i. Not because they want to be selfish, but they want to learn how to get things done within the
family
ii. To see where their role is in the family/society
3. Children have unmet needs that we need to attend to, to help them learn to regulate
4. *Always think about the reverse when thinking about developmental psychology
G. Children structuring language with structure
Document Summary
Lecture 6: children and families in social change (april 25, 2018, **check in important concepts, weird white educated industrialized rich democratic. Positivist research experimental settings controlling children"s behavior in a controlled setting. Interpretive research interpret the meaning from information provided by the child. *neither looks at children interpreting their role within the family. *always think about the reverse when thinking about developmental psychology: children structuring language with structure. In a study aimed at capturing how middle-class families organize their daily lives, researchers visited families in everyday routines: found that both black and white families engaged in concerted cultivation. Parents actively fostering and assessing their children"s talents, opinions, and skills: they scheduled children for activities and reasoned with them, they hover over them, and when outside the home do not hesitate to intervene when necessary. Parents were generally more authoritarian in rule making: relied on threats and directives rather than dialogue.
