World of Babies

Should babies sleep alone in cribs, or in bed with parents? Is talking to babies useful, or a waste of time? A World of Babies provides different answers to these and countless other childrearing questions, precisely because diverse communities around the world hold drastically different beliefs about parenting. While celebrating that diversity, the book also explores the challenges that poverty, globalization and violence pose for parents. Fully updated for the twenty-first century, this edition features a new introduction and eight new or revised case studies that directly address contemporary parenting challenges, from China and Peru to Israel and the West Bank. Written as imagined advice manuals to parents, the creative format of this book brings alive a rich body of knowledge that highlights many models of baby-rearing - each shaped by deeply held values and widely varying cultural contexts. Parenthood may never again seem a matter of 'common sense'.

Alma Gottlieb is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Brown University. She conducted long-term fieldwork in Beng communities in Ivory Coast (1979-93) and now connects with young Beng people through social media. A full-length ethnography of Beng childrearing practices appeared as The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004); she has also written the Beng-English Dictionary (with M. Lynne Murphy, 1995) and Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (1992). With proceeds from two memoirs of their lives with the Beng - Parallel Worlds (1993) and Braided Worlds (2012) - Gottlieb and fiction writer Philip Graham co-founded the Beng Community Fund, a non-governmental organization that funds development projects in Beng villages. Judy DeLoache is the Kenan Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Virginia. She has published extensively on cognitive development in infants and young children. She has served as President of the Developmental Division of the American Psychological Association, and as President of the Cognitive Development Society. Dr DeLoache's research was funded by a Scientific MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, Dr DeLoache received the William James Award for Lifetime Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Science from the American Psychological Society, as well as the Distinguished Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research on Child Development.