OUR BABIES, OURSELVES: Why We Raise Our Children the Way We Do.

By Meredith Small. Anchorbooks. 320 pp. $24.95

Dr. Spock once astutely observed that "two women who in actual practice would handle a child just about the same could still argue till kingdom come about [child-rearing] theory"—and probably would in America. The converse also holds true. Two women (or two men) who agree about childrearing theory could easily proceed to treat a child quite differently. Ask them how the differences might affect the growth of a child into a citizen, and the honest answer will be an uneasy "Who knows?"

Small, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University, seeks new clarity for the messy business of child rearing through a pioneering science called "ethnopediatrics"—"a mix of cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, with a soupçon of evolutionary biology thrown in." The goal of the group of pediatricians, child development researchers, and anthropologists who gave the field its name is twofold: to highlight the culturally relative functions served by "parenting styles," and to explore the effects those styles might have on the biologically fixed needs of infants. Put in the more prescriptive terms that Small often uses in her lucidly accessible book, "These scientists want to uncover whether mismatches might exist between the biology of the baby and the cultural styles of the parents, with an eye toward realigning parents and babies into a smoother, better-adjusted biological and psychological relationship."

The ethnopediatricians do discover mismatches, particularly in advanced Western cultures such as America’s, where child-rearing theories and methods have changed so often. Babies, according to the evolutionary view that underpins the field, are equipped with "Pleistocene biology" that has changed very little since the hunter-gatherer "era of evolutionary adaptedness" in which our genus, Homo, emerged. Faced with the dilemmas of maturation posed by bigbrained bipeds, the process of natural selection produced infants designed to develop within a closely entwined relationship with a caretaker.

Proof, or at least illustration (in this necessarily speculative endeavor, the two blend), lies in contemporary cross-cultural evidence that babies who are carried all the time, cuddled through the night, and fed constantly, as their ancestors presumably were—and as infants in some non-Western cultures still are—cry very little. Babies obviously can cope with less intensive bonding, but their developing neurological and biochemical systems will be in greater disequilibrium. Hence the colicky, cranky tendencies so commonly displayed among infants subjected to the more detached nurturing favored in urban-industrial societies, where babies sleep alone, breast-feed on a schedule, if at all, and can’t expect their cries to elicit prompt human contact.

Ethnopediatricians are not preaching a return to hunter-gatherer habits, though they believe such a style is better for babies. They appreciate the cultural pressures that have given rise to a great variety of "caretaking packages," which represent "trade-offs in which parents weigh the needs of infants against the constraints of daily life." But it would help, this new breed of scientist wisely feels, if we scrutinized those trade-offs more carefully. Instead, we tend to blur them in "parenting ethnotheories" that generally purport to prove that whatever methods suit adults in a particular social context are also best for molding children to fit the culture.

Small believes Americans would do well to give babies at least a little more say. Then we might appreciate the wisdom of fostering attachment, rather than fixating on independence—"the chief, overriding goal of American culture, whether stated overtly or not," she believes. In fact, we and our experts are already obsessed with bonding, as well as with autonomy. The truly novel service ethnopediatrics may provide is to expose how contradictory, or complementary, our socializing goals often are—and how difficult it can be to judge whether specific child-rearing styles, especially those used with babies, help or hinder us in achieving them. As parents and babies fuss in confusion, these scientists at their unreductive best suggest where some of our child-rearing conflicts come from. The tensions can be eased, ethnopediatricians propose, but they avoid the foolish promise that they will ever disappear.

—Ann Hulbert